The first term away from home

Nearly three months into my first term at Sichuan University, Chengdu has stopped being an event and become a place where I live. The famous landmarks no longer make me look up every time I pass. The metro map is no longer a maze, just a set of lines I have memorized by need. I know which canteen window serves food I can afford and which corner of the library stays quiet in the afternoon. The novelty has worn off, and in its place something more honest has arrived: routine, homesickness and the first evidence of the person I am becoming here.

The dormitory is where much of the education happens, and it is not on the syllabus. Four boys from four provinces in one room, with accents, bedtimes and standards of cleanliness that took weeks to reconcile. The first month was a careful diplomacy of boundaries, who uses the desk, who keeps the light on, who talks to their family at night. By now we have settled into the kind of peace that comes from knowing each other’s habits well enough to stop noticing them. I have learned more about the geography of China from my roommates than from any atlas, and most of it is about food.

The dialect question is the one I keep coming back to. My roommates and I speak Mandarin to each other, and we all switch languages the moment a phone call home comes in. The boy from Chongqing goes fast and musical. The one from Henan slows down into something rounder. And I, from Chizhou, feel my voice change without deciding to, slipping back into the tones of the lower Yangtze. We joke about it, calling each other’s dialects secret codes. Under the joke is a real discovery: the accent I smoothed over for the exam is still the language I think in, and no classroom ever told me that.

The biology courses are the reason I came, and they have not disappointed. The lectures are crowded, the reading lists are long, and the professors do not slow down for anyone. I have had weeks where I understood maybe two thirds of what was being said, and weeks where the two thirds was on a good day. But the laboratory work is another country. Standing at a bench with a microscope and a sample you have prepared yourself, there is no syllabus between you and the thing you are studying. I chose life sciences in August with an explanation I could not fully give; three months of lab work have started to supply one.

Chengdu has also begun to teach me things the campus cannot. The city runs on a later clock than the one I grew up with, and its tolerance for doing things slowly took me weeks to stop finding suspicious. The food is a constant negotiation between my stomach and my habits, and I am losing, happily. In the evenings the weather turns the particular grey damp that the city is famous for, and when I stand at the window I am struck by how far the Yangtze has carried me without my having to move along it, twelve hundred kilometres from home by train.

I have started to understand something about Chizhou that I could not see from inside it. The city I left was not a backdrop but an argument, made of particular people and particular expectations, and I carried the argument with me. When I decide things here, I can hear it. How late to stay up, whether to spend the money or save it, what to tell my parents in the weekly call. Some of the argument I have accepted and made my own. Some of it I have started to argue with. That process, slow and mostly internal, is the part of university no one photographs.

The homesickness arrives on schedules I cannot predict, usually in the evenings, usually with a smell or a sound as the trigger, a certain way the canteen stir-fries the greens, a phrase in a stranger’s accent. I do not fight it. Missing home is the tuition I pay for having one, and the payment is reasonable. I call my grandmother and she asks if I am eating, and I tell her yes, and it is true enough. The term is more than half over, the city is ordinary now, and the work is simply the work. I came here expecting to be transformed by knowledge, and instead I have been transformed by the ordinary: the four people in my room, the dialect I keep, the daily management of my own time. The transformation is quieter than advertised, and I am starting to think it is the real one.