At the start of this semester, Connecticut College junior Rosendo Sainz embarked on an exciting academic venture: to study abroad in China. I was able to sit down with him at Blue Camel on Feb. 13 to discuss his brief, but memorable experience in the far East. As you might have guessed, things didn’t go as planned…
Tell me about what led you to wanting to study abroad in China. I’m a Chinese minor. I went to China with a singular goal of learning Chinese. I’ve liked languages since I was a kid. I got stuck learning French for a few years but after that, I decided I needed to try something new and difficult to challenge myself, and what’s more difficult than Chinese? The answer is nothing. Nothing. I applied to two programs and got into both, but I chose the one I ended up doing in large part because it had a much better independent research project I could do. My choice was to study Beijing tattoo culture. I think it’s really interesting ‘cause all these Americans are getting tattoos of Chinese characters that they don’t even understand, whereas in Beijing there’s this huge generational gap where older people think of tattoos as not classy and younger people think of it as cool, bold, and in fashion. Even there, some people get English tattoos and they don’t understand what it means, which is mad funny.
What were you most excited about? I was excited to learn Chinese, to really be able to communicate. I also love Chinese food. The three weeks I was there, not once did I miss American food.
How was the trip over there? It was a thirteen-hour flight. Chinese airlines — fun fact — they gave me two full meals and a sandwich with little snacks. They give you mad amenities. And the drink cart came by like six times. They were always giving things out. I had a window seat so I just didn’t sleep. It was fine. Definitely got swindled by the taxi cab from the airport. It cost fifty bucks instead of like twenty but it was fine.
So how were the first couple of days? It was a difficult program. It was an intensive language [program]. I had a massive vocab list. I was only allowed to speak Chinese. I was studying probably eight hours a day and had about four hours of class. Twelve hours of my day was devoted to learning Chinese and the rest was about learning to live and interact in China.
So take me through when things started to go south. The Saturday before I left, I had a week off because they do a week-long New Years in China. I was hanging out with friends, watching a movie. We were about to go to bed and this girl in my program comes up and is super freaked out and tells us that this other guy Ben, whose mom works for Yale China, is having all of the Yale students leave China. They’re all getting their tickets back. And we’re like “wait what?”. So we all went to Ben’s room and we’re panicking, and we all have to call up our emergency contacts. I had to make six calls to get my mom to wake up cause it was like 6AM California time. We were also trying to get a hold of professors by calling them up, and we get one on the phone and they say that they talked to the US branch and Monday morning they’re gonna advise us on what to do, whether to end the program or not. That’s how it all began one Saturday night. Literally wasn’t even on our minds. We saw the news about Coronavirus and were like, “Oh it’s chill.” Like, “Oh that’s in Wuhan. That’s not very close and there’s only like a couple hundred cases.” But I talked to a guy and he kept seeing things on Twitter and was like, “Oh it looks like the government’s underreporting things.” Sunday was pretty relaxed but Monday morning things got weird. The campus got shut down. News was only getting worse. I tried to go to the store to buy some ice tea and a guard goes “No you can’t leave.” It went from talking to one guard to three of these men with a thick Beijing accent I couldn’t understand at all cause they spoke mad quickly to me. Then a dean came up to us and explained that we needed special permission to leave this campus because they won’t let you back in without special permission. It wasn’t quarantine, but it was high security.
So when did you leave? So after a day of being pseudo-quarantined on this campus, we finally get an email telling us the program’s canceled. I booked a ticket using emergency services for abroad students. And then the next day, me and three other people drove to the airport, got on our planes and got out of there.
So when did you make arrangements to come back to Conn? I was in contact with them while I was abroad, but I didn’t make a choice that I would officially come back until I got home. I wasn’t really in a good place to be making decisions before that. I was more focused on evacuating. All international students were advised to return to their home countries. To leave China.
Things seem like they have been pretty good since you got back. You had your first N2O improv show of the semester last weekend and the rugby season’s about to start up. Do you think you might try to study abroad again? There is a possibility. The Chinese government has a lot of scholarships for students who want to get degrees in China. There’s options for me if I want to go back but who knows. I was told I could go back in the fall but I don’t know how it will work with Coronavirus. I looked today and there were 60,000 cases versus when I left it was 2,000 two weeks ago. •
