Journalism, eh?

After Shanghai, I flew back to Xiamen, Fujian. It felt like a trip to a completely different country getting off the airplane into beautiful and stunning tropical weather that wasn’t nearly as evident when I had left Xiamen earlier in the semester.

Now that I’m back, I’m actually finished with all of my classes and only have an internship left. This part of the trip has been great because I have much more free time than I did earlier. I feel like I’m really experiencing Xiamen now, and Xiamen at its finest. Just the other day I was reminded that I live in a tropical paradise when I got off the bus from work by the BaiCheng University gate, which is right by the ocean.

My internship just finished and it was a great experience, although short. I was an official journalist for Xiamen Daily, more specifically for the English section called Common Talk Weekly. I got paired up with this internship because the China Studies Program director supposedly thought I was a good writer based off of a single written assignment. It’s true that I enjoy writing though, and I personally believe that I got the best internship, with some bias of course.

I had the nicest coworkers ever. This picture is of Enid Chen, a coworker I ended up working with most of the time. I wrote five articles during the three weeks and attended events and art shows. During the day, I would mostly proofread for my coworkers and travel around town to eat and attend events. I would stay late on Wednesday nights, the day before Common Talk is published every week. This internship really gave me an opportunity to meet some really interesting people, ranging from crazy Dutch artists to Irish motorized skateboarders.

Jean Chen, another coworker, came with me to one event with her husband and son and I felt like the fourth member of the family, all while meeting super important people at press releases that I did not deserve to meet at all. One, in particular, was Matthew Bourne, a British experimental piano and cello musician. I have so many strange stories in relation to this internship because of the people I got to meet, like a time I interviewed a German artist that had a fascination with body parts. I feel very privileged having been able to do this internship with no journalism background except for one class at Taylor.

My third coworker, who was more of my boss, was Vivian Zhang. She had an aura about her that screamed she was a very important person. It was interesting for me, because I was the only student that got paired with a state-run enterprise. There’s an added dynamic in that kind of environment that I found unique. You never knew whom you worked with may have quite a lot more power than you know, or have ties with the government. She talked to me about the fact that if you had a government job, you were definitely only allowed one child under the Planned Birth Policy, which has fewer limitations on childbirth than previously. If you had a child as a government worker, you would lose your job, but also YOUR BOSS would lose their job. That reminded me of how “losing face” has ties to a lot of aspects of life in China.

So, I ended up getting a lot of journalism experience that I was not expecting at all. Also, with the help of Enid, managed to get “insider” prices (meaning, she could communicate with the sellers), on some things I’ve bought for friends and family that I cannot reveal at this time. What a fantastic way to finish up the academic side of my China experience.

Next up: more life in Xiamen, OR if I don’t have time to write, an “I’M HOME!” blog post.

- Kev