Living in a Chinese family

Monday, 21. May, 2001-07-31

Our group is waiting full of tension in the reception room of Middle School No. 5 in Beijing. In a couple of minutes we will for the first time meet our exchange partners. So far we have had a slightly adventurous flight; the ride on the school bus through the busy streets of Beijing was also quite nerve-racking. There are still speeches being held, but then, finally, we can hear: "…Zhang Rui - Johannes Faust, Xue Hui - Caroline Wiese…". Now everything happens very fast. Our exchange partners take our hands and call taxis. We are heading home - somewhere in the big city of Beijing.

Johannes: After 20 minutes our taxi stops in front of a guarded gate of a wealthy settlement of sky-scrapers. My exchange student and I pass fountains, flowerbeds and sports fields and arrive at our sky-scraper where my host family lives in the 19. floor in an apartment, which can be considered large and technically well-equipped when you take the Berlin standard. Everyday life of my exchange partner seems to me quite similar to Western habits: Apart from the extensive homework he still has sufficient leisure time to watch television and play computer games. On the other hand, it seems to be typical Chinese that my host mother tries to read my wishes from my eyes. In the beginning she offered me an American breakfast including knife and fork until I managed to convince her that I prefer to have Chinese food and eat with chopsticks. Special advantages of this noble settlement I found out in the very first evening. In one of the communal institutions we can from now on regularly match ourselvesf in a kind of sports that widely spread in China and which my exchange partner is a specialist in: table tennis.

Caroline: My family lives in a traditional Chinese sky-scraper in a hutong. In the hutong the streets are narrow, you can see a lot of bicycles and countless roaming cats. However, as I get to know later, even ministers and one of the headmasters live in his hutong. I am the only one in our group who sleeps, as it is quite common in China, in the same bed with my exchange partner. I nearly always go to school by bike, which is, as an exception, nothing strange to me, but in fact for the Chinese people around me (European people usually use buses or cars.). I also appreciate, unfortunately only in retrospect, the rare evenings when my exchange partner and I have dinner together with both parents, because it happens quite often that one of her parents is at work - mostly her father. And that is really from morning till evening, seven days a week. The parents take that effort in order to enable their daughter to study abroad. She, on the other hand, is grateful by working hard to get good marks. That is why there is no time to have a boy-friend or even a flirt, because that would take time that should rather be spent by doing homework. The amount of homework is really enormous in Chinese schools. It is no exception that my exchange partner is still busy with her homework at midnight, whereas I am already falling asleep.

What characterizes a Chinese family? Put up in completely different conditions, we also found completely different answers to this question. In general, however, we can say that our Chinese host families excel in their tremendous hospitality which sometimes seems to be without any boundaries at all. Now we feel a real challenge to be similarly good hosts to our exchange partners during their stay in Berlin in October.

© Johannes Faust, Caroline Wiese; July 2001