Chinese Profile #6: Cao XingXing

(the one on the left)

I have to dust off my memory a little bit to write this profile, as Cao XingXing (曹星星) was not in Changzhou, or China for that matter, during my second year there. She took her love of English to England (quite appropriately) and studied at Coventry University there, getting a Master's in Marketing/Business Management. But, that doesn't diminish in any way the incredibly important role that XingXing played in making sure that I didn't end up stranded on some street corner in the middle of the night unable to say more than hello in Chinese.

XingXing was undoubtedly my first (Chinese) friend in China. I met her one day during my second or third week at JSTU. She was sitting at the extra desk in Teddy’s office, a place I visited with great frequency during my first semester. At this point, I was barely able to take in all the stimuli that one’s first few weeks in China involve. XingXing was cute and seemed cheery, so, I saw no reason to make her my main source for all questions Chinese. It turned out to be a good thing. I spent a lot of time with her during my first fall, and she would introduce her classmates Qin Chen and Zhao Min, who have also been frequent characters in this blog. XingXing was an awesome friend for two main reasons: 1) she spoke English incredibly well and loved doing it and 2) she had (among Chinese people) an uncanny and generally unmatched ability for sarcasm. The former quality made her a great friend of all the English teachers; the latter was especially appealing to me and my partner in crime, Dave.

It was not an attempt at hyperbole that I called her ability to use and understand sarcasm uncanny. Chinese people don’t really get sarcasm. Female Chinese college students (at least those in Jiangsu) are incredibly genuine people. This means they often paid me delightful compliments. It also means they were almost always shocked, offended, and sometimes even dismayed at even my most lighthearted and innocuous jokes. Not XingXing, she would laugh and dish it right back. (The only other girl I found capable of this was ZhenZhen, my former girlfriend.) XingXing was also a source of constant entertainment. Like many other English enthusiasts, XingXing made every effort to improve her language by learning and incorporating phrases and idioms into her language. XingXing was very intelligent and a good language learner; she thus knew that the key to learning new words/phrases is to use them frequently. Unfortunately, there are only so many times that the phrase “silver lining” comes up. XingXing would not be deterred, and I still remember the fortnight or so when XingXing tried relentlessly to find the silver lining in ever situation we encountered.

XingXing was fortunate enough to have hard working parents that had saved for half their working lives so that their daughter could do more with her life than they had been able to do. She admirably left the comfort and familiarity of Chinese society and went to a foreign land where they don’t use 汉字 (oh the horror), don’t eat rice with every meal, don’t even use chopsticks, and, on top of all that, call the hood and truck of a car the bonnet and boot (double horror). It was awesome to talk to XingXing as she studied in Coventry, England and experienced what I had experienced/was experiencing in China. Although, as we shared notes, going from a rich/developed/clean country to a poor/developing/dirty country and doing the reverse are in many ways different experiences even though they are both cross-cultural. I missed not having her and David around during my second year, but luckily DTMS was still there, and some awesome Americans came to teach, as well as a really cute, brash transfer student to keep me company.