Day 5: Hannah Collins, ’06 YC,
School of Music ’08
Xi’an, Sunday, May 20

“If I ever have a chance to go to China again, I’d like to see Xi’an. I only got the chance to spend two days there, but it is such a beautiful city full of old relics from the Silk Road and the ancient times. I’d like to go back.”

My grandfather, a 92-year-old retired surgeon, said this to me on the phone a few days before the “Yale 100” delegation left for China. Both of my maternal grandparents grew up in the Guangzhou region of southern China, but left permanently in 1947 to work for the U.S. Public Health department, eventually settling and raising a family in Kentucky. Though I won’t be able to see Guangzhou on this trip, I’m still thrilled to have this chance to take my first trip to China. I have already been able to visit my grandparents’ alma mater, Peking Union Medical College (just around the corner from the Beijing Hotel) and for the next few days will have the chance to see the ancient capital which impressed them both so much.

We started the day with a morning visit to Xi’an Jiaotong University (XJTU), the top university in the area and the alma mater of former party leader and President Jiang Zemin. We were greeted with a welcome ceremony of speeches and presentations, a routine we are starting to get accustomed to after two university visits in Beijing. After the ceremony we took a group photo and split off into groups in four interest areas: business administration, humanities/laws, construction, and biology/medicine.

I headed off with the biomedical group to a nearby building where we had a rare opportunity to mingle freely with students and faculty for over an hour. This felt like a real luxury after four days constantly on the move in Beijing. I found myself sitting with a friendly and articulate fourth-year medical student, Gao Yu, who was full of questions (and answers) for me. We started out discussing the medical education system in China and the challenges of training the large numbers of doctors needed, especially in rural areas. She explained that XJTU alone has over 4,000 students specializing in medicine. I answered her questions about the American system and assured her that American interns do their fair share of observation and are generally not asked to perform solo open heart surgery in their first year as seen on “Grey’s Anatomy” (which apparently is quite popular in China via internet downloads). We compared notes on roommates, apartments, cooking, and chocolate. Then we moved into more complicated topics such as the Chinese AIDS crisis and related issues of rural poverty, black-market blood selling and government intervention efforts. We also touched on President Bush, family/career planning for women and climate change. Quite a conversation.

The whole delegation reconvened with our hosts over lunch in the dining hall, where I made the acquaintance of a biology student named Dong Yang who quickly took an interest in my half-Chinese background and insisted that he would be a negligent host if he let our delegation leave Xi’an without trying the local specialty cakes and pastries. We agreed to meet up at the hotel later in the evening. Professor Arthur Horwich of the Yale School of Medicine also met Dong Yang at lunch and got into a detailed discussion about a protein-folding experiment that Yang was working on independently. Professor Horwich told me later on the bus “it’s not that the project itself is groundbreaking — it’s a neat little experiment — but the fact that he did this on his own with very little guidance is very impressive.” Professor Horwich was so impressed by Yang’s work ethic and dedication that he agreed to send a chemical reagent necessary to take the experiment further and to help Yang look for a graduate school slot in the U.S. after the Yale 100 trip ends. That evening Dong Yang arrived at our hotel as promised with two big bags full of local-style cakes and pastries for the whole delegation to share. Though we have all been shown incredible hospitality throughout the trip, this display of generosity from an individual student was especially touching.

After lunch we returned to the hotel to meet the local families who had volunteered to host groups of two or three delegates for the afternoon. Along with Vice President Bruce Alexander and his wife, Christine, I was paired with the Duan family. Mrs. Duan, a law professor at Chang An University, her friend Kathy, an English teacher, and 15-year-old son Zhi-hao were there to meet us and take us back to their home. Wang Zhuoqiong, a reporter from the China Daily (an English-language newspaper) who is traveling with the delegation for all 10 days, also joined us and helped to translate.

We arrived at the family home, a small apartment in a university housing complex belonging to Northwest University of Law and Politics, where Mr. Duan is a law professor. We had barely finished our introductions when Mr. Duan, with a cheerful, curious nature, launched into a series of very long, complicated questions about American values and religion, making difficult work for our translators. Bruce Alexander jokingly nicknamed Mr. Duan “the philosopher,” and fielded the questions admirably.

The Duans took us out to dinner in a small village about 40 minutes outside of the city by car. They wanted to show us where they would go in the countryside on a weekend to relax, go for a hike or have a good meal. We took two cars and the hosts made sure that their 15-year-old son was the only English speaker in my car, giving him a chance to practice his translation skills. After a considerable amount of struggle, he managed to ask, “Do you like the band Green Day?” It is easy to take for granted how much effort is required to learn English as a second language when talking to university students who pronounce words better than most Americans. I was very impressed and humbled by Zhihao’s efforts considering that the only phrases I can say in Chinese are “Hello,” “Thank you,” “Where is the bathroom?” and “Cheers,” (which actually sufficed for most of our outings). In the course of 45 minutes, he got warmed up and started translating questions from his father. Mr. Duan teased his son a little bit, asking me questions like, “When you were my son’s age, did you do work around the house?” He was very curious about educational opportunities in the U.S. for his son and also interested in my educational course. “How do you make a living with a degree in music?” Good question.

As we drove along, I got my first look at the rural countryside. These images were new to me — families riding on the same bike, farmers returning from the fields carrying scythes and hoes, women selling eggs, watermelons and other produce from roadside stands, people driving by on makeshift vehicles of all different kinds — basically anything with a motor and wheels.

When we arrived in the small village, we went into a restaurant which the Duans have been to many times, which is run out of a local family’s home. Because our party of eight people was too large for the front dining rooms, we sat in the living room. So far we have eaten extremely well in China, with banquets every day, but this dinner was the best of the trip so far. We had congee made from corn, beef with greenbeans, shredded potato, Chinese flatbread, chicken stew and delicious stir fried tofu with scallions. All of the ingredients were local, fresh and cooked expertly in the local style.

That evening, I went out with my roommate, Gao Rui, and one of the local youth federation hosts to a street market in a nearby Islamic neighborhood. After a day full of familiar and intimate settings, lunch with students at the dining hall, dinner in a living room with the Duans, conversations about music, politics, values, etc., the market served a shock to the senses. I was totally submerged by foreign sights, sounds, tastes and smells. Even Rui, who is a Beijing native, but new to Xi’an, said the market gave her the sensation of being “mentally drunk.” As we sat at a sidewalk restaurant drinking Chinese soda, I watched vendors cooking skewers of lamb, beef, crab and fish as quickly and efficiently as possible. Carts full of fresh cherries, melons, and jewelry rolled by while dried fruits of every color, including kiwi, mango, tomato, figs and plums, were piled high on tables lit by strings of colored lights. Street musicians wandered amongst the tables singing and playing erhu or violin, competing with barking waiters and children selling flowers for the attention of the customers. I didn’t see many foreign tourists, except a few from the Yale delegation. Near us, a group of friends celebrated a birthday, toasting loudly, and at the next table a local young couple sat spending the evening together, sharing a plate of shrimp. While the experience felt strange and new for me, it was another hard, hot, day of work for the vendors and the shop owners. A flutist played a beautiful heartfelt song at the end of a table though the patrons who hired him were barely paying attention. As we left, someone at the birthday table called over a flower vendor who couldn’t have been more than ten years old, took her whole bouquet and tossed it at the birthday boy. She waited patiently to be paid, then disappeared into the crowd.

I’m sure I will leave Xi’an with a very similar feeling to my grandfather’s. Two or three days is not nearly enough time to get a sense of what life is like here or to take in all of the historical and cultural sites. Hopefully I will be able to come back to visit with the help of new friends.