All posts by Xingyi (Sidney)

About Xingyi (Sidney)

Class of 2017 Poli Sci & Physics major (yes I know) Language: Chinese, English, Deutsch And no, definitely not a Pisces :'C

Time has gone by fast! -Kurz vor der Abreise

Time goes by faster than I thought. The first day I arrived (exhausted from the flight, forgot to eat in 20hrs and very frustrated trying to jumpstart my german language) still doesn’t feel that long ago, and I am already at the end of my Austauchjahr, ready to leave.

Three days before I have to check out of my room, I finally made the effort to sort my messy room out and started to pack. As I went through all the bits of stuffs I stacked around here and there in the corners, I found the process very therapeutic and even somehow inspiring. Anyone who is used to travel back and forth in different periodic settle-downs (z.B., college students who study away from home) might be familiar with this: you always have a little handful of things that are only useful in one of your “home places”, and they are somehow essential to your survival there. But as you travel around, they are totally useless in other places. Even so, you have to carry them around. Things like local currency cash, local IDs, electricity adapters and converters, an old phone with local handy number, or that pile of “only acceptable within CC campus radius” style hippie clothes you accidentally brought to Europe. They are kind of like first-aid kits of different places, and when you settle down in another place long enough, you might completely forget about them— until you have to go back again.

You sometimes forget about how if feels like to live in those places faraway too. I was surprised to see my “China first-aid kit” contains a large amount of cash (wow, brand new 100RMB bills!), while in my kit for the U.S., I was down to only 5 dollars cash. I got so worried for myself and started to recall the ATM machine location in Denver airport. Then I remember: huh, you don’t really need cash back there if you have your cards. The German way of living apparently spoiled me to be less dependent on modern technologies, how interesting. As for the cash in Chinese RMB, I then realised that the last time I was back in China, it was the traditional new year and I received my lucky money from the elders… well, I don’t remember anyone ever handed me cash in 100 Euro bills here, not even the ATM Geldmaschine…

The last two weeks has been kind of chaotic here. All the final papers, Klausuren, and Referate all happening at once, the Babylon Theater’s performance was every night the last week, alongside with the bureaucratic (man I retyped this word for 7453578 times to get the spelling right, why doesn’t english just adopt the umlaut büro!) Abmeldungen I have to do for my student status, student card, radio tax, bank account, insurance, rental status… Sorry, no intent to bore you, the list goes on. Now this is the point where you really miss block plan. At least they come one at a time monthly, not all in this one crazy wave at the end like a Durchfall.

I know my nagging has been very interesting, glad that you enjoyed it, I will get back to my packing and paper and panicking and everything in between.

Oh and here’s some photos from Babylon Theater (ft. Frankie, Jack, u. me)

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Local news Mittelbayrisch covered it too 😀 go practice your german reading and happy hunting my name 😉

http://www.mittelbayerische.de/kultur-nachrichten/eine-englisch-internationale-teufelei-21853-art1400738.html

Learning the Rules of Other Playgrounds

If you are a political junkie who also enjoy exploiting the different opportunities globalisation offers, you might understand what I have to say here so very dearly: to be a decent interlocutor (more so if you also want to seem slightly educated), the first thing you ever learn from a conversation is always “the rules of the context at that moment”, the local rules on the playground. Those rules differ on a very broad range of things: from using laymen rhetorics with extended explanations on complicated statements to using Poli Sci terms and inside jokes while throwing in a substantial amount of complicated conditional Nebensätze (subordinate causes, geez such a long term), to what statements are generally agreed upon and not worth mentioning or you should seriously tuned down.

Yes, I know, I know. We should always speak our minds, state our true opinions, blah blah blah. But if you are as same enthusiastic in political discussions as me, you would surely understand: not recognising the underlined “rules of the context at that moment” usually just stirs up emotional antagonism and leads to disastrous experiences where you either get out only irritated or hurt, or gradually get excluded altogether from the conversation— sometimes people just really do not need that “additional perspective” and do not want to hear what you have to say coming from that.

I remember my first two years in Political Science classes at CC was very much about just learning this new context. I have always been so interested in politics that it scared my parents at first. My hometown back in China was this very political place famous for all the rebels and revolutionists throughout the history, the most recent famous one being Mao. I certainly do not suggest that I live up to his legacy (what’s that even supposed to mean lol), but I admit to have looked up to these ancient Landsmänner (countrymen…?) as core-to-heart inspirations during my rebellious youth. I was already so used to throwing certain phrases around, like how “the rightists” are the progressive liberals and “the leftists” stubborn conservatives loyal to the party (not talking about the beer festival parties); how “nationalism” belongs to the morally high ground and “socialism” rather a milder bad name for all the USSR chaos that went down. These interpretations were already out of the most mainstream context of the majority Chinese. My way of talking was already deemed “too westernised”, or “contaminated” even. However, going into the context of the CC politics classes, I was hardly close to being ready. The first things I have to learn there were how “left” and “right” suggests completely different political contents and how they are perceived by my peers in class, and how “nationalism” is responsible for the rise of militarism yet “socialism” deemed a social system supposedly from pure kindness of human brotherhood. At the very beginning, I could hardly get any point across. To join the conversation is to rush into the hundreds of years of western democratic tradition that has already been intuitive to my peers, or to say at least the twenty years of immersion from their everyday lives. As I liked to eagerly advertise, when you think about the word “politics” in English (or German, “Politik”), you trace it back from into the ancient greek, the polis, the city states and their self-governed, democratic political traditions; while the equivalence in Chinese, “政治 Zheng Zhi”, basically describes the up-down dynamic of a centralized way of governing (regieren). Simply uttering this word in different languages evokes different aspects of its perception.

Now three years in, I can finally eloquently convey my points in this specific context. I play along with the rules on the playground. I know which concepts are the common ground for my peers, and what concessive compromises I have to make before my adversative “although/but” to make it acceptable for my peers to follow. My own beliefs are constantly challenged, and also learned to arm themselves better confronting challenges. I thought I was finally ready, finally educated enough in this field to have informative, inspiring political discussions ever after. So I gave it a few test runs, and proved myself so wrong. I found out I learned to play well on one playground, but there are so many different playgrounds, all played by sophisticatedly different rules. And interestingly enough, they are not always the way as you would imagined they should be.

Verzeihen, whoever accidentally stumbled on this blog and miraculously made it this far. 800 words in, I am finally going to talk about something German in this GermanBlog. Today after my poli sci seminar “Accessing the Obama Presidency”(because it is fun to take Obama in Germany and see what the Germans think about American Politics, while being secretly referred to as the Chinese girl with an annoying fake American accent), my professor Herr Professor Doktor B.(never miss any of the titles) came up to me to say this:”I just like attacking you in class because you are such a strong person. I enjoyed your defence.” This was actually kind of sweet and I took it as a compliment. When in class, he was discrediting some of my opinions by alluding my views were tempered with by Chinese propaganda and thus perceiving the western world in a wicked way. That was quite ironic to me since I also get so much comments of being “too westernised” and “tempered with by the Americans” all the time from my own nationals. But the point that got me this “attack” was actually one that would be well accepted in a CC international relations class: I simply suggested that we should not take Putin as the entire Russia and perceive him as an irrational warmonger, and the U.S. has previously been too invested into abroad military missions. Now if this statement was said in a CC class, especially when by an American student, it would be perceived as harmless criticism on US interventionism and a call upon closer understanding of “the other side”, since the underlined contextual atmosphere of CC is just liberal and internationalist. However when I, a Chinese student, was saying this at a German University, it sounded like an unfriendly nose-pointing from the defensive ally of Putin.

CC definitely does not speak for the whole U.S. public sphere. What is or is not acceptable in a CC class also does not prove any more or less legitimacy of the statement. It is just interesting for me to notice how people get silently offended by different things and started to take a defence automatically to whatever you are going to say next. Apparently most of my classmates here take the more U.S. intervention as a more desirable option, and this has become the hidden context behind. If I have navigated this more wisely, I would tune down myself, only try to slip in some of my disagreement when not have irritated this “common sense” already up front —no, no, this is not being dishonest or cunning, as you might understand already as another political junkie. It is merely a more efficient, craftier way to convey your points to others. Guess there is a point of calling this “political”, huh?

Going on and on about these trivial scenarios I encountered in political discussions is not going to help keeping you reading either, thus not an efficient, crafty way of conveying. So anyways, after a couple minutes of extended discussions on rational actor theory in international relations, and finding out that I actually agreed a lot with his view, Herr Professor Doktor B. gave me a final compliment:”I guess China is going to change for better, because it has people with good conscience like you.” To be a nice player on the playground, I decided to appreciate his comment, and not reading too much into it as to take offence for my other fellow Chinese nationals who also have good conscience, just happen to disagree with him and me. (I love this professor really, don’t take me wrong. After all I am the one crashing others’ playgrounds.)

The sharp edges of these rules can be so exhausting to deal with, especially because they change from context to context, from one conversation to another. There is no wonder so many of my friends took a peek into the hot mess of political debates and decided that they have no interests of jumping in. But isn’t this complexity, these constantly shifting nuances that you forever need to relearn, the exciting part of it for us who truly love an informative, inspiring political discussion? So enjoy being challenged while you can, and one day you will know all the rules so well (or learned to learn them very fast), that you can rock all of them 🙂

Germany is the land of Gewohnheit

Moin moin! It has been a while, I know. But in my defense, I have been making human contacts with my friends a lot…. whether those Treffungen are well-planned ahead or in the “hey ALEC get out of your shower I just arrived in Göttingen from Czech and you are hosting me SURPRISE!” Bara style.

So since last post, I have spent my Weihnachten with my family and Sidney, Michael and Coco. Gotta admit, seeing Uncle Tom and Sidney getting into a huge debate about immigrants by the fireplace (Sidney made the fire!) in Oberammergau was both entertaining and unentertaining… I mean, if you ever know one of them you would know what I mean.

Then me, Sidney, Bara and Jade met in Prague. It was fun. I withdrew too much cash in Czech Koruna and had fun stressing out about it. Bara’s mom’s lecture on healthy diet was also very educational. Then the four of us met up in Göttingen (that was when the crazy Bara random show-up thing happened). I got really drunk that night and have probably told Bara and Sid a little bit too much… Ich bringe die beide irgendwann um. Keine Sorge.

After the random meet-ups with friends, it was Abschluss time. Oh how I missed CC and the block plan. Instead of waiting in line and getting to me each by every month, all the seminars are just kicking my butt with the final papers at the same time. Luckily that was over too and I was soon able to make random plans again with Frankie and Sidney (she coldly refused, stated:”I told you months ago… I am leaving for China by that time don’t you remember?” I take that as “I don’t like you Alec.”, apparently) going to Paris and skiing in northern Italy. As I am writing this blog, I have successfully posted 17 sexy cringing faces of myself on Facebook. Go check them out.

So the thought of these days is (I know I normally do not do this kind of writings but I am growing and learning from Sidney. Thank you Sidney, my loyal friend and my great tutor in life!) that Germany is the land of Gewohnheit (habits). When I take the train from Göttingen to München, it is always 2 mins after the round clock almost every hour, and it is always on Gleis 10. If I umsteigen in Würzburg, it is always stepping off on Gleis 4, and go across the platform and stepping on again on Gleis 5. When I go to Hamburg, it is always going to be on Gleis 9, and it is every 17, 43 and 56 min of the hour. See, I can recall all of those after some frequent times of traveling. DB is never late, so you almost always know when and where you would be during the trip. It is a certain feeling of certainty and Sicherheit. It is german.

(On the opposite, french trains are so different. You should expect SNCF to be 20 mins late on average and you will not know the gate until the last minute. pffff. They are too french.)

Please find attached a friendly twerking photo of me.

 

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Until next time!

 

[If you are very confused after the last two blogs- assuming that you are reading the blogs at all: this is one of the exchange blogs I do with Alec, where I write about his life and he writes about mine…. So btw his last post was supposed to be “Sidney’s”. I think I did a good job being Alec though lol.  ]

For Learning One New Language, First You Gotta Lose Two

I have always wondered: do people have different personalities when they are speaking different languages? More intriguingly, do I? I remember seeing my English self as shyer, quieter and more introvert when I first came to CC. I often caught myself hesitant about reaching to people or exposing my thoughts and feelings. I stopped making silly puns, telling slightly offensive jokes (and then spending 10 minutes to politically correct myself), or bragging about the insane dreams I had last night. At moments, I paused and looked at myself, thinking that I stopped being me.

As a Poli Sci major, it especially sucked (pardon my idiotic English for now, guck noch mal diesen Titel) during an intense, discussion-centered politics class. I remember sitting in class, looking at the seniors, wishing that I could be them while I actually had to spend three times of the amount of time they needed to finish the readings. I remember sighing to myself: errrrr, only if this discussion was in Chinese.

Then I finally realized that, the problem is definitely not a different personality in another language, but the language ability not being enough to convey my personality completely. Two years later, the table has turned. I became that annoying Poli Sci major upperclassman taking an intro to IR class, babbling nonstop in discussion all time every time. I got to the point that I was describing my entire world view system to a new friend for hours in English as comfortable as in Chinese. After about two years, I found myself on the other side of the language barrier, being as weird and hyper as I should be. It feels like a PC user finally adapted to the Mac OS X system, and feeling fine scrolling up for the page going down— huh, quite smooth.

Ugh man, do I not miss that. I finally got to see Frankie this morning (it was in class actually). I was talking to him in English, and stuttered for three times on finding the proper word for “gleich” in English. Can you even imagine that… Then we both agreed to switch the conversation into German. Although I was still correcting myself all the time, using overly simple vocabularies and messing up the word orders, it actually (somehow) felt much smoother than speaking English. Don’t get me wrong, my German is not good enough, yet. (I tried, though, to take high level Quantum Mechanics theory in German yesterday… nope, total bloodshed. Dropped it after about 10 mins in class, right before I started to hate human race for inventing both physics and German.) My “German self” is quite as shy and quiet as my old “English self”, only speaking up when absolutely necessary. I can literally feel my personality trapped inside of my German, 蠢蠢欲动(Sorry this phrase has to be in Chinese lol),anxiously seeking a way out.

I guess now you can see that, as hard as I tried not to, my problem of multi-linguality is showing. I guess the language learning process is always making new connections between the cognitive concepts and the linguistic sounds/signs/marks/Wortstellungen. And in order to do that, you have to ignore the connections you already made in other languages. Fire is not 火, Feuer ist auch nicht Fire. Feuer is but the glamorous, hot, red thingy. It looks like a visible red wind blowing from below, or a mysterious Geist, or ghost. You gotta look at it as if you are your illiterate ancestor, or a 牙牙学语的 baby. Wow, red, hot, always altering its shape, how amazing. And then link this impression, this concept to the word in certain language. You know nothing about fire, or 火. At this brief moment, you have but one and only one name that you feel perfekt for this thing: das Feuer.

So ja, I guess this is basically what we go through when we try to pick up a new language. You intentionally forget the former language systems you had, you break up the connections between sounds, signs and meanings, and you build a new Ordnung out of this chaotic mess of concepts. At the beginning you stutter, you switch code, you try to sort the new connections out while fighting the instinct of calling them other names, but after a while, trust me, you’ll be fine.

But at this moment, you can only be patient, take your time, pat yourself on the back and be sicher that: for learning a new language, first you gotta lose two.

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also, here’s some photos from my trip to Wien this weekend. Gotta say, being a Poli Sci student visiting Austria in the middle of the refugee crisis and the election was quite interesting….

 

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No idea why these are tilted, but meet Egon Schiele, my fav artist. And go visit Leopold museum for his works some time if you happen to be in Wien.

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“Home” Is A Spectrum

About two months ago, when I finally got back China after a year at CC, everything seemed so familiar yet so strange. My hometown was still building its new metro, the symphony of cicadas was still overwhelmingly annoying, and the summer there was still like a burning hell but also with crazy high humidity. Everything was almost exactly the same as (thanks autocorrect for correcting my German “als” back into English “as”. But yeah, remember kids, if it IS really in German it should be “wie” not “als”) when I left. With a sigh compounded of 30% joy, 40% indifference, and 30% repulsion (the same recipe for the feeling of a 20 year-old dying marriage may I point out), I whispered to my town: “Hey babe, I’m home.” (Exactly the way that married-for-20-years couple would do to each other)

The backward culture shock has been real. So many people, oh my. “Relearning” Chinese and trying to kick the English words out from the middle of my Chinese sentences was painful. Crossing roads was like Fast and Furious (let’s just say the pedestrians don’t really have the right of way no matter what signal’s on). And what’s up with the physical intimacy between girls (And I used to be ok with that?!)? The on-going false alarm of “dude you must be flirting with me oh no you can’t all be gay” took some time to really wear off……

But anyways, there’s no place like home, huh? Home is home. It is the only place where all the knowledge and experience of the first 17 years of your life would always make sense and be valued. Do you know that, there’s a kind of fish called Periophthalmus that have feet and are able to live on the land for quite a while? No? Go check it out, they are so cool. I am saying here that, I felt like this kind of fish diving back into the water after a long walk on the beach (holding fins maybe). Yes, sure, I could survive living on the land and I really liked it. But now I am back into the water.

Plus, the transition from Colorado back to my hometown felt exactly like “back into the water”. The high humidity makes you wonder if you are walking around or actually already swimming.

Ah home. Sweet home.

Except that I had only two months before I started my journey here in Regensburg.IMG_3599

Regensburg rains a lot. I made jokes about how this fact should vermutlich be the reason of Regensburg called Regensburg, (“Es regt immer hier. Regen, Regen, Regensburg! Ach so!”) and then the Germans would correct me (yes as they always so passionately do) that it was eigentlich because of the river Fluss Regen. Ok, weather jokes do not work well here as back in Colorado. (I guess any sentence with the two words “Colorado” and “weather” in it works as a joke, ja?)

I have been here for two weeks now. It has been quite an experience. So far everything is just great, but moving to a new place and settling down always has its own thorns, especially when it is a new culture, a new language environment, and totally new groups of people. I wonder if it is because that I still often come back to English as my rescue when I fail to communicate in German, but I caught myself looking back into my first experience going to CC a lot. And all these flashbacks made me a little bit “homesick” for CC. I would be sitting on the super convenient 5-minute-get-you-everywhere city bus and miss the long exhausting car drive to ski on a block break; or when I look at the well-dressed serious, pünktlich people walking in the ancient Altstadt and suddenly miss the hipster kids dragging around their longboards and hairbands on CC campus. I have always claimed that I’m not a homesick(das Heimweh) type of person but a wanderlust(das Fernweh) type of person. But there is certainly something so comforting and homelike about CC, that leads my mind constantly back to it while enjoying a brand new life all the way across the Atlantic.

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I found myself scaling the degree of familiarity for the places I have lived in. Changsha, my hometown, can definitely be called home. I spent the majority of my lifetime there. However, the rapid pace of me changing starts to distant it from me. It is now a weird mixture of close-to-heart Herzlichkeit and “I-am-so-tired-of-you” Unheimlichkeit. And for now, I caught my thoughts referring to CC as home too. People there make me comfortable with myself being among them, and there is something about the mountains and the beautiful sky that soothe my immature, unsettled soul. And I already can tell that there is also something calling for my attention here in Regensburg, something that would eventually bind the yet still young me with this old city deeply for the rest of my life. And later in life, every new place I settle down in would carry parts of shadows of Changsha, C Springs, or Regensburg. And they would slowly climb up my familiarity scale and become indistinguishable to my identity of self.

On that scale, the concept of “home” is no longer a definite point, a label you stick onto the dearest place to you, but a spectrum, a feeling that is different with different places and would always be developing. There is a saying in Chinese, “四海为家” which literally means considering anywhere you go as your home. So how should we not have a spectrum for the concept “home”!

I would follow up on the details of life here in my later blogs to come(if I really remember to keep up with these). But for now, it is 0.36 in the morning and I have my 8.30 Deutsches Kurs in the morning. And my new Italian friend, Stefano, just persuaded me, somehow with the teachings of Taoism, not to be late for class again (yes he did that…).

So bis zum nächsten mal, ja? 🙂

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Sidney,

17-09-2015

Regensburg, Deutschland