Conversation #1

Today I sat down with my conversation partner for the first time. The beginning was a little awkward because he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. He thought that he had to do work as well. When I informed him that he didn’t have to do anything, he seemed much more relieved and relaxed in our conversation. From there we started with the basics. His name is Gang Tian, but he likes to be called Tristan because that is what everyone calls him and that is what he is used to. When I asked him why, he said he didn’t know, but he liked it. It is a 20 hour flight from Dallas to Beijing, China, where Tristan lives. There are no direct flights to Dallas from his airport so he has to have a layover. He is majoring in piano performance, an instrument he has been playing since he was 6 years old. Our conversation jumped around through extremely diverse conversation topics, with no real order or pattern to the things we talked about. We would be talking about one thing, and then the next thing we know we’re on a completely different topic with no recollection of how we got there. I think that’s a good thing though. It shows that we had a lot to talk about and that the conversation was interesting and engaging. As it turns out, Tristan has been in many states. More than I have been. I questioned myself as to why that is, because it made me feel almost unpatriotic that I had to ask someone from a different country what California is like or what St. Louis is like. Going into the conversation I was certainly not expecting to be asking him what certain states in the US were like. He was in so many different states because he had to do a bunch of auditions for colleges and they were spread out across the country. He says that his favorite state is California because the people are really friendly and the weather is very nice. He actually got to stay in New York for a month, about 30-45 minutes from where I live, which was an instant connection and excitement for me because I got to ask him some questions about my home town. I asked him to compare New York City to Beijing, considering that they are both big, major cities. He said that New York had more freedom. Compared to Beijing it was extremely open and you had the liberty to do what you wanted. In Beijing, he says, you have certain roles and expectations that are associated with your age in society. At his age, you are expected to go to school and to study. You have to do it. But in New York, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. Although it is normal to do so, you are not forced by your government or by your society to do so. Now on that point I disagreed with him to some extent. I said that in America it’s true that education is not forced on you. But higher education degrees are getting so common that it is hard to find a job with a college degree. Therefore, if it is hard to find a job and you possess a college degree, which means almost everyone else has a college degree as well. So I said that if you really think about it, it’s almost like you are forced to get an education, otherwise it’s almost impossible to get a job. He said I talked too fast for him to understand all of what I was saying, so I just laughed it off and said let’s get back to New York. He went on to say that diversity is much more popular in New York City, to which I thought that it was a proper statement considering it is called the “melting pot”. Then he said something that surprised me. He said that not a lot of foreigners are welcome in Beijing. Beijing’s very historical and traditional compared to New York and because of that, the government and its citizens do not take well to foreigners. I asked why else he thinks that is the case, and he continued to surprise me with his answers. He said that the people in power are extremely selfish. They think that they deserve all of the resources in their country and the foreigners shouldn’t get any access to them because they do not live there or contribute to the making of the resources they have. The government is extremely restrictive of what its citizens can do. They can’t access facebook or youtube because the government feels that it will influence their thought patterns and make them realize that their country is not good. In turn, these thoughts will gain followers and there will be a rebellion among the people that want a new government. Tristan said that if someone wants to travel from Beijing to Hong Kong, they need to get permits and visas to do so. “What other country makes you get visas to visit a city in your own country?” he asks me, “It’s like you want to visit Fort Worth, but you need a permit and a visa to do so because you’re from New York”. I couldn’t believe what he was saying. I had always heard that we had freedom and we were lucky to live in such a great country, but had never realized it until talking to Tristan. I truly am blessed to live in a place where I can access facebook and youtube every day if I wanted to. Then I thought about what he had said about the rejection of foreigners in his country because I was thinking of the Olympics and how that had worked if they typically rejected foreigners. He said that it wasn’t a problem, and living there during the Olympics was crazy and terrific at the same time. He actually volunteered for the diving program at the Olympics and got to help athletes change their clothes or just be a tour guide for them. Sticking on the topic of foreigners, I asked him what it was like to come to a country like the United States, one with no definite culture and no official language, being an outsider. Was it hard to adapt? How did you find the different norms and values to be? He said that the transition wasn’t difficult at all. This really surprised me because I was expecting him to say that it wasn’t easy because it was so different. But he said that it is easy to adapt because the people are so nice in America. They welcome people from the outside. He said that his roommate is especially helpful because even though his English is broken, he still understands everything that he says and is willing to help. He loves the food here. He says that the food is also very easy to adapt to. Back home, he ate a lot of noodles and dishes that his mom would make. These dishes consisted of frying anything that she had lying around the house. They have a lot of fast food in China because it is so convenient and they don’t have time to cook. He said that the Chinese don’t eat very healthy and that he thinks American’s diets are much healthier. This shocked me. Americans are typically described as fat, lazy people by outsiders. But he believed that we eat healthier than most Chinese people in Beijing. What?! I asked him what he meant and why he thought that because I was so perplexed by his answer and he said that people never eat fruit where he is from and everyone loves to drink alcohol. There is no age limit where he lives so people consume mass amounts. They also smoke a lot. He thinks that people don’t care that they will get cancer and because that in Beijing people don’t typically exercise or work out very often, the health of his city is much worse than the health in the United States. We talked about much, much more but I will save the content for more write-ups because I can go on for quite some time about our conversation. After our conversation was over I found myself thinking about everything he had said to me. I just couldn’t believe life was so different for him. Could I have really been so ignorant to what his culture and everyday life was like? In a way, it made me question my own intelligence and realize that I wasn’t culturally aware what so ever. How could it be possible that I was so ignorant? I’m extremely happy to have this opportunity though, because it has exploited something about me that I need to develop and work on and I look forward to my other meetings with Tristan, to learn more about him, his family, and his culture.