The Third Act

Days away from my departure, I feel it's about time to intoduce this blog and my 'adventure.' I say adventure because it is an adventure for me, and it was in this spirit I have named this site "The Wild East," some play on its American antithesis. In my last post I brushed over some of the reasons of why I call China--and I suppose East Asia at large--that. By now, I don't think I have enlighten anyone about the revolution that is modern China of this moment; this hundred years has been called 'China's Century' and it is hard to read the headlines without feeling the tremors from the rise of what Napoleon called the sleeping giant. China is the new land of opportunity, and it thus attracts entrepeneurs and dreamers of all nationalities with the lure of fortune, exoticism, and adventure.

I hope "The Wild East" will not consent to suffer the limits of a travel record, but instead strive to reveal some part of me and some part of China. In doing so, perhaps it will reveal something about the world, the meeting of the East and the West, and our shared future in this fragile century. But enough of this; the dreams belong in China, right? So, in the comfort of Memphis' suburbs, I will lay out the nitty-gritty. Bear with me; this is the introduction to my adventure.

With time to kill before a meeting, I found myself in the library of Middlebury College (as I so often did this past semester), sitting in a large, comfy lazy-boy in the main atrium. Zach, a classmate of mine, had stopped to share anxieties over a looming paper for a shared Chinese literature class. Conversation shifted to China, and Zach said something that struck a chord for me; he said studying abroad in China is the climax of your (a Chinese student, here) college career. And there I sat, a first-semester Junior with seven semesters (2 earned in an extreme summer program at Midd) of Chinese under my belt; Chinese students at Midd pretty much from day 1 expect to go to China, and it had come at last.

But there's another reason I dwell on this. This fall, I took screenwriting with Don Mitchell, who drove into our bones the concept of the Three Act structuture--setup, complication, and resolution. At the end of my first semester of Junior year, I found myself also at the end of my second act: the crisis moment, when all hope seems lost. I had papers and tests and no energy for schoolwork, and I also had no idea how I would make it out of this one. The protagonist somehow finds resolution at this point, though, and makes a decision that leads to the story's climax. The climax (going to China, right?) occurs in the third act. It was just a matter of getting to the next act--or so I told myself.

Well, I made it out alright--at least in screenwriting. And now I'm moving onto my third act which is divided in the following manner. From mid-January to mid-February I will be in Beijing as part of CET's January Term program. This program is strictly a language study program, where I'll be polishing the dust off my modern Chinese (which has deteriorated as I studied ancient Chinese instead in the fall semester). Sometime at the end, there is some time off to enjoy Chinese New Year (technically "Spring Festival") before heading south to Hangzhou.

Hangzhou (pronounced roughly 'hong-jo' in American) is a former capital of ancient China, which Marco Polo described as "beyond dispute the finest and the noblest in the world." Its beauty has earned it a place in a very telling phrase: "上有天堂， 下有苏杭," above there is heaven, below there is Suzhou and Hangzhou. It is here that I will spend my spring semester in the C.V. Starr-Middlebury School in China (partnered with the aforementioned CET) where I will take 'dumbed-down' courses in Chinese (as opposed to Chinese courses)--examples include 'Modern Chinese Literature,' 'Chinese Cinema,' and 'Contemporary Chinese Social Issues' among others. The 1-on-1 course I described before is also part of this program. And then in June, I will be set free to carry out whatever plan I will design to occupy myself until August 15, the date on my return ticket home.

So, sit tight for the third act--it's about to start.