Hangzhou and a Really Weird Start to the New Year

I started my fall program (Associated Colleges in China) this week, so before I get into the swing of things I want to wrap up summarizing the travels I made after HBA ended.

Initially, I wasn't sure where in China I wanted to go besides Shanghai. I considered going to Xi'an, but decided somewhere closer to Shanghai would work better. A fuwuyuan at one of my hostels recommended I check out Hangzhou, and I'm very glad I listened to her advice. The people in Hangzhou were very friendly, and the lifestyle there is very slow and relaxed, which was just what I needed before starting another semester of intensive language study.


Hangzhou is best known for the West Lake. Actually, that's the only thing it's known for. I asked people what else there was to do in the city other than visit the lake and no one had any suggestions. But I'm not complaining; it was very beautiful and I made some nice friends at my hostel, including a clerk at my hostel, a graduate student from Albany, and a film student from Denmark.

I came back to Beijing with a week to kill before ACC started. With that much time on my hands, I did some heavy-duty reviewing for my placement exam. Then I moved into my absolutely beautiful, brand new room, which was actually going to be a four-star hotel before the Chinese government altered the University's building permit or something along those lines. So I'm living in a great dorm, complete with free wireless internet and free laundry (24/7! plus there are machines on every floor!). My roommate is a junior at Bowdoin, really cool, and he and I have hit it off pretty well. I'm super excited for this semester.

We took our placement exams yesterday, and I naturally expected to place into Third Year Chinese, given that I just completed Level Two this summer. Since HBA is such a strong language program, students that enroll at ACC after doing HBA in the summer sometimes skip a year. So I thought maybe, just maybe, I might be placed into Fourth Year.

So when we looked up the results of our exams today, I first checked to see if I had made it into Fourth Year. I looked and looked but couldn't find my name. Okay, I thought, I guess it's Third Year for me. That's even better, I thought, Fourth Year would have probably been too hard anyway. But when I looked at the list for third years, I wasn't there either. Oh no.... was my Chinese so bad that they were making me repeat Second Year? The shame! Again, I looked but couldn't find my name.

Then I saw my name... the very last name on the list. Fifth Year.

Fifth Year.

There were only three students in Fifth Year. That means my exam results were in the top three out of everyone at ACC.... what the heck?! Another Fifth Year student was nearby, so I asked him how long he had been studying Chinese. He said five years.

I've only been studying Chinese for one year. One year ago, I did not even speak one single word of Chinese. And now I placed into the highest level at ACC?!

I should say that I think my results were very skewed because I had reviewed so much before the test. I was able to jam-pack my essay with idioms and advanced grammar points that I knew at the time, but could not easily recall in conversation. Actually, there are some heritage speakers here at ACC, with beautiful accents, and not even they placed into Fifth Year. I met one girl who spoke so well that I thought she was a teacher, and not even she is in Fifth Year. My Chinese might be good, but it isn't good enough to skip two years of crucial vocabulary and grammer. At HBA, the Fifth Year students were all Chinese-American and had been speaking Chinese since they were born. I wasn't even the best Second Year student at HBA - I never won a single one of the reading or translation contests that we had every week, I wasn't chosen as one of the HBA representatives at the speech competition at the end of the summer, I wasn't chosen to give the Second Year speech at our closing ceremony.

So I talked to the head teacher and switched into Fourth Year. Classes begin on Monday.

But, since there were only three students who placed into Fifth Year, all the teachers knew who we were. So when I introduced myself to some teachers at our meet-and-greet this afternoon, they all said, "Oh! You're the Fifth Year!" I explained that I didn't belong in that high of a level, but they insisted my Chinese was very good in any case, and even asked me if I was part Chinese. I asked them, Do I look part Chinese? And they said I could pass for part Chinese. I asked them to guess what I am, and they said French, Italian, or INDIAN. My Chinese family and two people at my last hostel also guessed that my family was from India. I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone.

Indian?