Humans of HUST: Sherry

I meet Sherry (Ma Shao Rong) in the morning on a hot, sunny day on the East side of campus. Sherry has chosen to meet at the East campus “playground,” which is what students here call the outdoor track and sports areas on campus. Sherry hasn’t chosen this part of campus on a whim; it’s her favorite part of HUST not only because it is ‘colorful’ but because it matches the ‘ideal campus’ that lives in her mind. I can understand this; it was difficult to dislike the ‘common’ green spaces on my own university campus where students and teachers alike gathered to relax and study. The playground feels much the same, but particularly in the evening and night when there are people playing instruments, circles of friends picnicking and chatting on the turf, and people exercising.

Sherry has a lot to say about ideals. I admire this about her. She is very confident in expressing her perspectives but also nods to the complexities of life. Of her life at HUST, she is both enthusiastic and critical, and this is partially due to her unique background. Sherry, unlike many students at HUST, is not from Hubei province. This in it of itself may not be revealing; however, the province where she is from, Ningxia, is a very small and less developed province in the northwest of China. She mentions the slower pace of life, which I’ve heard other students note, when talking about their home towns or provinces. More importantly, coming from this obscure province resulted in having an entirely different childhood than many of Sherry’s classmates who are from Hubei or other developed provinces. This is because, “We have much less competition for exams; (in my province) there are only 40,000 students taking the Gaokao college entrance exams, and there’s millions of students that take the examination in Hubei.” The Gaokao exam can truly be said to interrupt the childhood of millions of Chinese students as they buckle down and study harder than any University student for nearly all of their secondary education. And, it’s true that in a populated and education-saturated province like Hubei, the competition is absurdly fierce. Sherry truly lived an entirely different sort of childhood than most of her friends can imagine. She describes her first 20 years of life as “playing” or in other words, not having to submit to the gravitational pull of the Gaokao like so many young Chinese people must.

This carefree childhood has led to some ‘defects’ in Sherry’s eyes. She notes that most of her classmates from Hubei and similar provinces have an advantage over her due to their years of intense studying; “Now, I’m competing with students from all over China, and I feel they are well-trained; they have a good system of study, which I don’t have, so I have to work harder.” On the other hand, it doesn’t seem like Sherry would go back and change her younger years. “My roommate, who is from Sichuan province, she had a kind of hierarchy since primary school. They have different kinds of classes: ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ kids. The students get sorted each time after exams, so, if you have high exam scores, you enter with the smarter kids.” That Sherry didn’t have to experience this type of educational hierarchy as a kid may have done more good than she can imagine.

Sherry’s different perspective has led to other challenges and rewards in her college years so far. Sherry is a sophomore and doubles-majors International Business and English. When I ask her about adapting to university life, she immediately delves into the challenges of living in communal spaces. I nod as she talks, remembering living in as a freshman in a dorm, but then again, I can’t really understand. In China, it is fairly customary for undergraduate students to live 4 to a room. I haven’t personally been inside a room but I know they aren’t big. Again, she remarks on the advantage that her roommates and other classmates have over here in this regard; “When I live with 3 girls, sometimes I feel very uncomfortable because I have no privacy, and everything I do, they know. I don’t think that they have this kind of problem because they lived in dorms since primary school and they are very adapted to it.” She also mentions peer pressure and while I am initially expecting her to talk about alcohol and dating, I am surprised when I realize how wrong I was. She tells me: “It was my first time to see students from other parts of China and it’s my first time to feel peer pressure. Actually, I’m from the best high school in my city, the students who studied there are very extraordinary too, but when I came here, I found that the world I see is very small.... My roommates are from very competitive areas, and they have developed a defect in their personality. For example if I read (study), they can’t sleep, because they are stressed because I am studying...that makes me really stressed too...I’m afraid to do anything in the dorm; someone is always watching me and they are uncomfortable. So, I go out to the classroom and study.”

Other challenges to life at HUST include the weather, which is truly ‘different every day,’ and can lead to persistent year-round colds for students and teachers alike, and the fact that schools feels more challenging than she expected. In fact, when Sherry and I first meet this morning, she tells me that instead of enjoying the holiday (it is Labour Day break), she is doing homework. Despite these challenges, Sherry seems to be making the most of her experience thus far. Sherry notes that she chose her difficult double major a bit blindly, like many 17 year old humans are likely to do. Despite this, she enjoys her choices. She tells me that “I’m suitable for business because I think I’m a person that is willing to communicate with others and I think I sort of have leadership qualities, and for the English part, I love Hollywood movies since high school so English is a language that I really want to explore.” As noted in a previous interview, double majors have class quite literally all day, bracketed by early morning and late night ‘self study.’ Sherry exercises, along with most other students, in the evening around 9 or 10 pm, which is when I’m already deep in my REM cycle.

What I’m really impressed about is the extra stuff that Sherry does at HUST despite having such a busy academic life. :On weekends, it is the busiest, because I have all kinds of activities, like debating, and I go to the gym where I have a private gym coach, and I have a PE class in the weekends, and it’s very different because it’s climbing like a ropes course, it’s very challenging. I’m trying my best to experience different things and challenging things because I know if I graduate, there’s really no chance to do these things.” How true. How many of us look back and remember how we could have done A or B during college for free? Besides the debate and climbing, Sherry also squeezes her time for participation in singing contests, noting that it is an amazing experience to stand on a stage and sing. Her success in this has led to her becoming a judge for the competition at HUST. It seems like these opportunities have also come with a social reward. She tells me, “I’ve met a lot of great people who can help you and you can work together to concentrate on one thing.”

I’m always curious why students ended up at HUST, especially if they come from far away. It would be like meeting an Alaskan at the University of Kansas. Besides the fact that HUST was the best university that her grades could match, Sherry also describes it as “suitable” because, as she puts it, “ it may give me something that I didn’t have, like perseverance and patience, because I already have communication and soft skills. Students here might concentrate more on academic work, in WUDA (a nearby liberal arts university), life is maybe more colorful and students may concentrate on improving their soft skills. I think to sit down and focus on something quiet is less in my personality.” Because HUST is all I know of China and certainly my only deep understanding of a Chinese university, this is a reminder that I am living in a highly academic environment that is nearly monastic in its studiousness. You get the feeling that there are two acceptable states of being here: studying and on your way to study.

What I get talking to Sherry is an idea of the complex person she is. For the rest of our interview, I get to learn a little more about the woman behind the smarts. Of course, I’m curious about her name, as I am about all ‘English names’ that I run across. Sherry’s full name is Ma Shao Rong- ‘Ma’ is her surname, ‘Shao’ her mother’s surname, and ‘Rong’ her given name, which is a type of flower. Sherry chose her English name due to a similar pronunciation between it and “Shao Rong,” although it doesn’t hurt that “Sherry” is also a really smart and cool character in a Japanese cartoon (‘Detective Kunan’.) Speaking of media, Sherry is passionate about all things movies, and particularly Hollywood. Her favorite type of film are about superheroes; she loves anything ‘Marvel’. I know just about as much about Marvel movies as I know about subatomic particles, but I knew enough to proudly ask Sherry if she had seen the new Avengers film. She told me that since it opened on April 24^th, she had seen it 3 times (it was currently the 2^nd of May). Sherry also really enjoys singing and badminton, which is quite popular in China.

Sherry has gone to a few movies:

Whenever I ask my students what they want to do in the future, I try to leave a lot of space for hesitation and uncertainty, since why should a 20 year old know everything about their future, after all? Sherry, however, responded confidently: she wants to go abroad to get her Masters in Business Analytics and focus on big data. Although my brother works in this field, I am always appreciative of a reminder of wtf it is. She explains that it is, “ a data science to analyze data to make decisions. This major is actually very popular in these days because big data plays an important role in today’s business world.” I think we can learn a lot about a person from how they speak; for instance, you only have to ask me a simple question to delight in the human ability to word vomit. On the other hand, Sherry not only gives me the self-entitled ‘realistic part of her future goal,’ but also the ‘unrealistic part,’ which is that “I want to be in film...but I know this is probably just a dream, because in China there’s not many opportunities to do something related to films; in America, it can also be hard for girls and foreigners.” While this is undeniably true, I somehow very much doubt that someone confident and capable like Sherry will struggle to follow what she loves.

I love interviewing my students. Sherry is one of my new students that I’ve only had for several months, and I only see each group of students once a week. Without doing something like this, I would never have gotten the opportunity to learn about her. I especially enjoy asking questions about students’ inner lives, such as wondering what they love about themselves. Sherry tells me that she loves her confidence; she is the kind of person who doesn’t need validation and realized that although she may not start out as an expert, she will surely be able to do something well after practice. She also rightly mentions her breadth of interests and that she can see beyond the walls of her academics, which are qualities that many of her classmates may lack. Oddly, as a teacher, I love this perspective. I think it can be pretty harmful to see studying as the most important thing. As Sherry puts it, “There are many more interesting things to do than study.” Yet another perspective that makes Sherry unique is her take on ‘individualism.’ As she puts it, “I don’t know why this happened but I think I’ve developed individualism in my personality and you know, Chinese people always value collectivism, and sometimes this make its hard for me to communicate with people or get along with others.” Indeed, I can see that this would be a challenging point of view to integrate into life in China. Sherry mentions that she experiences this even with her parents; although she wants them to have their own lives and experiences and interest, she finds that she is “everything for them.” And, due to her centrality to their lives, she sometimes feels frustrated that her decisions are not truly her own. She describes it as this: “Yeah, I think sometimes I’m not viewed as an individual person, but an affiliate to them, to the family.”

Unsurprisingly, Sherry also struggles with the assumption of collectivism that is even felt among her peers, many of whom go around together always in small groups. Sherry laughs talking about this, “I do go to movies with my friends sometimes but other times if I’m upset, I want to go to movies by myself, because it’s a kind of outlet for myself, when I tell them that I did this, they say “you went to a movie alone!” like it’s a very weird thing or you have to go to a movie with someone else.” She reflects on this tendency of hers, “maybe this kind of personality developed in high school when we have a group of friends who do everything together, and maybe when we enter in college, maybe more and more students will develop more individualism ideology.” Of course, there are aspects of Chinese culture that Sherry deeply identifies with. She is particularly touched by the relationship between parents and children: “I think Chinese parents are very different than American because once they have children, they will devote all their passion, all their things, to their child. It’s great to know that there’s someone in the world who views you as their most precious thing in the world.”

Talking to individuals in any culture is a reminder of the limitations of cultural stereotypes. Sherry exudes her own individual soul through the way she speaks and how she expresses herself. One of my last questions is about something she would tell the readers of this interview. She says, “Firstly, Chinese people are not all rich, I think most Americans think Chinese are rich. Secondly, Chinese people are not all quiet.” And, this last point of hers might be self-evident from simply noting the length of this interview:) Thanks Sherry!