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给，还没有毕业的你们：(My College Experience in the US)
THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN 2.5 years ago, 2 weeks after I relocated to New York from New Haven, originally posted on CUUS (Chinese Undergraduates at United States). I decided to re-post this as I have been bombed by a series of questions on job hunting and life philosophies especially from Chinese students recently; and I realized a lot of examples and thoughts I laid out in this article are still very much applicable to people still at college or just gradated.
I know it’s a long one, and it’s in Chinese, but this is among one of the most precious, profound, informative, yet personal articles I have ever written in my life. So enjoy.
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(首发于CUUS & deniseyezi 个人博客, 转载请注明作者出处)
看了茶茶最近的帖子，有很多感触和启发，也有些许的惭愧。CUUS曾经是我大学生活中的重头戏，在这里应该记载了我的很多快乐，感伤，幸福，以及迷茫。然而我还没有来得及庆祝我的成长，或者还没来得及再宣告原来我依然是一个什么都不懂得孩子，一转眼，就毕业了。
毕业后来到纽约已经近两周了，仿佛这辈子也没有连续两周可以这样清闲而懒散。没有什么需要马上plan,没有什么deadline, 这样的梦幻般的生活却仿佛一下子不习惯。纽约已经燥热了3天，今天晚上一场大雨过后，终于凉快下来。这样的夜，我想，正适合写字。
仅希望——这些我毕业后才终于懂了的事情，你们毕业前就了解吧。
其实我只是想回答一个很简单的问题：在美国的大学四年，我们到底应该做些什么？或者那些看似平常的小事，我们应该怎么做？
以下的一些个人想法和经历，主要是讲几个故事，仅供参考。
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关于人生观价值观—要感恩要控制
最近我遇到一位长得一表人才，家庭条件非常好的移民，IVY league的PhD +MBA, 据他本人说是开过法拉利，乘过私人飞机，交过super model做女朋友。可是认识没几天他突然抱怨，我觉得生活没有意义了，我不知道我到底想做什么，没有什么事情让我感到excited,我觉得我没有任何朋友。。。等等。我就傻了。当然我尽力安慰他，可是我在心里说：你不知道比多少多少人幸运呢！我想不明白他为什么没有感恩的心情，为什么不能对已有的知足。
我羡慕那些时光流逝却未能改变他们的人
Another periodic Chinese blog of mine, in response to a movie based on my very generation, emotionally deep; excuse me if you don’t read Chinese.
——前两天终于看了80后那部电影。不能说每个情节都感同身受，可是很多细节上了东西却仿佛无缘无故的牵扯了我多年没有调动了的敏感神经。这是一部融入了太多感情在里面的片子，让我流泪，在回忆中不知所措，然后一发不可收拾。
记得中学的时候读安妮宝贝，看新概念作文，谈论郭敬明。现在想来真的很奇怪，那些根本从来没有在我身上发生过的事情，为什么只是读过就在自己的身体和精神上刻了那么深的烙印。慢慢学会“一半明媚一半忧伤”或者什么“快乐而孤独的等待”还有“爱情仿佛在她心里开出一朵诡异的花”还有那些一切有关长发，阳光，白球鞋的东西。乐此不疲。
我们本来都是快乐而简单的小孩子吧。为什么后来我们的文字里有那么多忧伤？
Read more…
On “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior”, and what is wrong about it
Aside from the release of Verizon iPhone 4 and another round of big snow in New York, there is something else that has flooded the internet these days: Ms. Amy Chua’s Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior article on WSJ.
I have to say I like this article. I admire Amy’s honesty and audacity to even talk about things in such controversy that many Chinese are familiar with but may be totally unimaginable to other cultures. I am intrigued and impressed by her witty (at times funny) language and detailed examples, and I mean who would not be?! Especially when you read such a tagline – Can a regimen of no playdates, no TV, no computer games and hours of music practice create happy kids? And what happens when they fight back?
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However, as much as I have personally lived through many experiences Amy has explicitly described in her article, and as much as I can only nod through her 3 points that by large have differentiated Chinese parents from other parents, I have sadly come to an conclusion that there are at least two fundamental flaws in the very foundation of her arguments:
1) Happiness and success do not necessarily correlate to each other, especially when you define success in such a narrow way.
2) Ending your parenting story when your kids are 15-ish is probably quite pre-mature. What may have worked for a 7-year old does not mean it will work the same for a late teen.
Top 8 Things I learned in 2010 (Part II)
5. The easiest thing in the world is to say good things about other people.
Without even seriously meaning it. But it’s so easy, and you see the results. It doesn’t cost you anything, but it makes everybody happy. It really should be something natural to you, because everyone else is doing it too.
But you must be stupid if you don’t know WHY other people are doing it, especially if you are the “target” of the praise. Some people might seriously mean it, and I have every respect for those being honest and genuine with their compliments, but even if you are 10 times better than the compliments, why should they? Because you are a boss? You are a girlfriend? You are his date in this dance club? You are a customer browsing shoes? You are a competition?
And then I realized why we complain to each other
Probably the first rule you should know before going on a blind date is: Do not complain. Even though you’re in pain, you have a lot of things going on, you just got yourself into some new trouble…do not complain. Because nobody wants to be with someone who constantly nag about their own problems and frustration which have (in most cases) absolutely nothing to do with you, and you definitely do not want to leave that impression the first time you meet someone.
What about close friends? I remember this line from my childhood: if you share your happiness with your friends, it doubles; if you share your sadness with your friends, it reduces half. Oh how powerful. But in real life more than often people, especially close friends, and especially girlfriends, complain to each other all the time. Is it really because “if I don’t turn to you about this I have nobody else to talk about it?”
Maybe that’s true in some cases. But if you do that too often it may becomes a burden to your friends. Yes they care about you, but it doesn’t mean you can take advantage of their kindness or time. To think about it in this way, if you were your friends, would you be willing to listen to your own nagging for a few hours, and every other weekend? If your answer is yes, then either you are very enduring and patient, or you are narcissistic. At least I used to think so.
But during my trip to Asia a few weeks ago I realized something new about the nature of complain that I never thought about before. I was grabbing drinks with 2 girlfriends and one of them was telling us about her charming, capable, rich boyfriend for almost the entire evening, especially about how good he is to her. I was amused actually and enjoyed very much their stories. Then toward the end of the night the other girlfriend walked me back to my hotel and said on the way:
Twenty Thousand Days
I dreamed about my parents last night.
A close girlfriend used to work at Mckinsey Hong Kong, and she told me a while back that she was looking for another job, something more stable, more sustainable. I asked why don’t you just come back to the US?
She said, because it’s close to home. My parents are not young anymore, I want to get to visit them at least a few times every year. It may sound surprising, but we only have about twenty thousand days to live in our lives.
20,000 days, only?
The “Battle”: How Should China Face Western Criticism?
It is interesting to trace how Americans talked about China in the past few years. They were talking about human rights, then intellectual property rights, then environmental problems, then Tibet. And at the same time, they are amazed by what is happening in Beijing and Shanghai, and they couldn’t stop talking about those shopping malls, clubs, Sichuan food, and oriental culture. Hosting the Olympics Game and World Expo doesn’t make you the most developed country in the world, and China obviously is not there yet. But it does attract tons of eyeballs. It attracts praises as well as criticism.
Every country has its own problems and issues. Sometimes I feel one has no right to comment on other country’s problem if first of all, you actually have exactly the same problem, and second of all, you have no idea what is really going on on the other side of the world. I read “Snow“ a while back, the Nobel Prize winning book by Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. I am not a big fan of the political part of the novel, but there is this one quotation that really caught my eyes: “If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I’d like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away.”
It is a brilliant quotation. And I couldn’t stop but thinking, it is very true that we can’t understand someone from so far away, but do we really understand ourselves and each other, even when we’re actually so close?
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