“this is not me; this is not me at all”

Speaking only in Chinese with my fellow classmates leads me to wonder how a society judges a person to be educated. When we first arrived to Beijing, I could identify the soon to be sophomores, and I more or less noticed an age disparity between myself and all the other students. (Of the 60 or so students I have come to know, one is my age, and only one is older than me.) The first two days, everyone spoke English. You could tell by the stories, the naïve comments, and the references to high school or partying, who just finished freshman year, and who was going to be a junior. (Notice that if you say, “just finished freshman year,” vs. “going to be a sophomore,” it impacts your impression of the person’s age.) Now that we all speak Chinese to one another, I no longer can tell who is a sophomore and who a junior. The age differences have melted away. I am not entirely sure if it is due to a barrier in communication and expression, or if I have merely adjusted to their personalities. I feel strange telling others I am a senior in college, not because it makes me feel old, but because I have no proof of my seniority. I use to associate college seniors as being more mature, eloquent, solemn, and knowledgeable than their counterpart underclassmen. However, whether or not I possess these traits over my younger classmates, I have no way of knowing, let alone displaying. Often when I try to express my opinions, I feel like an uneducated high school student, especially compared to some of the more verbally advanced students. Does maturity and sophistication depend on your ability to express your thoughts? While I possess more complicated thoughts, I can only briefly and simply summarize them. Granted I am able to express myself in English, but for now let us focus on Chinese. If a person is unable to communicate properly, it is generally viewed as a lack of intelligence. This is where the question of judgment comes to play. Is a person intelligent and sophisticated if their thought process is complex, or if they possess an eloquent tongue? If you cannot express yourself, you cannot prove your level of intelligence. If you cannot prove your level of intelligence, then does it exist? Debates are won based on articulated ideas. Those ideas that remain silent do not exist in the eyes of the audience or the opposition. Society can only judge a person based on the characteristics they display, not those that lie hidden. So if a person never speaks, are they still intelligent? Intelligence is just an opinion. It can be a widely acknowledged opinion, but never a fact.

I left a lecture today from a visiting professor discussing the increasing role of liberal Confucianism in Chinese society and politics. He discussed the differences between Western and Eastern political philosophy and the rise of those differences. It was fascinating. When I left, I yearned to debate it with my classmates, but all I could say was, “That was really interesting for me, because I took a government class last semester.” Reader, did you notice the dramatic decrescendo?!

The inability to communicate more profound feelings has slightly altered my personality. In the US, I am a rather outgoing person who cannot hold back her thoughts. I seek intimate friendships, and I love to discuss my feelings. But in China, my friends bore me. It is actually our interaction that bores me, but I cannot tell if they themselves are interesting people or not. I would often rather sit in silence than strenuously listen to a broken conversation about food and weather. I prefer writing a journal where I can explore the depth of my ideas and experiences, than briefly summarizing them to a person. My classmates cannot know who I am, because I cannot show them. Of course, my idea of who they are is skewed as well. Unfortunately, most of my character judgments are based on body language and looks, because I cannot tell from our conversations. So these friendships seem shallow and transitory.
Today I had the urge to scream, “I swear I’m not this shy. If I could only speak English, you would see who I really am. This is not me; this is not me at all!”
With a loss of eloquence, I have also suffered a loss in confidence.