China from the Inside
Two students break their own paths into a complex country.
By Laura Demanski, AM'94 | Photos by James Wasserman
IF KRAMARCZUK WAS IN THE RUNNING FOR THE BEST TRAVELED EAST ASIAN CIV STUDENT, KARISSA WOIENSKI was uncontested as its most prolific chronicler. From August to December, her personal blog about the trip, Dreaming in Chinese, amassed more than 50 detailed updates. A Montana native with hopes to pursue a career in the Foreign Service, Woienski had her tuition partially funded by a Gilman Scholarship, which requires recipients to share their experiences abroad with other students when they return to campus; making a virtue of necessity, she created the blog to meet that requirement.
In addition to her updates on Dreaming in Chinese, Woienski contributed a blithe and bonny day-in-the-life essay to the Center in Beijing's website. A characteristic entry went like this:
12:30 p.m.: After lunch, I head to the bus stop, where I take a 355 bus. Beijing's bus system is insane—they have over 800 different routes, and one day I plan to ride them all, but not today. Instead, I head to the ice rink, housed in Jinyuan Shopping Mall, the world's second-largest mall.
Woienski, a double major in political science and East Asian languages, arrived in Beijing early in September with one year of Mandarin under her belt. It was barely enough; she found even basic communication challenging. In the early stages of her stay, she relied on a dictionary and dogged practice, keeping a handwritten diary in Chinese. "Everyone says immersion is the best way to learn a language," she thought. "Now that I'm here, it's kind of like, OK, I'm immersed, now what?"
When the program started in late September and she was assigned a Renmin University student as a language partner—in reality, more of a mentor or coach—she was relieved to feel less need to practice on random strangers. By late November, she was making puns and jokes in Chinese. "The best one," she says, "was when a classmate who doesn't speak Chinese was trying to buy something and I explained to the salesperson, 'He's very cheap and a lot of trouble.'"
Before classes began, Woienski made a point of locating an ice rink where she could keep up with her figure skating—and, it turned out, exercise her conversational Chinese with other skaters. "Even if we're not having lengthy conversations thanks to my limited Chinese," she says, "we're still friends—or kindred spirits, as Anne of Green Gables would say!" Looking more like Anne of Green Gables than anyone else on the ice earned her the studious attention of the tiniest skaters, whom Woienski sometimes noticed following her lead. "I did a sit spin. They did sit spins. I did a loop jump. They both did loops. I did a lutz. They both did lutzes," she wrote on her blog. "They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."
Woienski wanted to keep up her skating in China because she hopes to compete for the University when she gets back. She didn't foresee that the rink would be more than a practice site—it quickly became something special: a place where she was a regular. It was there she felt most woven into everyday life in Beijing: "Having the common ground of figure skating has been so great for getting to meet Beijingers." As a bonus, she got to meet representatives of Team USA at November's Cup of China competition, where the pairs medals were split between China (gold and silver) and the United States (bronze).
Like Kramarczuk, Woienski left China in December with a paradoxical sense that more familiarity brought less understanding. "I feel like I need some time away from the country to think about everything I experienced here," she says. "Every aspect of living here teaches me something."
