The travels of Justin

For months I’ve been in the dark about many critical issues, including when school starts. It always seemed like the strangest thing to be unknown by a school. Sure, I understand that the Chinese language courses for foreigners are operated much differently than degree courses, and approrpriately so, but I still couldn’t understand why no one had an answer. The closest thing to a clear target starting date was ‘near the end of September — maybe around the 20^th.’ Chinese people are famous for last minute events, and so it was on Friday night at 5:30pm I get invited to a 6pm dinner at a nearby hotel that would lift some of the fog surrounding these questions.

You can imagine my surprise when I was dining with heads of the International College at Nanchang University (NanDa 南昌大学) and I’m told that a decision was made to hold a meeting for foreign students 3-days later on the Monday. At the meeting, we’d have the chance to meet our classmates, and possibly learn when class will actually begin. At this point the start of classes sounds like progress, and I find it interesting to know at least some of my future classmates already in Nanchang. Since I arrived here months ago I’ve been asking to be introduced to some of my future classmates so we can get to know each other and share discoveries about the local area. With the exception of some Americans I had approached in a restaurant (”Do you study at NanDa?”), the International Department has always maintained that other foreign students wouldn’t arrive until closer to class starting. I’ve since learned, other foreign students have been here for several weeks (at minimum), with a few people having already spent 1.5 years in Nanchang.

Saturday night rolls around and I get a text message from my new American friends saying that they’ve heard class might be starting on Tuesday. Class on Tuesday? We’ll wait for the Monday meeting to know for sure, but this sounds good. Alright! Great! By this stage, I’m itching to start my lessons. The novelty of being in a foreign country has worn off a lot from my year in Tianjin. My studies in Tianjin were in English and did not include a language component so now it can be frustrating to be locked out of simple things just because I don’t have a rudimentary command of the language. Studying in class will be much more effective than trying to study on my own in my quiet apartment, but I can’t understand why I’m (1) hearing about class dates much earlier than expected, and (2) why I’m hearing about them through unofficial channels. I keep asking myself, if they want to attract foreign students to Nanchang, wouldn’t the class start date be considered as critical information? I can only assume that some approximate date had given to the other students since everyone is already here. I guess I didn’t get the memo.

“Umm… yeah. I’m just going to go ahead and get you another copy of the memo.” -Bill Lumbergh, Office Space

I was looking forward to this important Monday meeting, and decided that regardless of it’s outcome, I would at the very least be able to say I enjoyed an excellent breakfast of slightly overooked pancakes, eggs, and toast. Well, it is now Monday night and the meeting was a good one. Once we found the meeting room, 40 or so students sat themselves around a giant boardroom table with giant fake flower centrepieces adding colour to the room. The chair of the meeting had the understandable problem of picking a language to speak. We have people from Niger, West Africa (country unspecified), Mexico, USA, Canada (me!), Russia, Korea, and Japan. Do you use Chinese? Most people present understand a bit of Chinese, but most (certainly including me) can’t understand a full meeting in the language. What about English? Everyone who doesn’t speak English natively at least has some English training; however, nothing beats the clairity of your native tongue. Everything was spoken in several languages in turn: first Chinese to set the tone, then English for almost everybody, with some French and Korean used to clairify.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, class will not start. Instead, we’ll meet at 9 AM and take a trip the new campus of NanDa, on the outskirts of the city, to familiarize ourselves with the school’s third and biggest campus.

We were told class is expected to start either Thursday or Friday. It sounds like we’ll be starting with a review of phonetics while the teachers assess our ability. Then they’ll divide everyone into classes and make a plan.

After months of waiting, it has begun.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 7:51 am and is filed under China 中国, Culture, Life and living, Nanchang (南昌市). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.