Crowds and Cliques

KGSM Student Radio

This week’s podcast will focus on the remakable differences in social behavior I have noticed in my now three weeks here in Zhuhai.

I was standing in a supermarket, the one near the bank I use here, a couple weeks ago. I was looking for a few things, including a cheap pair of chopsticks for your room, some peanut butter and maybe some bread. I wasn’t totally sure where peanut butter might be kept or even if I would find any at all in China. I knew it is not a friendly taste for many people outside of the united states, but wandered around trying to find it anyway. Suddenly, right as I grabbed a 1 kuai pair of chopsticks, I noticed a student standing next to me, staring at me.
“Hello,” he says nervously, and looking almost starstruck, “where are you from?” he asks.
“Mei guo,” I replied, noticing the smile on his face.
“You go to UIC?”
“Yes,” I told him and then asked, “do you?”
“No” he responds, and struggles to find the words to tell you which of the three

colleges in the area he attends.

“BNU?” I offer.

“Yes, yes, BNU. Year one?”

“No, I am year three,”

“You in Zhuhai, three years?”

“No, I have been here only eleven days, I am an exchange student, here until January.”

“Oh, ok, see you later,” and he departs, off to continue his own shopping adventure.

My interaction with this BNU student is a prototype of my social interactions here in Zhuhai more genearlly. It seems like everywhere I go, people are excited to see me, almost overly excited, to get to know me, learn about me, my home country and what I am doing in China. How long have I been here? When am I leaving? What is my major? Do I play sports? Which question is always followed up with “Basketball?” regardless of how I answer. A whole barrage of questions come down upon me with nearly every person I meet. A high school student this week bumped into me at a restaurant, and did a double take when he noticed I was definitely not chinese, rather I am a 6 foot 4 white guy, probably from America. “SORRY” he almost shouted at me, and the proceeded to leap up and down comparing his height to mine.

Earlier this week, I ate lunch with a contingent of first year students from Yunnan Province. There were probably about twelve of them, all around 18 years old, and were standing in a pack at the bottom of the driveway leading away from campus to Stadium Road. I met my friend Rhea at the library and walked over to this group. When the students saw us coming it was as if they had seen the most spectacular sight of their lives. Many of them hid behind their umbrellas they use to shield themselves from the sun, and some of them averted their gaze away from us, and when Rhea introduced us as her friends, a hushed “woah!” could be heard from the crowd. As we walked to the Guandong restaurant Cynthia and I led the charge-even though we weren’t entirely sure where, exactly, we were going-with the crowd a good fifteen feet behind us; as if getting too close would in some way be taken as a sign of disrespect. It’s hard for me to imagine why these particular students are behaving so much differently than everyone else we’ve met thus far. Perhaps it is because of how many of them there are, the crowd creating a groupthink mentality that the Americans are best left undisturbed. Maybe it is just the awkwardness of being 18. Regardless of the reason, the whole situation carried an unexpectedly high level of reverence toward the waigouren, the foreigners.

I know many international students at Gustavus, but find myself trying to recall any that are given this kind of instant celebrity status back home. Are there clubs that actively seek out international students because they think they will be more popular to everyone else? Looking back on your experiences, it seems like the international students at Gustavus just sort of fade into the background, as if they are just like any ordinary student on campus. Gustavus easily has more international students per capita than UIC, by a wide margin, and it seems like the average student takes that for granted. It seems like we take it for granted that in any given class we can have the perspective of students from Nigeria, China, Sweden, France, Malaysia and a host of other countries from around the world. I wonder if the UIC students there now are having the same kind of social experience as I am here. Yes, Gustavus does have the international festival each year, and yes, Gustavus does have the Crossroads program, the Sweedish House, ACC, PASO, ICC and the DLC does excellent and commendable work fostering the diversity on campus. But how often do Gustavus students open up their group of friends to complete strangers from the other side of the world. How often do Gustavus students attempt to learn something outside of these formal structures about the lives of the international students on campus? During classes, how often does every single student stop and turn to listen intently to the international student speaking? Perhaps it is happening more than I can see it, or perhaps it is something I will notice more once I return, but in my experience, international students are taken for granted. As if, just like there will always be domestic students, there will always be foreign students.

It’s difficult for me to decide which is better, the UIC style celebrity treatment, or the Gustavus style. On one hand I am glad these students have accepted me as one of their own. It certainly makes eating at restaurants easier for me as I have someone to say “fu yu wen!” to flag down the wait staff and get the bill, or order some food. It makes living and making friends at this college much easier, and without them I would probably feel an incredible sense of lonliness with only one other student from my college and a total of 7 other foreigners. On the other hand, being isolated as a foreigner, left to my own devices to actively make friends and draw my own crowd would certainly be less invasive. If I had to join the basketball club, for example, to tell people I liked basketball, I would be opening myself on my own terms, instead of on their terms. In some ways I think I would experience the culture of Chinese higher education better if I were taken for granted, if I did just blend in with my surroundings. I certainly would be experiencing a lot more culture shock than overeating at restaurants because I don’t know to just stop eating if I’m not hungry if I were just another number expected to live up to the Chinese cultural expectations more than I am presently. I would be forced to learn the language on my own, to learn how to get by without any knowledge or help whatsoever.

* * *

One part of being an American at UIC I am still adjusting to is my ability to draw a crowd. Peter Hessler, in his book River Town discusses the subject of crowds at some length throughout the book. When he first arrived he drew a crowd everywhere he went, introducing himself at nearl every assembly and any other social environment because it was the only way to bring the audience to attention. The crowds, he writes during a discussion of the Three Gorges Project, are “exclusive as well as inclusive, and the average…resident [appears] to feel little identification with people outside of his well-known groups.” He gives several examples of how this manifests itself in Fuling, the Sichuan city where he was teaching English, and this same concept can still be seen ten years later in the insulated environment of the college campus. There is a sense in which the campus has many cliques, among which there is little interaction. The college really is not much larger than Gustavus, (though it is among three other schools for a large, overall, student population) and yet, it is entirely conceivable to only know about twenty people. My roommate, for example, rarely associates with the students who came to Gustavus this summer, many of them are in the same class and have no idea, or only a fleeting notion of who he actually is, many know him simply as my roommate, and have never seen him and probably do not plan to ever introduce themselves unless it’s through me.

My existence here, in some ways functions as a force of unification. My friends are more open to meeting new people if I am bringing them along. Devotees will remember that my roommate claimed his group would be the most popular on campus, simply because I offered to copy edit his blog. This kind of uniquely Chinese group mentality causes me to wonder, however what might happen once I leave. If a mixed cliqué group goes out the a KTV, or to one of the hip bar street clubs, and becomes a regular crew while I am here, will they continue to function this way once I leave, or will I be their only common bond? Is it possible, I find myself wondering, to merge cliqués and form a larger community?

This podcast was brought to you, as always, by the Gustavus Communications and Marketing Department, with production support from KGSM Radio. You can also catch my column in The Gustavian Weekly, titled “Letters from Zhuhai,” which contains excerpts form this and other podcasts. My name is Greg Boone and this podcast was recorded right here at United International College in Zhuhai, China. Music this week from Atmosphere and The Plastic Constellations. See you next week.

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