Be careful what you do-- because the lie becomes the truth

One of the most important things I learned last year in China was about myself and about how I am motivated. I was used to being a good student. I was used to getting good grades because I did the reading and the work, because I was intelligent and ready for class every day, and perhaps most importantly: because I am mentally quick enough to keep up with professor lectures (many of which cater more to the professor's mind than the students').

I was not a good student in China. I struggled to make it through half of the reading for most of my classes. I did finish, but rarely. My Chinese ability was average for my classes-- meaning that I ended up with passing grades but was not ever the smart one in a class. I couldn't keep up with lectures, felt a fool many times a week when a professor asked a question in class and I couldn't answer.

I am embarrassed by how thoroughly feeling like a poor student threw me completely off track, even when I was getting through just fine, really. I was embarrassed to talk about how well I was understanding course material, and had trouble staying motivated to do reading because it took so long to look up the characters I didn't know, and even when I did my comprehension was low.

When I did actually talk to classmates about schoolwork, we were always in more or less the same place: struggling and embarassed about it. A friend who was in a different program in nanjing said she thought herself lucky she had already had so many experiences as a good student-- she remarked that if feeling this way had been her first experience in school at five years old, she would probably never have recovered and would have spent her whole life thinking of herself as a bad student. This put into clearer focus some thoughts about the way that my brother and I were treated and spoken of when we were both in elementary school, and about the education system in general that I will hopefully explore more fully in a later post.

It was definitely not my best year socially, either, and I'm still working on trying to figure out why. In some ways it was a product of my surroundings-- living in close quarters with large groups from different cultures left a lot of differences of understanding in the open, and it also underlined how much more comfortable people were overall with classmates with the same native language. There were many friendships across the Chinese-Foreigner line (and I'm happy to say some were mine!) but much of the time groups from one background or the other dominated people's social lives.

I know there is more I could have done, was capable of doing, to improve to social feeling in the Center. Trying to pick up the pieces and get more out of last year will, I think, be very important for how I feel about myself this year.

Title is from Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean", which has been stuck in my head for the last few days because a friend of mine introduced me to this excellent cover by Aloe Blacc and The Grand Scheme.