For some Wilmette Junior High School students in China this summer, the highlight was the bright golden lights of nighttime Shanghai and the majesty of the Great Wall. For others, it was the chance to cook dumplings with a Beijing family, or to do Tai Chi with senior citizens in a Changsha park.
But many who traveled with Mandarin language teacher Yiyi Xu said their four-city journey was a revelation, one that validated that the Mandarin Chinese language skills they’d worked on could let them connect to people from halfway around the world.
“We were not just sightseeing,” 13-year-old Julia Nagel said after the trip. “We went to a high school and talked with students, we went to someone’s house and had dinner with them … this was so much more than a trip to Chinatown.”
Julia and five other students, who got together after one of their first days back at school to talk about the trip, returned to Wilmette with memories and a renewed determination on the part of most to continue their studies. That pleased Xu, who has taught most of the students since Mandarin was introduced three years ago as a fifth-grade subject.
Xu said she had long wanted to organize a trip to her native country, to take her students beyond classroom language and culture lessons and trips to Chicago’s Chinatown.
“I’ve taught them for all this time, and I wanted to see, could they function in China? I wanted to give them that opportunity, to learn more about the culture by meeting people,” Xu said.
She said it took almost a year to organize the trip, getting paperwork and setting up visits that Xu felt went beyond typical tourist fare.
The group – nine eighth-grade students, five-seventh graders, Xu, a Madison, Wisc., colleague of Xu’s and 13 parents – left Chicago June 17 and began their visit in Beijing with trips to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.
Before their June 30 return, the group spent five days in the Chinese capital, then began a three-city exploration that took them southward; first by bullet train to the city of Xi’an, thence to the city of Changsha in Hunan province and finally to the 27-million-strong city of Shanghai.
Along the way were treks to sites including the Great Wall and Xi’an’s famous Terracotta Warriors, as well as Shanghai’s Pearl Tower and financial center.
But Xu also arranged visits that she hoped would encourage her students to interact with Chinese citizens, in schools, calligraphy classes and even a trip to the filming of a Chinese television show, where they were part of the audience.
The trip challenged not only their burgeoning Mandarin skills, but their view of China.
“I didn’t really expect that nobody would be able to speak English around us,” said Ben Akason, 13.
Ryan Ball, 14, said he was surprised “at how un-Westernized” the trip locations were.
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Students also learned first-hand how dynamic the language they were learning could be in real life.
“Every city we traveled to, the people spoke Mandarin a little differently,” 13-year-old Jenna Dike remembered. “I didn’t expect that. It was easiest to understand in Shanghai and Beijing, and hardest in Changsha, where they have their own accent.”
Karen Miller, a Mandarin speaker who accompanied daughter Katie on the trip, said she was impressed with how willing the students were to exercise their language skills.
“I definitely saw them using it to haggle when they were buying knick-knacks at the Great Wall, and I thought that was great,” Miller said. “They would speak Chinese with the tour guides and I think they felt they were on top of the world because they were able to understand.”
Beth Fulkerson, whose 13-year-old son Simon Kellman was on his second trip to China (the family had visited Shanghai the previous year), said she thought one of the strengths of the trip “was that it wasn’t so much about the language, but about getting a grasp of how humongous a country China is, of how many people are there.”
Xu said she was impressed and proud of her students
“When locals approached them, they were not afraid to try to talk and make themselves understood,” she said.
Xu hopes to build on this summer’s visit by developing a relationship with a sister school in China and arranging reciprocal visits between student groups. For now, she is happy with how much her students gained from this inaugural trip.
“Simon’s mom sent me an email after we were back, and she said that Simon told her, ‘When I go to college, I’m going to find an internship in Shanghai.'” Xu said. “Receiving that email, that makes the whole trip worth it.”
Twitter: @pioneer_kathy