It would sound stupid in English anyways

Well, it's over. This huge academic odyssey, this monstrous amalgamation of characters and formal vocab and oral presentations and 听写. This week was essentially spent preparing for finals and doing a minimum of other things, but I didn't prepare too hard for them and still did very satisfactorily. It figures that I finally got the balance of work and play down to a fine art on the very last week of ACC. I worked hard for my oral final, which was a twenty-five minute presentation on Daoism, though I didn't prepare for the second part, twenty-five minutes of responding to prepared questions, and still got a rather good grade. And actually, the teacher presiding over my presentation on Daoism said that he almost gave me a perfect score. (He didn't, of course, because my pronunciation and tones are as always on the poorish side, which is a direct translation of the phrase in my head, 依然未免有点差.) I was a bit blown away - I didn't think my presentation was that good. And moreover, the sophistication of my language and concepts was approaching presentations I did in high school, in English. If that's not the sign that my Chinese has improved, I don't know what is. That was Thursday - Thursday afternoon, I prepared for my written final without killing myself, even getting about nine hours of sleep which really is the most I've slept on any weeknight, and the test passed successfully on Friday. As did I, for that matter. This week, I still took time to take teachers out to dinner (on both nights before both finals, I should add), and I was completely content with how finals ended up for me.

After finals came a nearly perfect day. I got some blessed rest in the afternoon before our graduation ceremony at four o'clock. In it, we were presented with certificates, our group picture, listened to speakers, and watched a rather nostalgic slideshow of pictures from the summer. It was then that I started to feel a little bit 舍不得, a word that's rather easy Chinese but doesn't have a simple English equivalent, meaning "reluctant and sad to part/let go." But I didn't have time to feel that moved, because our language pledge had ended. I will say: I had not been looking forward to the end of the language pledge. This is not to say I wanted to continue to not speak English, but my and my fellow student's strict adherence to the pledge was really one of the biggest factors in how much my oral Chinese has improved. I won't lie, I did break the pledge a few times, but each time it was only because of really extreme, unavoidable situations, and each time was very minor. Even when talking to my parents on Skype, I did not speak English. It was my challenge to myself, to not be lazy and keep working on Chinese 24/7, and though it was hard at the beginning...well, keep reading. Essentially, yesterday was the first time speaking real English, and it was so weird. English felt wrong. Absolutely, completely wrong. As I spoke, I was telling myself to speak in Chinese, and in English sentences I would 不知不觉地 switch back into Chinese. Even in writing this post, I often have no choice but to translate certain words in my head from Chinese. This is astonishing, considering it's only been two months. This was the first time I had heard many people's English voices, and it was just too weird. Since the pledge ended, I've spoken more and more English, and it gets more and more natural (my teachers asked me to say a complicated, fluid, English sentence, and it was a FIASCO), but I still mostly speak Chinese, and feel much more comfortable that way.

Which brings up the looming problem of re-entry to America. As things stand now, I'm gonna have some major culture shock. Really, one of the biggest gifts the language pledge gave me is the deep understanding of how difficult communication really is, and how only interacting with native speakers of your own language makes you forget that. I have forgotten, and will not adjust for a long time, to the ease of just speaking English, without struggling constantly to make yourself understood and understand. Luckily, here, I can lapse back into Chinese, but when I get back to America...my friend said it best last night at one of the bars. At home, most of her friends don't speak Chinese, and thus there's a part of her life and thought that they'll never understand. Here, all her friends can understand, and they always will. There are concepts and experiences that I cannot explain to my English-speaking friends. I can translate, you can understand every bit of the meaning with enough time, but you cannot understand the significance behind the words without the experience of them. As I keep learning more Chinese, my experience will only grow, and the things I cannot explain in English will summarily grow. I can't explain to my parents the brilliance and elegance of characters, my friends can't appreciate the beauty in the absolute compactness of high-level Chinese and Classical Chinese, English speakers can't appreciate how much information and culture and meaning is crammed into every 成语, none of them can understand the magnitude of each triumph I've experienced in practicing tones, drilling characters, creating a new part of my brain and soul...and the worst part is, when I go home, I won't be able to share that with the overwhelming majority of the people I meet. A part of my self, now a very important part of my life and psyche and thought, will be censored when I return to America. I now understand the pain of immigrants forced to learn English. I now understand what my mother has lost by no longer speaking Swahili, Portuguese, or French. I understand how much it can mean to someone if you speak to them using their own self, because it means that you have the capacity to understand them and their experience like nobody else. Back in America, I had viewed my speaking in other languages as a simple opportunity to deepen communication. I was so wrong. When you speak a second language, you don't just lose fluency and ease, you are a different person. When my teachers here speak English, they are not the same person. An immigrant with marginal fluency transforms themself in the eyes of their listener: I have judged others for having an accent, it is evolutionarily-speaking a conditioned and unavoidable response. And when I speak Chinese, I am not Nick Rosenbaum. When I get back to Yale, if you speak to me in Chinese, I will be so, so grateful, and this is coming from a native speaker of English. The next time somebody has tears in their eyes because I can speak their language, I will understand.

This sounds trite, I know, and I apologize, but it's only going to get worse. After graduation, ACC took us out for 北京烤鸭, which gives me great pain to refer to it as Peking Duck, ewwwww. But it was delicious, and the opportunity to talk with our teachers and eat with them and just be together was so good. They asked us all the questions about English that they had been dying to ask over the past two months, and I was actually at a loss to answer some of their questions because my English has deteriorated so much. (To be fair, trying to find a good translation for 混蛋 is really difficult, especially because our teachers had been taught to say "blackguard," HA) ACC's other tradition is that after graduation, you get to go out with your teachers, and we did. First, it was a bit of barhopping, when I once again was forced to recognize that my alcohol tolerence is high to an absolutely insupportable degree, but then a small group of students and some teachers broke off from the regular bar/dancing scene to go sing Karaoke. This was actually the first time I had gone singing, due to my life absolutely abhoring me and making me sick on the nights that people went out to karaoke, and I had so much fun. Really, I stayed out until three, which is about four hours of karaoke, and I'm not a person that can stay up late at ALL. (I only got three hours of sleep tonight, and let me tell, this is going to 造成后果 later today.) I'm also not a singer, but that's not the point. I got to demonstrate my limited knowledge of Chinese music, but the songs I know I really KNOW (Jay Chou's 夜曲 was pretty badass of me, I have to say), and people were impressed. But more importantly, over those four hours, I really began to feel 舍不得, but more than that, I began to feel overwhelming, humbling gratitude. I talk a lot on this blog about how my teachers are the best part of this program, but it really hit home last night. These people have put so much time, effort, and care into teaching me, and saying goodbye to several at the end of the night was really, very difficult. My teachers have watched me struggle, pushed me, listened to my deep convictions, my worldview, joked with me, and cared about me for the past two months. In the taxi alone going home, I was hit by deeper gratitude than I can remember experiencing. Truthfully, I'm not a very grateful person. This is not to say that I don't feel gratitude, I don't thank people, I don't appreciate what people do for me. But I don't count my blessings, and I almost never feel very, very strong feelings of gratitude. Tough to admit, but true. But I am so grateful for these people, shockingly so, and in a few days, they'll all be out of my life. Not exactly, we already communicate on Facebook, but...

To be honest, I won't really miss my new friends here at ACC. Let me explain: I will miss them, some I will miss a lot. But this trip has given me a whole new perspective on distance. The fact is, even if I miss my friend at Stanford, we are in the same country. The way that life works out, we will see each other again. But for the people I am leaving behind in China...it is very likely that I won't see them again for at least several years, and it's entirely possible that I will never see them again. This is a scary thought, but it gives me perspective on the people I miss right now, because they're so much closer. I begin to understand what it means for my Mom to live halfway across the world from the rest of her family except for me, who are strewn across the globe in England, Norway, and Kenya. I understand why my parents miss me so much when I'm across the country, because distance is so relative. Now, I don't consider Stanford "far" at all - compared to the distance from Beijing, from Singapore, from Nairobi, it's practically right next door. On Thursday, one of my favorite teachers and I made a promise of sorts: in forty years, at 6 PM on July 6th, we will meet at the entrance of the Vienna Opera House. On one level, it's a silly promise, though it would be so cool if it does come true. But on a deeper level, it's both of us tacitly acknowledging that the time we have together is painfully 短暂. Now that ACC is over, I have until next Thursday and then it's on to the next stage of my life. I am very ready to get a break from intense studying. I am ready to get back to Yale to continue the next stage of academics. But I'm neutral about leaving Beijing. I could care less abou the city - I will be back here again, and I will explore more. Rather, I am forced to acknowledge that there is never enough time to get as close to people as you would like. And on Thursday, I will depart on a plane that will underscore that bitterest of facts.

Last night, one of the songs picked to sing was called 童话. The song is extremely poignant and simply beautiful, and I really felt emotional when listening to it last night. When I got up today, I went on the internet to download it (you can ponder the significance of the fact that I downloaded it within a minute off of Baidu, including search time), because it had been in my head as I tried to sleep last night. I literally had to stop the song halfway through, because there was an actual chance I would start crying. Kind of pitiful, I know. Perhaps this has more to do with the amount of sleep I got last night, but I'm not convinced. This song will forever remind me of last night, of the people I have left behind, of the part of me that I no longer possess. The more I meet people, the more they effect me, and the more they leave me, the more I realize that the idea that you hold your self in your hands is an outright lie. My teachers will keep me when I leave, as will all the people that are important to me across the world. I'm scared to leave China, actually, and I had no idea that a straightforward summer spent in my dorm room cramming words into my head would have this effect on me.

This wallowing has carried on for way too long, and I'm going to stop here, not least of all because I'm starved. I'll probably be embarrassed about this blog entry later. How do I summarize this, "I've been on the verge of tears because I'll miss my teachers?" Ridiculous. To end, I'm posting the refrain to that song. And you know what? If you can't read Chinese, you get to feel a bit of the pain I'm going to experience when I get back to America. Tough luck for you, you're going to have to suck it up and deal. It would sound stupid translated into English anyways.

我要变成童话里你爱的那个天使
张开双手 变成翅膀守护你
你要相信 相信我们会像童话故事里
幸福和快乐是结局