#522 My friends are people who...: Two years in the US (Part 1/4)
... sent their best wishes as I entered the unknown
Evening on Sunday, 14 August 2011: Sendoff at Changi Airport
After experiencing a few sendoffs as the sending party when the girls flew overseas to study two years before, it was my turn to go. As I type this more than two years later, the scenes are still fresh in my mind. Partially because I have the pictures framed up on my wall, and because it was such an adrenaline-charged event. Anyway, among the guys, I was one of the earlier ones to fly. Although I really enjoyed my time in Singapore after the army, I figured that it would have been pointless to stay once the S'poreans started school and couldn't hang out as often any more. I wanted to fly with pleasant memories of a happening phase in my life.
I wished I had showed up earlier at the airport. The first thing I did was to check in my luggage, which I had to repack because it was a few kilograms overweight. For some reason I thought it would be a good thing to cart a ton of books over, although I never touched 90% of them since coming here. After I was done repacking, I had only an hour of mingling time, which I was planning on all along because I didn't want things to get draggy. But it turned out that an hour wasn't enough to concentrate on spending time with any one group without glancing at the watch and worrying about spending too little time with my other friends.
Friends from Chinese orchestra
5B friends
Signal buddies
With a bag of gifts in one hand and my red passport in the other, I waved to my friends, "All the best, thanks for coming!", walked through the door in the glass partition into the restricted area, and forever problematised the word friends.
Sendoff gifts I got
On the ANA flight, sitting beside Jon, I was reading the funny and poignant note from Grace, looking through the items in Jacq's care package and reading her note, and flipping through my signal friends' (Hong Ming, Han Liang, Lincoln, Yan Ming, Shi Xian, Clive) scrapbook, which was filled with colourful messages and photographs of key events in our friendship :') I think it's really rare and touching that a group of guys would put such a touching gift together!
Jon and I reached Tokyo for a four-day getaway, when I sang proper karaoke for the last time, and during which Esther also passed me a note and a souvenir. All along during the school year I have these notes in front of my desk in my room, and they have given me food for thought from time to time, especially Jacq's excerpt of Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken.
Notes in front of my desk
Although I was at the threshold of the greatest change in my life till then, I didn't feel anything at the airport, or on the first few days of the trip. It felt as though I was just on my way to Japan or Hong Kong on any other holiday. On the first day of my trip, I lugged my 41 kg suitcase from Narita Airport to our dorm in Ikebukuro, and the sheer weight of my suitcases was almost the only indicator that we're not merely people on holidays. After the trip, Jon and I parted to leave on different flights. From that point forward I was all alone to make friends anew.
Jon and I at Narita Airport, 18 August 2011
I must tell the story of how my Washington, DC-bound flight started. I had the window seat, a S'porean girl starting college in DC was in the middle seat, and her mum was on the aisle seat. Apparently I fell asleep and knocked into the girl's shoulder or something like that, so she switched seats with her mum for the rest of the flight, and her mum promptly nudged me awake and called me out on it. I spent the rest of the flight feeling awkward and lying head-down on the tray in front of my seat. (Studying overseas tip #47: Bring an air pillow.)
... do things together just because
Before August 2011: Distinguishing being friends and being friendly
Before I get started on telling about my life in the US, I'd like to discuss a bit about the friends I've had from before, because I know that my US friends reading this might have a different idea of friendships.
Japclass at Jon and my sendoff, 14 August 2011
I'll use Japclass as a case study. I made my Japclass friends when I studied Japanese in RJ (11th and 12th grade). Skip this paragraph if you're from RJ: We had 4 hours of instruction a week, initially split into 2 hours/2 hours with a break an hour into class, and later split into 2 hours/1 hour/1 hour. Our Japanese classes were interspersed among classes for other school subjects, such as Math, Physics and/or Chemistry. There were only 17 of us, so classes were held in a normal classroom on the windy 7th and top floor of our biggest classroom building. We stuck together in the same Japanese class throughout the two years we were in RJ.
I've always felt a bond with Japclass that transcended our formal status as mere classmates. Perhaps because of a strong core-half of Japclass was from 6R, which had very nice people and was very bonded to start with-Japclass naturally clicked into a group. Moreover, many of us knew each other from our days in RI (the feeder all-male secondary school for RJ, middle school equivalent, 7th to 10th grades). One major turning point was when we hosted Japanese students from Shibuya High School, Tokyo and Makuhari High School, Chiba in March 2008. We started really holding activities as a Japclass, such as dinner and karaoke, to entertain our guests.
Shibushibu/Shibumaku Hosting Programme, March 2008 (uploaded by Chiaki)
During and after the programme, we had a lot to talk about regarding the hosting experience. So we started going out more and more as a Japclass for New Year countdowns, karaoke sessions and meals, such as celebrating the end of CT2 after our Japanese exam with an outing to Cuppage Plaza along Orchard Road (the combination of Japanese food and the karaoke joint Cash Studio made Cuppage the favourite Japclass hangout for all time). Our friendship culminated in an 8-night trip to Japan in December 2008 which I had to miss due to army (long story) and a 5-night trip to Hong Kong in August 2011. Our karaoke sessions, meals and online conferences continue to the present, almost 5 years after our classes stopped.
From the start, Japclass has occasionally eaten together in the school canteen, but it doesn't count if it's in school. At some point, Japclass extended our interaction from within to outside the school, and that's when we transitioned from being friendly to being friends. We do things together not out of necessity, convenience or pursuit of some academic/work-related goal, but because we enjoy our time together, just because. This definition treats friends as cliques and "intimate communities", and if it makes it easier for you you can substitute either whenever I mention "friends".
... were 15 000 km away
September 2011-April 2012: Sociophysical isolation in the Village
I arrived in the US on 19 August. I stayed in a Washington DC hostel for 5 nights to get accustomed to the 12-hour time difference, set up my Citibank account and visit some of the Smithsonian museums. A Greyhound bus and the commuter rail brought me and my suitcases to the Brandeis campus on the 30°C afternoon of Friday, 26 August.
I disliked the Brandeis campus the moment I set my eyes on it. My first thought looking at the patchwork campus, with shiny new buildings situated and angled awkwardly amidst vintage pieces of brick, was "If I had visited the campus, I wouldn't have applied." Too bad, like it or not I'd have to stay here for another year. I dragged my luggage into Shapiro Campus Centre and collected my key from the Department of Community Living booth.
The director was there, and I asked about the arrangement of having some freshmen live away from freshman quads. To address a shortfall in revenue, the school admitted a lot of students into the Class of 2015, and the number of people attending was larger than the capacity of the freshman quads. A lot of people don't know this: as a result, DCL put a handful of students whose age was above the normal age into Village B1 and Ziv 128, based on the questionable premise that we might have liked to interact with students whose ages were closer to ours.
I don't blame DCL for this arrangement; I blame myself for not requesting a housing change from the outset, and not acting proactively to counteract its effects. Looking back, it's painfully obvious that there was no way this arrangement was not going to go wrong, but I was completely oblivious to what I was missing out on. Pause a moment and think-is it obvious to you where this is headed? For those who study outside the US system, I should spell it out. The issue is that I was isolated from the freshman community. This mattered especially during the critical first two weeks of school during which many people made many friends (entered stable cliques) whom they start out with as a base to hang out with, even if they move on later to friends who are closer in personality. The first two weeks was the only period in all of college when it wasn't weird to add anyone you meet on facebook and message to hang out in someone's room that very night, especially if you're in the same floor or building and/or are of the same race. Take all the midyear complaints about being socially isolated in the Village with Fall intake freshmen, and multiply by 100 because I don't have the community that midyears do. I'm friendly with and like many of my first year floormates, but because of small numbers, class year differences and the lack of a common orientation period (DCL interspersed freshmen with juniors/seniors), being in the Village was nowhere near being in North or Massell and building friendships there.
... understand what I speak and how I relate
September 2011-present: Coping with culture shock
But I can go even deeper. The underlying issue behind ending up being isolated in the Village is lack of cultural understanding. If I had spent time in the US, I would have understood from hearing stories from people older than me about the American model of college friend-making, and hence the importance of living among other freshmen in the initial weeks and months of college. To cite a New England example, "Almost all [Rutgers University students] believed that they would not benefit from higher education unless they also made new friends in college. And most of them did so very quickly... Within two months, the average dorm resident named almost one-third of the other sixty residents on her or his dorm floor as friends or as close friends." (p. 42, Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture, Michael Moffatt, 1989) Instead, I tried to make friends the way I have always used to based on my RJ experiences: by trying to make friends with the people I take physics classes with. For many RJ classes, class outings were a given for the first few weeks, and then whether they continue depends on how the first few turn out. However, when I suggested a class outing for my physics class, I was disappointed and very confused by the response, which was lukewarm at best. I lacked the understanding that in the American model, although exceptions exist, in the first year and on the average, floormates are considered a pool of potential friends to a larger extent than coursemates. (p. 32, Social Networking Phenomena in the First-Year Experience, Jay Corwin and Rosa Cintrόn, 2011) I wanted to make friends but I used the wrong methods because of the lack of cultural understanding. Better methods would have been to appeal my housing arrangement to DCL, and to find a friend and +1 onto his floor at the start of orientation. I would probably have intuitively practiced this if I had spent more time the US.
Cultural issues also affect me directly in other ways. It took forever for me to be understood by Americans. My most memorable example was the following exchange:
Me: How were your midterms?
Adam: What?
Me: Your midterms?
Adam: What?
Me: Oh, your midterms!
Converting to a rhotic accent was essential to being understood, and it took a long time to get it into my subconscious. Initially I had misgivings about it, since British English is non-rhotic (r-dropping) in general and an equally respectable style of English, so I felt that I was picked against: If British people can drop their r's and still be understood then why can't I? Recently a Brit spoke at a science seminar and I later heard feedback among American peers that he was boring and difficult to understand, so maybe fair enough.
These are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cultural acclimatisation issues. The whole idea behind cultural lack of understanding is that you don't know what you don't know. But somehow or other, there is this idea that I do, say and think about things differently from Americans, in a fundamental way that is usually makes it less conducive for friendship without communication and a great deal of effort from both sides, a luxury given the fast pace of life in Brandeis.
Part 2: Wednesday, 21 August
Evening on Sunday, 14 August 2011: Sendoff at Changi Airport
After experiencing a few sendoffs as the sending party when the girls flew overseas to study two years before, it was my turn to go. As I type this more than two years later, the scenes are still fresh in my mind. Partially because I have the pictures framed up on my wall, and because it was such an adrenaline-charged event. Anyway, among the guys, I was one of the earlier ones to fly. Although I really enjoyed my time in Singapore after the army, I figured that it would have been pointless to stay once the S'poreans started school and couldn't hang out as often any more. I wanted to fly with pleasant memories of a happening phase in my life.
I wished I had showed up earlier at the airport. The first thing I did was to check in my luggage, which I had to repack because it was a few kilograms overweight. For some reason I thought it would be a good thing to cart a ton of books over, although I never touched 90% of them since coming here. After I was done repacking, I had only an hour of mingling time, which I was planning on all along because I didn't want things to get draggy. But it turned out that an hour wasn't enough to concentrate on spending time with any one group without glancing at the watch and worrying about spending too little time with my other friends.
Friends from Chinese orchestra
5B friends
Signal buddies
With a bag of gifts in one hand and my red passport in the other, I waved to my friends, "All the best, thanks for coming!", walked through the door in the glass partition into the restricted area, and forever problematised the word friends.
Sendoff gifts I got
On the ANA flight, sitting beside Jon, I was reading the funny and poignant note from Grace, looking through the items in Jacq's care package and reading her note, and flipping through my signal friends' (Hong Ming, Han Liang, Lincoln, Yan Ming, Shi Xian, Clive) scrapbook, which was filled with colourful messages and photographs of key events in our friendship :') I think it's really rare and touching that a group of guys would put such a touching gift together!
Jon and I reached Tokyo for a four-day getaway, when I sang proper karaoke for the last time, and during which Esther also passed me a note and a souvenir. All along during the school year I have these notes in front of my desk in my room, and they have given me food for thought from time to time, especially Jacq's excerpt of Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken.
Notes in front of my desk
Although I was at the threshold of the greatest change in my life till then, I didn't feel anything at the airport, or on the first few days of the trip. It felt as though I was just on my way to Japan or Hong Kong on any other holiday. On the first day of my trip, I lugged my 41 kg suitcase from Narita Airport to our dorm in Ikebukuro, and the sheer weight of my suitcases was almost the only indicator that we're not merely people on holidays. After the trip, Jon and I parted to leave on different flights. From that point forward I was all alone to make friends anew.
Jon and I at Narita Airport, 18 August 2011
I must tell the story of how my Washington, DC-bound flight started. I had the window seat, a S'porean girl starting college in DC was in the middle seat, and her mum was on the aisle seat. Apparently I fell asleep and knocked into the girl's shoulder or something like that, so she switched seats with her mum for the rest of the flight, and her mum promptly nudged me awake and called me out on it. I spent the rest of the flight feeling awkward and lying head-down on the tray in front of my seat. (Studying overseas tip #47: Bring an air pillow.)
... do things together just because
Before August 2011: Distinguishing being friends and being friendly
Before I get started on telling about my life in the US, I'd like to discuss a bit about the friends I've had from before, because I know that my US friends reading this might have a different idea of friendships.
Japclass at Jon and my sendoff, 14 August 2011
I'll use Japclass as a case study. I made my Japclass friends when I studied Japanese in RJ (11th and 12th grade). Skip this paragraph if you're from RJ: We had 4 hours of instruction a week, initially split into 2 hours/2 hours with a break an hour into class, and later split into 2 hours/1 hour/1 hour. Our Japanese classes were interspersed among classes for other school subjects, such as Math, Physics and/or Chemistry. There were only 17 of us, so classes were held in a normal classroom on the windy 7th and top floor of our biggest classroom building. We stuck together in the same Japanese class throughout the two years we were in RJ.
I've always felt a bond with Japclass that transcended our formal status as mere classmates. Perhaps because of a strong core-half of Japclass was from 6R, which had very nice people and was very bonded to start with-Japclass naturally clicked into a group. Moreover, many of us knew each other from our days in RI (the feeder all-male secondary school for RJ, middle school equivalent, 7th to 10th grades). One major turning point was when we hosted Japanese students from Shibuya High School, Tokyo and Makuhari High School, Chiba in March 2008. We started really holding activities as a Japclass, such as dinner and karaoke, to entertain our guests.
Shibushibu/Shibumaku Hosting Programme, March 2008 (uploaded by Chiaki)
During and after the programme, we had a lot to talk about regarding the hosting experience. So we started going out more and more as a Japclass for New Year countdowns, karaoke sessions and meals, such as celebrating the end of CT2 after our Japanese exam with an outing to Cuppage Plaza along Orchard Road (the combination of Japanese food and the karaoke joint Cash Studio made Cuppage the favourite Japclass hangout for all time). Our friendship culminated in an 8-night trip to Japan in December 2008 which I had to miss due to army (long story) and a 5-night trip to Hong Kong in August 2011. Our karaoke sessions, meals and online conferences continue to the present, almost 5 years after our classes stopped.
From the start, Japclass has occasionally eaten together in the school canteen, but it doesn't count if it's in school. At some point, Japclass extended our interaction from within to outside the school, and that's when we transitioned from being friendly to being friends. We do things together not out of necessity, convenience or pursuit of some academic/work-related goal, but because we enjoy our time together, just because. This definition treats friends as cliques and "intimate communities", and if it makes it easier for you you can substitute either whenever I mention "friends".
... were 15 000 km away
September 2011-April 2012: Sociophysical isolation in the Village
I arrived in the US on 19 August. I stayed in a Washington DC hostel for 5 nights to get accustomed to the 12-hour time difference, set up my Citibank account and visit some of the Smithsonian museums. A Greyhound bus and the commuter rail brought me and my suitcases to the Brandeis campus on the 30°C afternoon of Friday, 26 August.
I disliked the Brandeis campus the moment I set my eyes on it. My first thought looking at the patchwork campus, with shiny new buildings situated and angled awkwardly amidst vintage pieces of brick, was "If I had visited the campus, I wouldn't have applied." Too bad, like it or not I'd have to stay here for another year. I dragged my luggage into Shapiro Campus Centre and collected my key from the Department of Community Living booth.
The director was there, and I asked about the arrangement of having some freshmen live away from freshman quads. To address a shortfall in revenue, the school admitted a lot of students into the Class of 2015, and the number of people attending was larger than the capacity of the freshman quads. A lot of people don't know this: as a result, DCL put a handful of students whose age was above the normal age into Village B1 and Ziv 128, based on the questionable premise that we might have liked to interact with students whose ages were closer to ours.
I don't blame DCL for this arrangement; I blame myself for not requesting a housing change from the outset, and not acting proactively to counteract its effects. Looking back, it's painfully obvious that there was no way this arrangement was not going to go wrong, but I was completely oblivious to what I was missing out on. Pause a moment and think-is it obvious to you where this is headed? For those who study outside the US system, I should spell it out. The issue is that I was isolated from the freshman community. This mattered especially during the critical first two weeks of school during which many people made many friends (entered stable cliques) whom they start out with as a base to hang out with, even if they move on later to friends who are closer in personality. The first two weeks was the only period in all of college when it wasn't weird to add anyone you meet on facebook and message to hang out in someone's room that very night, especially if you're in the same floor or building and/or are of the same race. Take all the midyear complaints about being socially isolated in the Village with Fall intake freshmen, and multiply by 100 because I don't have the community that midyears do. I'm friendly with and like many of my first year floormates, but because of small numbers, class year differences and the lack of a common orientation period (DCL interspersed freshmen with juniors/seniors), being in the Village was nowhere near being in North or Massell and building friendships there.
... understand what I speak and how I relate
September 2011-present: Coping with culture shock
But I can go even deeper. The underlying issue behind ending up being isolated in the Village is lack of cultural understanding. If I had spent time in the US, I would have understood from hearing stories from people older than me about the American model of college friend-making, and hence the importance of living among other freshmen in the initial weeks and months of college. To cite a New England example, "Almost all [Rutgers University students] believed that they would not benefit from higher education unless they also made new friends in college. And most of them did so very quickly... Within two months, the average dorm resident named almost one-third of the other sixty residents on her or his dorm floor as friends or as close friends." (p. 42, Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture, Michael Moffatt, 1989) Instead, I tried to make friends the way I have always used to based on my RJ experiences: by trying to make friends with the people I take physics classes with. For many RJ classes, class outings were a given for the first few weeks, and then whether they continue depends on how the first few turn out. However, when I suggested a class outing for my physics class, I was disappointed and very confused by the response, which was lukewarm at best. I lacked the understanding that in the American model, although exceptions exist, in the first year and on the average, floormates are considered a pool of potential friends to a larger extent than coursemates. (p. 32, Social Networking Phenomena in the First-Year Experience, Jay Corwin and Rosa Cintrόn, 2011) I wanted to make friends but I used the wrong methods because of the lack of cultural understanding. Better methods would have been to appeal my housing arrangement to DCL, and to find a friend and +1 onto his floor at the start of orientation. I would probably have intuitively practiced this if I had spent more time the US.
Cultural issues also affect me directly in other ways. It took forever for me to be understood by Americans. My most memorable example was the following exchange:
Me: How were your midterms?
Adam: What?
Me: Your midterms?
Adam: What?
Me: Oh, your midterms!
Converting to a rhotic accent was essential to being understood, and it took a long time to get it into my subconscious. Initially I had misgivings about it, since British English is non-rhotic (r-dropping) in general and an equally respectable style of English, so I felt that I was picked against: If British people can drop their r's and still be understood then why can't I? Recently a Brit spoke at a science seminar and I later heard feedback among American peers that he was boring and difficult to understand, so maybe fair enough.
These are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cultural acclimatisation issues. The whole idea behind cultural lack of understanding is that you don't know what you don't know. But somehow or other, there is this idea that I do, say and think about things differently from Americans, in a fundamental way that is usually makes it less conducive for friendship without communication and a great deal of effort from both sides, a luxury given the fast pace of life in Brandeis.
Part 2: Wednesday, 21 August