the Sam Jackson College Experience

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.