Learning Experience 3: Chinese Movie Night

I think that it is extremely important to allow yourself to go outside your comfort zone because I believe that the more you are outside of what your used to, the more you learn about yourself and realize how big the world is. This is a broad and generalizing statement but here’s a specific example of a time that I allowed myself to go outside of my comfort zone and not only enjoyed the experience but also learned something from it.

Last week, as part of our required curriculum, I attended Chinese Movie Night. There we met up with the native Chinese students here at Texas Christian University, ate a Chinese food dinner (which was actually delicious), and then watched a movie. The movie at first I wasn’t sure about because it was all in Chinese with English subtitles. However, as it progressed I became extremely interested. The movie was set during the stage in Chinese history directly after they had transformed into a democracy. I thought it was very odd because, in the documentary, when the teacher asked her students if any of them knew what democracy meant none of them had any idea. The idea was entirely foreign to them. The plot line of the movie followed a class of Chinese students as they, for the first time, held class elections for student monitor (a position which had previously always been selected by the teacher, much like how the Chinese government operated prior to the transition).  It was very interesting to see the various tactics employed by each student competing to win over the votes by their classmates and how seriously they took it. In fact, it was not just the students who took it extremely seriously, but even more so their parents. Their parents’ involvement with their lives seemed to be at almost an absurd extent. To me, this was very interesting because I could clearly see the impact that the one-child policy had on the parent-child relationships. Also, there were other things that stuck out to me, for example, there was one mom who was divorced and the child’s father was not there. The mom seemed to blame much of the child’s problems on the fact that he does not have a mom and a dad like “all the other children”. Here in America it is a lot different because divorce is relatively common, whereas in China, it is seem as dishonorable and divorce is much less common.

I found that this video opened my eyes to the many cultural differences that we don’t even realize exist. It was also interesting to me after learning a little about Chinese history and culture; things like the one-child policy that have a big impact on the way people there live. I hope to keep allowing myself to experience new things and learn more about people, cultures, and belief systems that are different from my own. In this way, through learning about others, I think we can subsequently learn much about ourselves.