A little piece of Vassar comes to Beijing

In addition to Zan and I coming to Beijing, another piece of Beijing apparently exists here too. I went to my first (auditing) class titled: "性别社会学" or "Sociology of Gender". I wasn't sure what to expect, but after failing to communicate my "where is the women's bathroom?" question to several people, I was worried about my comprehension abilities. Once I walked into the room, immediately everyone starting whispering "woah" "look, a foreigner!" "what is she doing here?" "does she speak chinese?" "wow!". So that was fun. Once I found a seat in the very front row (that was all that was left), I made friends with the girl next to me also auditing the class.

Then class started, and two girls gave presentations on the articles they read: "The Five Sexes: Why two isn't enough" and "Believing is Seeing"- both high level American, english articles. Most of their power points were in english actually so I followed along pretty well. Then the professors lectured about the two articles for the 2nd half of class. I'd say I understand 30-40% of the content, but I got the main ideas: "Gender is a performance constructed by society, and forced upon the people by the organization of society into food and sexual (re)production"- that's my take on it at least. It was awesome.

My take aways from this one auditing experience:

• Serious (and progressive) feminism and gender studies exists in China. 
• I am not going to die next semester when I have to audit classes at Xi'an Jiaotong University. 
• I want to make friends with all the Chinese feminists students and the professor (great connections probably)
• They all spoke and read fluent english. Woah. (The class was in Chinese mostly though...)

I love China. I love classes. Actually, can I just go back to school for the rest of my life please? I'm such a nerd.

(check me out- a relatively short blog post!)

PS Life Updates to come, but previews: Ming Dynasty Tombs, "Big Yellow", US Foreign Policy Lecture, Anti-Japanese Protests, and more!