I am no stranger to international travel, especially to China. Prior to high school, my family used to take the 9-12 flight back to my parents’ native country to visit grandparents and other relatives nearly every year. So when I learned of the Brown PLME’s summer programs in China and Taiwan in late September of last year, I basically discovered my plans for this summer. I set out on the night of June 4 halfway across the world not just to learn about Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), but also to get in touch with my ethnic heritage and become more familiar with a culture and language that I feel I should have expended more effort to understand when I was younger.
Hangzhou, China, constituted the first leg of the trip. The four week stay in an unfamiliar foreign city really put my Chinese to the grind. I used to be shy about speaking Chinese, to the point that at times I would ask my mother to translate my English in social situations. Since two months ago, that timidness has largely disappeared; my Chinese has become more fluid and confident, although it is still very far from ideal. The course material at the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University was lax and basic, and served well as a general introduction to Chinese medicine and some Chinese medical history. It was an interesting insight into traditional Chinese culture as well, although its lasting impact is far outshadowed by my experience of merely being in the city of Hangzhou itself.
For the latter half of July, I traveled for the first time to Taiwan. This program, in a departure from the one prior, was more about exploration than familiarization of culture to me, as Taiwan’s culture could in many ways said to be polar opposites to that of China. To that end, certainly much exploration was done. I traveled to the northern, southern, and central parts of Taiwan, to the various night markets, the malls, the memorials, etc. There was so much exploration that I was thoroughly exhausted a week in. The course itself was a surprise, and generally not a great one either. The program’s title suggests seminars revolving around TCM much like its counterpart in China, but lecture topics involved mostly archaic subjects like microscopy and FDA regulatory practices. As a result, I got much less out of the seminars than I had expected.
For those students seeking to explore a new or unfamiliar culture/country, programs like these will more than satiate that desire. The course in China did a better job at integrating the course material to corroborate that cultural exploration than did the Taiwanese course, but both are worthy experiences in their own right.
（海云注：这是我儿子为他的大学写的暑期作业，等我有空翻译出来，作为我写他这个暑假中国和台湾见习系列文章的结尾。）
| Amoy (2014-08-14 01:45:02) |
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这样的经历真心好，我也盼着儿子有机会做交换生的那一天 |
| 春山如笑 (2014-08-15 03:45:11) |
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Hi Kevin, thank you for sharing with us your wonderful experiences both in China and Taiwan. Best wishes for your coming new term at Brown. |