the Sam Jackson College Experience

The extremely heavy rainfall here in Boston over the weekend took me away from all my research / work as I tried to help mitigate the effects of 10+ inches of rainfall in the Boston area on our house / basement… we managed to jury rig together a pump and then get some going, but it wasn’t a pretty sight and still isn’t.

Anyhow, when I was able to find a moment break from that, I finished up a quick redesign of my main Sam Jackson ’splash page’ @ http://www.samjackson.org. Thanks to http://www.os-templates.com/ for their creative commons’d CSS templates for the main page, as well as to http://thingsthatarebrown.com/ for CSS templating magic on the Resume page.

Please check it out and let me know what you think. Yes, it does behoove me to fix this blog up a little bit too since some pieces are falling off here and there, but we’ll get to that some other time….

My dedicated readers will no doubt already be aware, but for those who missed a beat: I am currently writing a biweekly column for the Yale Herald about reflections from my return from studying in China last semester. The last column was about the way institutional controls on electricity and dorms affect the lives of students. This week we continue that theme by addressing mealtimes in PKU, though only briefly. Unfortunately, this is not the comprehensive account of all the gustatory delights China has to offer – that’s a post for another time.

Follow all the posts in this series by looking for the tag “a semester returned.”

A modified version of this piece originally appeared in the Yale Herald, February 26, 2010, titled “So much food, but so little community.”

If you want to learn about a place, watch its people eat. At Yale, the magical camaraderie said to characterize the residential college system is manifest best in the college dining halls. At Peking University, mealtimes are no less illustrative of the often quite different dynamic which underlies student life for China’s most elite students.

Consider a ‘day in the life’ of an average student at PKU, compared with Yale. Here, we’ll consider breakfast: At Yale, you roll out of bed and are able to eat breakfast as you please, with only a slight hiccup in the half-hour between breakfast and lunch; your experience is one of groggy leisure marked by free copies of New York Times and Cross Campus.

In China? You must bravely arise early decide what you want to try to eat (and quickly). Your options are many: unlike those hapless students in New Haven, you have hot breakfasts to choose from without needing to go to Commons! Unfortunately, also unlike Yale, you have to be sure to get up early to try to get this food, because many of the dining halls close around 830am and don’t reopen until lunchtime.

Worse, this foreshortened time means that you have to fight swarming crowds of other students for the privilege of ordering food: after opening at 6am, the tastiest breakfast treats are usually gone by 730 at the dining hall nearest our dorm, for example. But, don’t get discouraged just yet. You have so much to choose from! You can have red-bean filled buns, soups, noodles, whatever your heart desires, as long as it’s Chinese and still available, and as long as you don’t need to try to find two seats next to each other to breakfast with a friend!

Not interested in the shi tang chaos? Try one of the abundant carts on the streets or a smaller shop. Here you can get a tasty Taiwanese-style breakfast pancake fried to perfection, or fresh-steamed baozi filled with cabbage or meats. Mission accomplished.

Good work. You’ve made it through breakfast, and all for about 75 cents – if you weren’t too stressed by the ordeal, you’re certainly looking smug compared with that Yalie and his 10 dollar swipe for a bagel and tea, even if he does have relative peace and tranquility. You go to class, where – lucky you! – you decide to stop at one of the snackeries conveniented located in your classroom building and buy some bread and candy to make it through lecture. You then fill up your tea-bottle from one of the hot water dispensers outside the classroom.

The abundance of choices may dull your mind to the dangers of this system. Busy though we are at Yale, we take for granted that our academic schedules allot almost all an hour or more to eat. In China, if one had time at all between classes, it’s generally under 30 minutes.

Asked how to deal with this inconvenient conflict, Chinese students I polled suggested most frequently ‘not eating’ as their solution.

Because students are forced to keep such eccentric schedules,  because the dining halls are so painfully unaccommodating to so many, and because labor is so extremely cheap, there are a fantastic variety of wonderful options that would make zero economic sense to offer in New Haven! You can get spicy-boiled-vegetables and noodles on a stick up till about 11pm on campus; from 6-12, you can get spicy grill-fried meats, tofu, and other delights, or go to the fruit stand and buy all oranges, melons, and tomatoes; after those on-campus shops close, you can head outside the gates to get delicious chuan’r, kebabs fresh cooked for you. The 24 hour McDonalds will deliver to the dorm for about a dollar.

What does this story say about the institutional objectives and mores at Beida? As Yalies, our biggest point of confusion was why no one complained more. With tables bolted to the floor and unable to seat more than 4 people around them, mealtimes often feel like a return to middle school, without the recess.  People do, in fact, complain – in small doses and almost always in mediated, monitored contexts. And even if the uncaring policies of the school created hassles for students, people still try to eat together, cramming several miniature hot-pots onto their tables and catching up.

At Yale in Chinese 140 right now we’re taught how important family meal time is in Chinese culture.  University dining differs greatly from home habits anywhere, but the sheer number of people eating alone in a rush offered a vivid demonstration of the ways Beida – intentionally or otherwise – isolated its students within a built world of schoolwork and other time obligations. Beida is a source of great scholarship, but where student life is concerned, it remains rigorously managed and controlled just like grade school. Mealtimes manifest a philosophy wherein individual student needs are rendered subordinate to the greater group.

Thanks for reading, and please join in by posting any questions you have here in the comments, or anything you’d really like to hear about for future columns / posts. I’m open to suggestions!

My dedicated readers will no doubt already be aware, but for those who missed a beat: I am currently writing a biweekly column for the Yale Herald about reflections from my return from studying in China last semester. The last column was about cats and other cute animals, and the dearth thereof here at Yale. This week we begin to turn towards more serious matters.

Follow all the posts by looking for the tag “a semester returned.”

Original Publication: February 12, 2010, in the Yale Herald.

Having electricity in your room after midnight is a luxury most Yalies take for granted. But at Peking University (PKU), your lights go out at midnight and don’t turn on again until sometime between 6 and 6:30 a.m.. As a perk of the Yale-PKU program, our special floors in an otherwise ordinary dorm were equipped with two common rooms that, even after hours, maintained copious current­.

Other Chinese students were not so lucky, and late night strolls through the meandering paths were lit only by street lights, with nary a window aglow. (The next most prominent perk was showers on our floor, as opposed to the “norm,” which entailed a five to 10-minute walk to a separate building—another story.)

The obvious conclusion—to be drawn at first glance from this unusual situation—is that Chinese students are not only very hardworking but have also adopted a sort of institutionalized early-rising disposition. Thankfully for my faith in the laws of (student) nature, this latter part was not entirely true. If the agents of the Chinese Communist Party, via PKU, were universally able to turn teenage students into morning people, I’d have known for sure that America was doomed.

How, then, did we overcome the dearth of electricity? When we first arrived on campus, class hadn’t officially started yet, so the lights were available 24/7. Internet access (such as it was) was not affected at any point in time. I was therefore confused—and jetlagged to the tune of 12 hours, Beijing to Boston time—when I saw a veritable IKEA’s worth of dorm supplies for sale, overflowing on the sidewalks outside the student dorms.

One rule I discovered is that, in China, you have to pay for things that you normally think ought to come included. Broadly speaking, this includes such items as napkins in restaurants, potable water anywhere you go, and access to websites located outside China. In the case of dorm rooms, this means many things, including illumination after hours.

The top sellers in these street-side bazaars were small, goosenecked lamps, with a cord to charge and a battery to work after the juice cut out. Environmentalists, take note: They were usually equipped with either fluorescent or LED bulbs, presumably the better to last long into studying. Equipped with one of these lamps and a powerful laptop battery, no student could go wrong in their sly subversion…or so the thinking went. But in truth, for those at PKU not in our program, a bigger problem arose when trying to work late at night: roommates.

Our own rooms were reasonably sized, and we were each privileged to have a wonderful Chinese roommate who wanted to be in the Yale-PKU program with us. The average PKU student, however, shared the same space with three other students.

I asked people how they managed this system, and got a variety of replies. Long story made short—lamp or no lamp—late night studying is discouraged when some people need to sleep, and the likelihood of collisions increases with more roommates, two to a bunk.

When I first came to understand this system of electricity denial, I struggled to find a reasonable explanation. Surely there must be a good reason, I told myself—the government is truly committed to thwarting dangerous climate change, and is taking aggressive action to reduce coal burning! No, probably not.

It is true that the government seeks to enforce a certain “ideal” or image of behavior as part of a schema like this one. The better question is what this behavior is meant to achieve in the laptop age. One hypothesis we formed: An early-to-bed, early-to-rise undergraduate population, burdened with endless classes and no common space to congregate, has neither the space nor energy to gather to dissent or conspire.

I was somewhat used to this loss of technical convenience. I went to a boarding school where, in the tenth grade, we were required to be back in our dorms by 8 p.m. and have our lights out (and ourselves in bed) by 11 p.m. Staying up later was largely frustrating regardless, however, because even as upperclassmen, our collective Internet shut off promptly at 11 p.m., excepting those days when it cruelly teased us until 11:02 or—once!—11:15.

Elaborate circumvention schemes for this system are beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say we tried everything we could to scale our own version of “the wall.” By no means is this to say that I accepted happily the changes in China. But we had a common room, and it served a happy purpose of forcing us together to gather and become closer friends as I baked brownies for us all, safe in our refuge from the encroaching dark.

Yale-PKU remains the only program at that university—otherwise host to more than 4,000 international students—that affords its enrollees the opportunity to live with Chinese students. Other foreigners are housed in hotel-style dorms complete with a steady supply of electricity.

But what’s the draw of having working lights if you don’t have a conversation partner? My countless bedtime discussions in the dark with my roommate were, in their own right, some of the most illuminating experiences of my time abroad, and that made it all worthwhile.

Thanks for reading, and please join in by posting any questions you have here in the comments, or anything you’d really like to hear about for future columns / posts.

I decided to try to write a column for the Yale Herald this spring semester about my time in China, since it didn’t end up working out that I would write one while there. It’s been a strange experience readjusting to Yale, and I’ve come to appreciate many things about it that I once took for granted. At the same time, there are certainly lessons learned from China that are worth applying here, and there is plenty worth missing about Beida. This first article falls more into the latter camp, and is reposted below.

Original Publication: January 29, 2010, in the Yale Herald.

Time spent abroad reveals volumes about the world left behind. I had the pleasure and privilege to study in the Peking University-Yale Joint Program last semester, and my experience both defied expectations and eludes easy explanation. In this column, I will share some of those reflections formed abroad and narrate the everyday rediscoveries in a life newly reunited with Yale.

I’d like to talk about one of the first unique features I noticed at Beida, the school I attended in China. It’s a feature that Yale lacks in a very quantifiable way: animal camaraderie. Yale is lacking in the four-legged friends department, while China’s flagship university has a surfeit of semi-domesticated animals that roam its grounds. Never have I met so many different cats in so little time: big cats, small cats, feral cats, and more recombination still. Outside of campus, I would meet felines in temples, restaurants, and alleys; on campus, they roamed the grounds, as fearlessly and assuredly as any of the students. One cat liked to sit by the window and listen to East Asian demography lectures; another occupied special turf next to a noodle shop. I learned to recognize these different cats by their territory and their habits­—the same was true for dogs, though they were fewer in number.

At Yale, however, our visible animal life appears to center around rodents. During my freshman year, devious squirrels plotted a grand invasion of several Bingham rooms and managed several reconnaissance forays before students rebuffed their advances. Though obnoxious, these Old Campus squirrels are key contributors to the inter-species dialogue here at Yale, and we welcome their presence as a check to impressions of overwhelming urban sterility. Recently passed New Haven ordinances now allow enterprising residents to raise chickens, but I have yet to see any campus examples thus far.

While I was in China, there was one cat in particular that, through charm and good looks, stole the hearts of all who met her. She was called Xiao Huang （小黄）meaning “little yellow,” and she proudly wore her golden-orange coat every day as she and her on-again-off-again boyfriend Xiao Bai, （小白） “little white,” lazed about their turf outside our Chinese class every day. While some of the semi-homeless animals at Beida suffered and begged for the attentions of motivated bystanders, Xiao Huang knew how to work the system to her advantage. The little minx and her beau were fed every day by staff at the building they frequented, and in return they offered their adorable services—usually in the form of purring—as a pick-me-up to anyone who had just bombed a Chinese test. I was a frequent patron.

But there were also the animal-welfare situations that left me at a loss for action. One such recurring experience would pass at night on busy streets: As I walked, I’d spot a small crowd forming, bottlenecking the sidewalk with interested bystanders. Getting closer, the crowd would thin and reveal a man or men in nondescript parkas, vending merchandise from a cardboard box at their feet. Only when it’s too late to escape without heartbreak does the occasion’s interest become clear: puppies for sale. Of course, in Shanghai one could buy live ducks a block outside our downtown hotel. I was discouraged from doing so, perhaps, by the startling variety of other animals—alive or otherwise—available for purchase there. But its being commonplace didn’t erase its impact.

Xiao Huang’s sad story came together in bits and pieces as I learned more about her. She lived outside one of the foreign student’s dorm, and she had originally been rescued by a foreigner, but left behind when that woman’s stay in China was up. Those strays outside Beida appear to manage with their feline wits, but for every Xiao Huang being taken care of, there are a dozen more that struggle. The more helpful comparison between Yale and Beida comes when considering the relevance these cats have for Chinese students. One official club devotes its time creating shelters for—and feeding—the hungry cats on campus: Plenty of people want to help. What do we have at Yale?

I wish there were fewer cats lounging in Beida’s bamboo groves. As Beijing’s winter took a bite, I saw so many suffering—kittens shivering and groups of cats huddled together for warmth. Like so many ephemeral observations about China, closer analysis revealed a more complex problem. I bought catnip and lamb kebabs for my feline friends, but I learned that just because they speak Chinese doesn’t mean Chinese cats like spicy food. I also recognized that it was human feeding of these cats which allowed so many to survive on campus.

What does it mean to surround ourselves with animals? It’s important because it helps to ground us. I appreciated the increased presence of animals not just for the daily dose of adorable cat behaviors, but simply because nature in this active embodiment captures the attention and reminds passersby that no matter what color the sky is, how much homework you have, or what personal struggle you face, nature still exists all around. When you watch animals play, the exigencies of student life fade away like magic.

I couldn’t take Xiao Huang back to Yale, so how can that wonderful appearance of the wild be recaptured? The answer starts with you, readers: If your Master or Dean doesn’t have a pet, start a petition to insist on real-life college mascots. If professors at Harvard can graze cows, why not a real life Trum-bull?）

I will keep this short and focus on the content here, folks, because it’s amazing. A few years back I wrote an angry letter to Yale Dean of Admissions Jeff Brenzel for not being forward-looking enough with the admissions office. I will soon have to draft him a letter of congratulations for his support of this great  student-led, student-created effort to create a fantastic Yale admissions music video. Much of what I’ve ever said on the blog about engaging branding and effective marketing comes together here in one fell swoop. More analysis of this later, and praise for the enterprising students who developed the video. For now, have a look and share your comments! You won’t regret it.