Rooomieeees

So what is the first thing you think of when you think about Asian people in the United States. For me, I thought of that super-genius kid, who always did the homework on time and got 100’s on the exams. This is not really the case with the IES Chinese Roomies. They stay in the rooms pretty much all day playing computer games, the boys particularly like World of Warcraft. Although they have classes (DEFINITELY not as many as we do, by the way) they skip them fairly often and hardly ever study for them. They even are in awe of how much us Americans study. ME! Study too much?!!? What?!?!

I think there are a couple reasons for this disparity. First of all there is the problem in China of Xiao Huangdi (sheeyow hwahng dee=little emperors, aka spoiled brats). Because of China’s one child policy, many families have only one child. When families are particularly wealthy, this situation, in turn, leads to an exceedingly spoiled child. Essentially, all of the IES Chinese roomies are Xiao Huang Di, whose parents bought their way into BeiWai. In addition to wasting their parents’ money by just sitting around their dorm room playing video games and watching TV, they go out shopping all the time and by stupid shit that they don’t even need. In terms of wealth, I would say that the roomies are probably about as wealthy as I am in China—despite the falling value of the USD, this makes them pretty wealthy.

This leads me to my next reason why there’s a disparity between the Chinese people that I see in America and the IES Chinese Roomies. In America, we only see the Chinese people who had to work extra hard in order to come to America to either study or work and their offspring. Perhaps this work ethic is somewhat genetic, or at the very least encouraged by the overseas Chinese in America, which is why all of the ones you see seem “nuli.” I can tell my English is going dowwwwwwn hill, I’m sorry if any of this is incoherent, thinking in Chinese all day can take a toll.

That said, however, my roomie is very nice. Serena (Zhang LingXue) always offers me food and is very nice and polite and quiet. I don’t know what else to say….

So loyal fans, would you like the more frequent “this is what I did today” type entries, or the less frequent, more thought out(ish) ones? Let me know, I aim to please.

Zhu an!