One of the best ways to start to know a person in distance is probably to know his background. I hope the following is a good start.
I was born in Fuzhou. For the first six years of my life, I traveled a lot between Fuzhou and my mother’s hometown, so that my grandparents could take care of me while my parents were busy with their work. I was never able to meet my father’s parents; they passed away before I was born.
By the time I reached six and moved to Fuzhou for formal education, I was able to speak in the dialect of my mother’s hometown very fluently. I can still understand the dialect up to today, but I am no longer able to speak in it.
I have never been able to speak in Fuzhou dialect because all the people I communicated a lot with in Fuzhou spoke Mandarin either as a habit, like my parents and their friends, or as a requirement, like my teachers and friends at school. Therefore, I ended up not being able to speak in any Chinese dialect.
Judging from that, I probably have no gift in language. That would conveniently explain why I have never been very good in English even though it was my major in college, not to mention German, my second foreign language, and Japanese, my third foreign language. That being said, I would still like to give myself credits for at least having the ambition to try to learn all of them. However, my college has always been excellent in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature; evaluating my college by example of me is just a sampling bias.
Shanghai is a city of opportunity; my college was no exception. A merry chase after things that could make life easier was one of the themes of the campus. I would not be so assertive as to say that the academics had become secondary at that point, but it was definitely struggling to maintain its dignity. And of course, there was love, passion, jealousy, youthful joy, adolescent cruelty, senseless frustration … the whole package of the four-year college. Two years of job stay in Beijing was a good change for me. Though tempted, I will refrain from making any comparison between the two most prosperous cities in China. Friendship marks these two years of my life. One curious thing that happened to me during the two years was that the Northerner characteristics from my father's side were awakened in my blood and tried to overthrow my Southerner upbringing, but did not succeed. Instead, they made peace and stayed together in me. Interestingly enough, the collision/merge had its greatest impact on my food selection. I enjoy wine-soaked live shrimp as much as pork, pickle and rice noodle stew. It was a nice two-year period of my life. However, I decided that I do not want to be a journalist and quit my job.
Such is life that you wish you could get through a certain period of time quickly, but when you finally get through it, you wish you could re-live it. I had wished I could get the admission letter from the graduate school quickly; I had wished I could get my US visa quickly; I had wished I could get my degree quickly, get a job quickly, get a promotion quickly, get my green card quickly, get my next higher-paid job quickly… In all these things I wish I could get, time had gone by. Now I wish I could re-live it and enjoy it one more time. However, in such wish, my current life goes by…
