I'm kind of a big deal

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When I did my study abroad orientation workshop at USF, they explained that we may experience an inverted version of homesickness when we came back home. Apparently many students (especially in China) get quite a bit of attention while they are abroad, and they experience a...euphoria at their new celebrity like status.

I laughed it off. Tianjin has 14 million inhabitants. Nankai University has about 23,000 students not including the internationals who come to study each year. This is the Princeton or Yale of the Orient. This is the University that attracts renowned people from around the world. They have a Mormon Chinese Classic professor here for christ's sake. Oh and did I mention that one block away there's a whole other University? I'm just a drop in the bucket. No one will notice me. And if they do, it will not be in a good way.

I was dead wrong.

I'll admit it. Celebrity status never felt so cool. It's been fun stopping traffic while taxi drivers gawk at us.

Wednesday morning I'm minding my own business at breakfast. A Managerial Economics PhD who's teaching in Canada sat down next to my roommate and me...and proceeded to have an hour long conversation with us. Then he ran off to do his presentation.

Later at the electronics shop where I tried to use my garbled Mandarin to explain my computer woes (I now know how to say internet, ethernet cord, wireless, computer, and dvd rom in Chinese. Oddly enough I can't say the word 'ethernet port' even though that was the broken item.) the tech guy told me I reminded him of his niece. After he spent an hour fixing my computer, he gave me his card and told me to come back and have tea with him so we could chat more.

The next morning I receive a knock on my door. A Korean Gentlemen who is a professor in Scotland heard me speaking English and some Chinese. One of the students he had been mentoring here at Nankai was just accepted at University of Oregon and he wanted me to meet with her and teach here about the U.S. culture.

I decided to go with my Chinese student counterpart to get a haircut in the afternoon. Among the bustle, the shop owner decided to pull up a chair and chat with me. We somehow managed to converse despite how little Chinese I speak and how little English he knows. Then he decided to dedicate a Chinese song over the loud speaker to me while I got my haircut. He even made his staff clap and cheer for me. It was one of the stranger moments of my life.

I mean, I always imagined myself being serenaded without shampoo in my hair. And none of the men in my life can sing.

Did I mention the freshmen English class that stared at us bug eyed when we went to visit them? One of them pulled out his camera and filmed us.

Then there's the shopkeepers at all the restaurants we've been going to, where the staff come out and stare at the Americans?

Fame is a hard thing to come back from. I'm not sure I'll recover after three weeks of this. I expect to be in therapy for a long long time once I get back from the states. =)

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