See you in two months, Los Angeles!
When I was younger, my mother prepared a homemade workbook of Chinese characters for me to learn and copy. In my attempts to avoid these Chinese lessons, I would play hooky and sprawl over my desk, pretending to have fallen asleep. I was reprimanded and told that I would later regret not learning Chinese in the future. I never took to heart her words, reasoning that I needed only the basics to get by and that there was little use for me to memorize the complicated Chinese characters, especially if I were to live in the United States. Time after time again, I would find some way to escape these dreaded lessons. Eventually, these lessons ended. As the years went on, my practice of Chinese was strictly limited to conversations with my parents, and even these were heavily interlaced with English substitutes for words I had forgotten.
Today, perhaps more than a decade after my last Chinese lesson with my mother, I finally feel the remorse that I was once warned about. As I frantically google the Chinese characters for “bathroom” at the airport, I do feel regret not learning more when I was younger. Nevertheless, I am excited at the opportunity of having a second chance at learning this complex and artistic language through the IPD Public Health in China program.
I’m Lisa Chen, a rising sophomore majoring in biological sciences. I was originally born in Cleveland, Ohio, but moved to southern California when I was about 3 years old. Although I was born to Chinese immigrants, I have never been to China myself. In fact, this will be my very first time leaving the country. My Chinese background has always been somewhat of a quandary to me. I eat the traditional cuisine at home, mostly converse in Mandarin with my parents, and obviously look Chinese, but I have always felt the dichotomy between my two different identities as a Chinese-American individual. I want to take this opportunity of going abroad to China to explore a side of me that I have always been aware of, but never fully understood. I hope that my explorations in a country so steeped with culture and history could help me to explore a bit more about my identity as well.