My name is Jay Weisbrod, I am a 22 year old recent college graduate and tomorrow marks the beginning of a new chapter in my life. I have recently accepted a job to be an English teacher for an elementary school in the city of Guilin, located in Guangxi province in southern China. I will be living alone for the most part and the only means of communication I will have with family and friends back home will be via Skype or Face Time, provided that I have a good internet connection (not always a given). The previous sentence makes what I'm doing sound a bit more dramatic and extreme than it actually is. Guilin is a picturesque city that has managed to keep pace with the tide of modernization while also maintaining its traditional feng shui. It has a vibrant native population as well as a strong community of westerners who are either employed or students. It's not as if I graduated college and decided to skip town so that I could go native on the other side of the world in order to "find myself," that's not what this is about. So I suppose for those of you wondering why I would decide to take this path after graduating college I should offer a bit of background.
On May 27th 1991 I became the firstborn child of Mark and Beth Weisbrod (great people). Due to my Dad's occupation in the medical distribution industry I spent most of my early childhood moving from city to city. After my birth in Richmond, Virginia we moved to Memphis, Tennessee (where my brother Jack was born); Seattle, Washington; Augusta, Georgia; and Taipei, Taiwan before finally returning to Richmond where we have remained since. It was in Taiwan where I first came to experience Asian culture and all that it had to offer. I enjoyed it so much that I was actually upset when my dad broke the news that we would be moving back stateside. While I was able to quickly readjust to living in Richmond again, my interest in Asia and Asian culture endured. It wasn't something that many of my new friends understood so I kept it largely to myself. As I grew older and went through high school and college I was able to take opportunities to learn more about this area of the world via mandarin classes and other cultural studies. This education eventually led to me making the decision that once it was time for me to get a job that I would look for something that involved me with China in some capacity. The decision made sense to me for several reasons: first and foremost was that it would satisfy my interests that I had largely been deprived of while living in the United States, secondly I wanted to be in the forefront of the recent boom of the Chinese economy as I feel that it would give me more employment opportunities both as a teacher and beyond; and the third reason was that being exposed to Chinese culture would bring me closer to my goal of becoming fluent in mandarin.
In the summer of 2013 I discovered a place where I could achieve all three of these goals simultaneously--Guilin. As an International Studies major in college I was required to pick a language to study in order to satisfy my degree requirements. Naturally, I chose mandarin; however, there was one problem--my university, Virginia Tech, did not offer classes at the level of which I was required to take, a huge pain in the ass. In order to satisfy these requirements I would have to take mandarin classes through other schools that offered them and transfer the credits back to Virginia Tech. It was then that I found out about a program founded by a former Tech graduate called The Chinese Language Institute based out of Guilin. It was decided that in order to finish my language requirements that I would spend a summer in Guilin living at the institute and studying mandarin. A stack of paperwork, a few heated exchanges with the university registrar and study abroad office, a couple thousand dollars in student loans, a trip to the Chinese embassy, and a plane ticket later I was on my way (see how easy it is????)
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| Aerial view of Mt. McKinley on my first flight to Guilin |
People often ask me what is it about China that I like. Is it the food? Is it the weather? Is it the landscape? Are you attracted to Chinese girls? Is it because you're short and most Chinese people are short too? Do you like being in a place where white people are a minority? (I may use stereotypes from time to time in this blog just a heads up). The answer to all of these questions is yes, but, to be honest, I don't think I can give a singular, specific answer; at least not yet. I'm looking for something more profound than simply saying "Um...yea, like, the culture is totally awesome and the food is really good too." There is something about that place that is, like, totally awesome but I can't seem to explain it. Hopefully as the weeks go by and I settle in I'll be able to do better in this department.
In writing this blog I hope to achieve two things: first is to provide an account of my everyday life from both a tourist and a residential perspective. In doing so I plan on being brutally honest while also not observing the restrictions of political correctness; I may even throw in a few colorful words here and there if I'm feeling up to it (Weisbrod and Armbruster families you've been warned). Second, I want to continue to get closer to figuring out a definitive answer to the question of why I like it so much over there.
In order to guide my observations I have come up with several categories that will supplement my weekly writing. They are as follows:
"Going Native" Experience of the Week
Now this doesn't mean that I am going to show up the first week and start eating dogs for dinner and wash it down with stinky tofu, but one of the things I love about being over there is that I am constantly finding new experiences whether I'm looking for it or not. This section will give me a chance to share some of these.
Mandarin Improvement Sign
A chance for me to toot my own horn!! For anyone else who has studied a foreign language you know that it is a long process and sometimes it seems as though you aren't making any progress. Being able to successfully navigate through situations where you are forced to speak something besides your native tongue can be incredibly rewarding. This segment will help me gauge my progress (I still have a very long way to go).
Funny Sign of the Week
Americans and people from other English-speaking nations are incredibly spoiled in that anywhere we go in the world there almost always seems to be an attempt to translate the native language to English if it isn't English already. Why does that happen? It's not as if we make a huge effort on our end to speak their language.Nevertheless, I am eternally grateful for the effort that random people make to speak English to me when I am a visitor in their country and they have little incentive to do so. With that being said, sometimes English translations can miss the mark and these mistakes can manifest themselves in pretty funny ways where the only thing left do is laugh. You see a lot of these signs in China and I will post the ones I see for your viewing pleasure. I make a big enough fool of myself trying to speak their language anyway so I feel that I am entitled to poke a little fun back. For this week I will post a sign that I saw the last time I was in Guilin.
This sign was located underneath a cliff in a scenic area. One can see what they were attempting to say. Pretty tame compared to some of the others you will see in here.
Reason Why I Like This Place
My effort to reach goal #2 of this blog. Self-explanatory.
Random Tangent
For those of you who even make it this far and feel that I haven't rambled enough this is for you. This will be where I write about something that isn't related to my stay in China e.g. sports, music, Justin Bieber, etc.
So this begins what I hope will be an entertaining and insightful account of my experiences for the foreseeable future. This should be fun and I assure you I will get better at this as I go along. SO STAY WITH ME GODDAMMNIT!! If you have any questions comments or concerns or just want to tell me how awesome I am send me an email (jayw0527@gmail.com) hit me up on facebook or leave a comment below. Just don't call me because starting tomorrow I ain't got no phone.
