Rhema Kang's blog

Once again, the Asia Pacific Studies capstone seminar has secured generous funding of nearly $30 000 for an overseas field school. This year, eleven students will be travelling with Program Director and Professor of Geography Rachel Silvey to Bandung, Indonesia for two weeks to learn about urban planning and other issues.

Although I’m not enrolled in the seminar, I will be joining the field school as one of the additional students. I will be blogging about our discoveries in Bandung. Before the field school begins on April 25, I decided to stopover in Malaysia for a week to visit my paternal grandmother.

Note: This entry has two separate components that are independent of each other.

A Midpoint Critique
As I'm more than halfway through my stay in China, I thought it would be fitting to review my experience at the Beijing Language and Culture University. My first four-week language program is completed and the second has begun so I have a decent perspective on how the university works.

Anyone who has travelled to China will understand how the topic of Chinese meals is worthy of an entire blog entry. My experience at dinner with a local family provides insight into Chinese culture and encapsulates "hao xiguan" - good social practices.

I wish that this could be a How to Survive Guide but as I haven't figured it out myself, a narrative/warning will have to do.

Backgrounder: My friend from Hunan province is visiting me in Beijing, and her family friends have invited us out to dinner.
When we are picked up, I greet my hosts as "aunt" and "uncle respectfully. I can't figure out if their son is older than I am, and I don't want to ask so I remain clueless about how to refer to him.

It's been a while since I blogged, mainly due to lack of Internet time, and it's impossible to capture in a nutshell what life in Beijing has been like since I started class ago.

The most recent scattered blog post was written in the confusing daze of jetlag and I realize that I need a proper introduction.

As an Asia-Pacific Studies/International Relations student at the University of Toronto, I received a Faculty of Arts: Dr. David Chu Scholarship to fund Mandarin study at the Beijing Language and Culture University. The school was founded solely for educating foreigners in Mandarin, so its population is extremely international. After a week in Hunan surrounded by Chinese people, BLCU's students are a familiar reminder of Toronto. I've met people from: Australia, Thailand, Greece, Italy, Tunisia, the US, Russia, Japan and a French guy from Hong Kong. There is also a massive South Korean population as well.

I'm blogging now from Zhangjiajie, a city in the province of Hunan.

My arrival was an interesting introduction to China as what greeted me at the end of my 14 hour flight was food poisoning, although the culprit was most probably Air Canada, rather than any local cuisine.

Welcome to my blog about my quest to learn Mandarin in Beijing. Without an explanation, the title is a misnomer: It has nothing to do with harmony in the dictionary definition of the word, it’s a tongue-in-cheek take on the Chinese Communist Party’s use of the world “harmony”.

When political dissidents disappear or are put in jail, it is said that they are being “harmonized”. President Hu Jintao has presented China’s foreign policy, including its relations with rogue regimes, as striving to build a “harmonious world”. When China competes with other countries for access to oil supplies through soft power, it is said to be a challenge to Beijing’s “harmony”. Official censorship is euphemistically called “harmonization”.

It's interesting how I've learned so much about myself by going away, then again, since we define ourselves by what we're not as much as by what we are, traveling can be a revealing process.

At one point during our trip we tried to come up with possible entries for Canada into an international cuisine contest. The result of putting our heads together were: maple desserts and other maple products, apples and other autumn harvest related dishes, and wild game found only in Canada (ie beaver and moose). The greatest challenge was to find dishes that were truly national, which excluded west coast fare, Quebecois cuisine, and other region-specific cooking.