China trip proves to be a rich learning experience
Treasure Valley Community College students and instructors visited China in May
By Johna Strickland
Argus Observer
Friday, June 27, 2008 10:08 AM PDT
Editor’s note: This is the second part of a two-story series.
Ontario — P.J. Haro started packing at 2 p.m. on a Sunday in May for a Monday morning flight to China.
He made a couple trips to Wal-Mart to purchase suggested items for his and Treasure Valley Community College’s first international academic adventure.
Led by business professor Kent Banner and Instructional Dean Susan Tinker, 12 TVCC students journeyed to China during the last two weeks of May. Each traveler could only take one 44-pound suitcase because of Chinese airline regulations. Haro, 31, finished at 26 pounds, five shirts and three pairs of pants, including the “one pair of pants I was wearing.”
“I don’t think I’ll do that again,” he said. The 13-day trip gave students and professors a firsthand look at Chinese culture, and a taste, Banner said.
“I like to go out for Chinese once in a while. We had it three times a day for 12 days,” Banner said, adding each meal was served with steamed rice. “So if you really didn’t like what was there you could just hang out with the rice.”
Student Laura Carlon, not a fan of Chinese food, did just that.
“I lived on rice for a couple days,” the 20-year-old said.
Dining on fish, pork and the occasional chicken or beef, the group ate family style at large tables with no serving spoons, Banner said. Restaurants provided only chopsticks for eating and serving, a challenge with rice.
“You eat less and you eat slower,” Banner said, adding a few people brought forks along and would whip them out at meal times.
Eating with chopsticks is an education at each meal, Haro said.
“You just had to relearn every meal,” he said.
In Hong Kong, the tour’s first stop, the food was “all right,” but got “weirder” in Beijing and other cities in China’s mainland, Haro said, recalling a chicken head and foot they found in a dish one day. Banner said he tried octopus, finding it “chewy.”
Carlon said she saw live scorpions skewed on sticks for sale in one market. The group did make it to McDonald’s a few times, Haro said.
Shopping proved to be another cultural experience, one integral to the trip’s focus on China’s economy and business. Most items for sale have been marked up 80 percent, Banner said. Bargaining vendors down gave students practical business experience as they browsed for souvenirs.
“They got to participate (in China’s economy) and buy things, leave some of their money there,” Banner said.
At first the student didn’t bargain though, and paid too much for items.
“I felt bad bargaining, so I just bought stuff, then I realized I was getting the bad end of the deal,” Carlon said. Haro agreed.
“I think I got ripped off a couple times,” he said.
Watching bikes, scooters, rickshaws, double-decker trolleys and buses compete with people for space on the roads also offered a new experience to the group.
“The people are so thick, cabs slow down and start nudging people,” Haro said. “Everything was just made to move as many people as possible.”
Banner said drivers view traffic lights as suggestions.
“The light turns green, and the pedestrians take off across the intersection,” he said. “Sidewalks are fair game (for cars).”
The sheer number of people crowding into China’s cities shocked Carlon, who grew up in a town of 350 people and said Portland was the largest city she had visited prior to the trip. In country, she rode her first subway train, too. Visiting a communist country where couples are allowed one child and men dominate presented its own challenges. From a tour guide in Hong Kong, the group learned about the rules governing couples who have more than one child. The guide had been born a second child, and the government fined his parents thousands of U.S. dollars for his birth. Then while his brother received a free education from grade school through university and a retirement pension, the guide got nothing. The only exception is twins, Haro said.
“ ‘My brother says I’m the expensive child,’ ” Banner said the guide told them. The guide’s expense to his family continued as they paid a $20,000 dowry to the family of the guide’s fiancée, Haro said. To bargain down would be an insult, Banner said, adding the guide’s family would also pay $20,000 for a wedding banquet.
Carlon said she found the emphasis on boys — “their pride and joy,” Banner said — a difficult idea to accept.
“(It was) hard to listen to them say they wanted male children ... and they really spoil the boys,” she said. “(Though) they seem to treat their women really well in marriage and their children and elderly.”
Upon their May 31 return, Haro and Carlon finished up their classes — neither carried study materials to China — after missing two weeks and graduated June 13.
One class Haro completed, international business taught by Banner, tied directly to the trip as Haro gave a presentation about his personal experience with the topic.
“Usually it’s pretty quick to put together a PowerPoint, not when you’re looking through 1,500 pictures,” Haro said.
Banner said he noticed a difference in the presentations from students on the China adventure.
“There was a richness to their presentation because they had lived (it),” he said. “They interpreted information firsthand when others went to the library.”
This observation and his international experience will affect his teaching style, Banner said, noting he gained “greater professional depth in my area.”
“My teaching people about international business will be a little less theoretical and a little more practical, hands-on, having seen it up close and personal.”
In the fall, Carlon will head to the University of Idaho to pursue a degree in international agribusiness and Haro to Northwest Nazarene University for a business degree with a minor in marketing.
Neither Carlon or Haro had ever traveled overseas before — Carlon said China was her “first time going anywhere” — but both said they intend to travel again. Back in the U.S. just two weeks, Haro and three of his China trip companions had already begun planning a trip for late 2008, possibly to Japan.
