Campus Life

Living on campus in China feels a lot more like boarding school, every one lives in the same 500m stretch, attendance is mandatory and the canteens have set times. The Chinese even have curfews, fortunately we don’t, we’re allowed to continue in our destructive and disrespectful partying ways. Though the flats are segregated by sex, and you aren’t supposed to have guests staying over. Having Chinese and Foreigners in different buildings and with different rules is a hangover from the time when it was thought that us International students would corrupt the Chinese with our bourgeoisie ways. Doesn’t being Bourgeoisie sound glamorous! Little do the Chinese authorities know the most rebellious thing I do here is use my VPN for Netflix, Ha! Take that! 

Sadly it’s missing the perks of boarding school, prepaid food, your laundry done for you (shout out to Dawn), and a cleaner. We have supposedly booked a cleaner, but she came the other morning and I couldn’t notice any discernible change in the flat after she left. Saying that I’m quite enjoying the 3 minute walk to the teaching buildings, not too much of a commute. However one does have to bear in mind that if you’re looking for a new room the layout is in no way logical. The other day I was looking for room no. 109, I found 110, then 112 and next door 117… 109 was on the other side of the building. Much in the same way that I’ve deployed the point and hope technique when ordering food ( side note, that backfired when I ended up with meat sushi for breakfast), I’ve started using an ‘ignore the logical decision’ method here. It’s pretty much universally applicable when dealing with anything China and when I was next looking for a new classroom I went the opposite way to my initial thought and it worked. So that’s reassuring. 

We have crazy Geese, that are even  more terrifying than the Canadian Geese on the UK campus, and feral cats that seem to congregate around the International buildings, and you can hear them mewling through the night. Apparently us foreigners are soft touches because some of the Chinese students throw things at them to scare them off, whilst we stroke them and some offer them food. It’s a weird disconnect because a fair few students here have pets in their rooms and not just fish or hamsters, actual dogs. They aren’t really supposed to, but it seems weirdly common. Other weird things about the campus include the bell, or lack thereof, it has woken me up on several occasions but it isn’t a real bell, merely a recording of the one in Nottingham. Apparently it’s played off a laptop in the Administration building. Very bizarre, but I suppose it’s better than mandatory morning exercises being blared out on the loudspeaker instead. Another difference here is the building work, it starts about 6 every morning and carries on through the night, when it gets dark you can see the lights from the welders. They also carry on through the weekend, so my soundtrack here is electronic bells, mewling cats and never ending building works. 

We even had a Freshers fair here, lots of vendors from around the city trying to capture your attention for the year. 

Georgina and I were taken by a cute looking bakery, with lots of pretty cakes adorning their stall, we chose some cute little cupcakes. I was pretty excited, but it was the weirdest cake I have ever eaten. The cake itself wasn’t too offensive just slightly under baked and incredibly bland. The icing however was horrific, the only way we could think to describe it was slimy, as though someone had blended seaweed then added a thickening agent and removed all flavour, leaving this slimy consistency. It was truly disgusting. 

Excitement!

To Horror!

Nottingham Ningbo is individual in China as it has student led societies the same as back in the UK, there are sports, academic, culture, travel societies. However there are significantly fewer than back home. Also the sport selection is far more Asian - unsurprising really - not so much football, netball or hockey as badminton, table tennis and billiards. Also they don’t have the whole ‘everyone is welcome’ policy, if you can’t play or aren’t good enough you can’t join. Which is a bit disappointing. However I have joined Aikido, a Japanese martial art that focuses on self-defence, Chinese Calligraphy society, Movie club, from which I got a free V for Vendetta mask which I thought had interesting political connotations, and finally Travel Club.

 I enjoyed Aikido but was slightly worried when our ‘Sempai’ (teaching assistant) dropped down into full on splits as a warm up. I’m just proud I can touch my toes. There’s an interesting respect dynamic in class, we all have to bow to our ‘sensei’ a lot, but luckily he’s English so seems quite chilled about it all. We also have to sit in the most uncomfortable manner possible, kneeling down with our feet tucked under. I actually found this the hardest thing to do, courtesy of frequent spraining and twisting, they are weak little pansies of ankles, which resulted in numb feet and shooting pains shortly into the session. Not ideal. Apart from that it was pretty fun, we practised forward rolls, yup like we used to do in PE, I started off looking like a turtle flipped up the wrong way but fortunately managed to make myself go forwards rather than sideways by the end. We also practised moving which has to be slow and smooth, and you aren’t supposed bring your body up but maintain low. Some of the movements felt very similar to the position you need to hold your body in whilst skiing, so I’m intrigued to see how that will progress over the year. We then moved onto incapacitating others, what fun that was, a lot of it is based on using others’ force and weight against them. So watch out, when I get back I’ll be a force to reckon with!

I’m also enjoying Calligraphy, which is a change of pace to Aikido, it’s very relaxing and requires a lot of focus. A Chinese girl called Jennifer helps me out, she’s taught me the way to write the strokes in the simplest style and gives me words to write out. She’s very shy but an excellent teacher, and also tried to teach me the ‘Running Style’, it’s more fluid and has to be written quite quickly, but I think it’s fair to say it was a bit of a disaster! 

Week 1's efforts, Jennifer said they were cute. I think that's a compliment.

This week we wrote out a saying related to the mid- Autumn festival which is tomorrow. It means, May we all be blessed with longevity, though we are thousands of miles apart,we are still able to share the beauty of the moon together. 

(I can't get this to rotate, stupid internet)

Jennifer also wrote out a poem for about how people should be like Pine trees, strong and stoic.

Much prettier than mine.

Earlier this week a friend of the family visited as part of check up on the University here and in Malaysia. As a consequence I was invited to a couple of fancy lunches. I did turn up to the first one on time,  Louise was 20 minutes late so lesson learned for the next one, where I turned up 15 minutes late and only had to stand around awkwardly for 5 minutes. Much better. We had a lovely catch up and she bought some goodies over from the UK, including marmite - of which I now have about 3 years worth, nice smelling things for my room and exfoliator - which is incredibly tricky to locate here. The second lunch was Western which was pretty nice, actual salad, antipasti and a really nice peach cake which hands down beats the seaweed cake. Louise also gave me some mooncakes to celebrate the festival with tomorrow. They look very fancy. 

So onto class, I’ve just finished my second week and the workload is intense. I now understand why Chinese students seemingly work without a break. In the past 2 weeks I’ve been given about 300 new characters to learn, and to properly ingrain a new character in my brain it’ll take about 15 minutes. I don’t even want to do the maths on that, I’m sure it won’t add up to the amount of hours in a week. My first couple of classes were terrifying, I’m fairly sure shell shocked is an appropriate word to use when describing my feelings after the first class. ‘Overwhelming Tidal Wave’ is how I’d describe the 4 hours of Mandarin on the following day. For the first time all of the class is conducted in Mandarin, and for the first week of class there were lots of different people at different levels moving around the groups. Which made me feel completely inadequate and like a failure, AND OMG WHY AM I EVEN LEARNING THIS LANGUAGE, I SHOULD JUST JACK IT IN AND RUN AWAY TO THE MOUNTAINS!!!!! Thankfully that moment passed. It turns out I was just a bit rusty, funnily enough if you don’t really think about a language for 3 months, let alone sit down and study it, it takes a while to come back. Who’d have thought it. In fact it’s going quite well really, it’s challenging and requires a lot of work, and if you don’t know what’s going on just fake it til you can Pleco it.

Some of the classes do me make me feel like I’m back at school though, like the one where our teacher assigned us into groups for a debate. so I moved over to the others, but apparently I sat in the wrong place. So she told me to take a seat behind them, then we began discussing our debate and she had a go at me for sitting too far away and not engaging, then she moved me back to where I had seated myself. Once the debate started however she stopped it because I didn’t move back to the seat behind. Confused? I was, apparently I can’t be trusted to seat myself. Which I find highly condescending and that makes me sarcastic and abrasive. Luckily I’m not sure she realised that. There was the moment when we’d just had the no phones in class talk, and the teacher gathered us around to put our hands in together - kind of like a pre game pep talk in a cheesy American sports film - and then just as we were about to shout No Phones (YAY), she got her phone out to take a photo. What sweet, sweet irony.  Another brilliant moment was when one of my teachers sat me down because she was concerned that I was struggling with homesickness and culture shock. Despite the fact that I’d just had to stand up and introduce myself to the class and talk about my previous experience in China including those 4 months living in Beijing. So I appreciate the caring gesture but I’d only met this woman an hour ago, and she sat far too close and had really appalling breath, and I know that’s mean but it’s very true. It’s irritating having left school 3 years ago and having been at Uni where you are treated as an adult who is capable of making their own decisions, whether they be good or bad, to return to that student-teacher dynamic. Where the Institution that is the University knows best, and you are expected to live life their way. Maybe that sounds a bit free spirit esque, but I think it’s an important thing to discuss because everyone knows about homesickness and culture shock but I didn’t realise that we would be treated so differently to home. Like we can’t be trusted with ourselves. 

Whilst this is an irritant for us it’s even more stringent for the Chinese pupils, they have their curfews, gender segregated buildings and for some courses attendance is part of your mark. As I’ve said previously you have to go to the clinic everyday if you’re too sick for lectures, the cooking facilities here are so basic most students eat out anyway. It fosters an environment of dependancy, the opposite of how we view University back in the UK. Yes, they’re moving away from home but there’s no real branching out and living independently, it’s kind of hard to when you’re sharing a dorm with 5 other people. Maybe this stems from the fact that most are only 17 when they arrive. That’s right they start Uni at 17, so maybe setting them loose on real life would be too much of a shock, but I think in the long run you need to allow students the space to decide what it is they really want to do and where they want to take their lives. Maybe it’s because there is so much more expectation and pressure on students here, parents have probably spent a lot on their education up to this point and the University knows that if the parents don’t see results then they will lose their students. Maybe it’s because like all Chinese Universities it is overseen by the Ministry of Education. Either way, if China wants to foster a more creative generation that can innovate then they need to give their students the space to make decisions in all aspects of their lives. Nottingham is even more lenient than most Chinese Universities, it’s the only University in China with societies as we know them in the UK, and a large bulk of the staff are International which engenders a more forgiving and relaxed atmosphere. They are also very proud to be the only Chinese University with a Starbucks, Despite that it’s still a Chinese University and it has to adhere to the Ministry of Education and what is demanded of it. 

I think this creates not only an academically pressured environment but a socially pressured one. At the weekends Chinese students want to go out and party but they have two choices when they do this; either rent a hotel room with other students or stay out until the dorm re opens at 6. This results in what a couple of Chinese students told me were ‘dirty games’ being played in the hotel rooms, and all the peer pressure associated with that. Or students falling asleep in the clubs, which doesn’t sound amazingly safe. Ironically by instigating these tough rules the University is encouraging an unhealthy attitude towards partying, you either go big, or go home and miss out. It’s hardly promoting a balanced lifestyle. 

It’s interesting to see how the Chinese have taken the concept of a British University and added their favourite ideas to it. Like Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, Nottingham Ningbo is a British university with Chinese Characteristics.