The 6 Lessons I Learned While Studying Abroad in China
I hate travelling. To be more concise, I despise the act of travelling, but I love the feeling of exploring. To me, the two are completely different things. Travelling is the act of making a journey from one place to another (and honestly, sitting on an airplane for 12 hours is not fun at all). Exploring is much more than that. It implies adventuring to parts unknown, revelling in foreign things, encountering new personalities, and learning from experiences.
When I think of explorers, I think of the legendary figures from textbooks who ventured off to distant lands in hopes of discovering new things. They were geologists, botanists, zoologists, historians, and scientists who shared the knowledge and discoveries they made with the rest of the world in hopes of changing people’s outlooks.
“I want to become an explorer.”
I spent a long time reflecting on my experiences and scrolling through my camera roll, but with all that out of the way, I’d like to begin by sharing discoveries and experiences during my time studying abroad in China this summer.
1. Made in China. During my stay in Hangzhou, a lakeside city in the Zhejiang Province, I got to witness the scale and culture of Chinese manufacturing. From Geely’s automobiles to Jingsheng’s semiconductors, SHINING’s 3D printed components, and XioLift’s elevators, I was able to personally witness the different manufacturing techniques, principles, and processes and gained a crucial understanding of the dynamics of Chinese manufacturing philosophies and work culture by visiting factories in four different industries.
2. Chinese is the future. Tencent. Alibaba. WeChat. Taobao. Xiaomi. Baidu. With the rise of Chinese super apps, tech companies, and international conglomerates, the Chinese language has become ever more mainstream and global. In this present day and age, knowing both English and Mandarin Chinese are assets in dealing with fields that include, but are not limited to business, manufacturing, technology, and medicine. I am half Thai and half Chinese, but I grew up speaking only Thai and English in my household. Now knowing that I want to work in business and manufacturing in the Guangdong or Zhejiang Provinces I have realized how important it is to understand Chinese culture and communicate ideas through local dialects.
3. Communication is everything. Following the ideas of the previous point, this one should be the most obvious. You can’t work as a team if you can’t communicate like one. While working in a group environment with Chinese students, I had to work to overcome the language barrier in communicating ideas; however, there are some things that transcend language like math and science. Through simple illustrations and practical demonstrations as well as an effort to learn each other’s language, our group was able to conduct research and effectively convey our project’s findings and ideas to an international audience. Overall, I accumulated a new knowledge of words, phrases, and ideologies in both Chinese and Japanese that related to the topics of culture, quality, manufacturing, consumerism, and business.
4. Perfectionism leads to procrastination. I call myself a perfectionist, and although it can be considered a strength like having an eye for detail, I consider it a weakness and an excuse for procrastination. For me, I have a hard time getting things done very fast since everything I do has to be perfect the first time around. Even when losing a lot of time, I never started my course projects until I was sure every aspect was presentable when I really should have just begun collecting data and worrying about the other aspects later.
5. The Great Firewall of China. China bans a lot of social media platforms that we normally use and even things like Google, Gmail, YouTube, and Netflix are blocked there. If you wanted to access these things, you would need to download and subscribe to a VPN and then try numerous servers to find the best connection. However, after just a week or so I simply gave up going through the process and embraced the lack of American media consumption. Instead, I began to learn about local media consumption and explore the neighbouring areas around me. I worried less about updating social media followers and focused more on witnessing moments in time where things stood still and the simplistic beauty of my surroundings overwhelmed me.
6. Your body is a temple. A lot of people tend to overlook the topic of health when it comes to working. We often make sacrifices to get work done; however, it all takes a toll on both our physical and mental health. You work less efficiently when you are sleep deprived or you stress more easily when you work too much. Because of the nature of taking quarter-long engineering courses compressed into half the time, I found myself stressing too much and staying up too late to do work. I quickly learned that wasn’t the best idea and began to prioritize my sleep over work. Instead I slept by a certain time and then woke up very early to get more work done, and as a result, I felt much more productive and efficient.