My First Entry

Why am I blogging? Up to this point in my life, I’ve never had a written log chronicling my life, thoughts and experiences. Moreover, I never really caught on to the blog craze—this page will be the first one I check on a consistent basis. I guess that the seeds of this blog were sowed during the winter of my senior year at Yale. After kicking around a myriad of post-graduation possibilities, I decided to move to Beijing and look for a job. Let me explain.
After spending my junior year at the University of Sydney in Australia, during which I spent 2 months backpacking through Southeast Asia, I knew that I wanted to live overseas again. Furthermore, I firmly believe that, as a recent grad, this is the only time in my life where I have no obligations or responsibilities beyond making enough money to pay my rent.
During January, I began thinking about ways to get back overseas—graduate studies at Cambridge, NGO work in Africa or South America and doing something in China. As second semester continued, I became more intrigued with the prospects of moving to China. I’ve also found international relations to be fascinating and, as a political science major, I’d spent a lot of time studying governments and the different ways in which states are governed. Indeed, China is emerging as a key player on the international stage and the way in which Beijing has decided to open up an essentially closed economy is impressive—and unprecedented. The more I thought about China, the more I realized that, if I wanted to understand China and, furthermore, international affairs in the 21st Century, I’d need to have a firm grasp of Chinese culture, or Zhongguo wen hua. Yet from my year overseas, I knew that a culture is not something that you can grasp, intuit and understand without living in a country and getting to know its people and its language.
Therefore, I enrolled in a 9-week intensive first year Mandarin Chinese Program at Middlebury College immediately following graduation. I finished the program two weeks ago and, next Thursday, September 7th, I’m moving to Beijing.
Yet I still haven’t answered the question I began this entry with: Why am I blogging? As graduation approached, seniors began greeting each other not with “what’s up” or “how are you doing” but, rather, with “so, what are you doing next year?” More often than not, answers fell into one of three categories: I-banking/consulting, teaching or more school. When I told people my plan—starting to study Chinese, moving to China and then looking for a job—I was met with both incredulity and amazement. Once people realized that I was serious, they usually ended the conversation by saying something along the lines of “be sure to let me know how things turn out in China.” This blog, then, is my attempt to do just that.
Before I wrap up with initial entry I need to offer one quick caveat: this page is not going to be devoted to my personal exploits in Beijing. Rather, it is going to be my attempt to explain Chinese culture—from business etiquette to the language (which I currently speak poorly) to the impact that the 2008 Summer Olympics are having on Beijing and, finally, the way in which the government interacts with its citizens and companies. That said, you can think of this page as a series of “situation reports,” or my take on how China functions as a society.