Twelve time-zones removed from her American hometown, Kristen Tracz encouraged a class of 50 Chinese children to choose English names for themselves. She was expecting choices like Michael, or Cathy.
Instead, to Tracz's chagrin, her students made selections like, "Heaven" and "Tomato."
The exercise was one of the ways that Tracz communicated in English to herthird through eighth grade students at Luo Shan Middle School in Shanghai. There, students begin learning English in third grade, mostly by route memorization tactics that make the transition to conversational English a difficult process. For the Chinese students, the most valuable resources for learning English are native speakers, but they are scarce in Shanghai.
So in mid-May, Tracz, a third-year College student, left Alexandria with a backpack slung over her shoulders. She was headed 19 hours across the world, prepared to swap languages.
Setling in
Being one of 13 million city-dwellers bustling through Shanghai made Tracz's head spin when she first arrived in late May.
"When I first got there, it was like walking in a cloud," Tracz said. "I was overwhelmed by the masses of people, how enormous the city was. I realized just how far out of my comfort zone I was."
Though she felt lost in the crowds, she knew she had a job to do. Each morning after taking lessons in conversational Chinese, Tracz headed to Luo Shan Middle School and attempted to fuse the cultural gap between herself and her students.
At first, her classes were what she called, "a tough crowd."
"The everyday environment in school is pretty formal," Tracz said. "So when I'd walk in and say, 'Hi, how's everyone doing?,' in the beginning I'd get 50 blank faces."
With coaching and daily doses of Tracz's relaxed, amiable manner, the students warmed up to her more informal method of teaching. Although her arrival infused the classrooms with levity, her students still struggled with demanding academic responsibilities. Tracz's mostly urban middle class students attended school from 7:30 a.m. until 5 p.m., carried four hours of homework nightly and attended class in an atmosphere of fierce competition.
"Nearly every child is an only child, so the pressure they feel from their families is intense," she said. "For these families, their one child is their one shot to break out of their class and excel."
Parents and teachers constantly remind Luo Shan students that academic success and perfecting English are tightly intertwined. As a result, Tracz said, the United States fascinated the students. They were curious about every aspect of her life -- from what kind of a home she lived in, to how large her family was. They also wondered why, at 5-feet 10 inches, she was so tall.
"They were inquisitive about everything," she said. "And many of their impressions were funny for me. They thought in America we eat KFC for breakfast and pizza for dinner every night."
Foreign interests
Long before she was explaining to a classroom full of Chinese students that she was simply born tall, Tracz searched for a condensed summer abroad program that would coincide with the U.S./China Relations concentration she is pursuing within her political and social thought major.
"I'd been so interested in China, and taken so many classes about it, that it got to the point where I didn't want to read it anymore," Tracz said.
She found the Shanghai program through Cross Cultural Solutions, an international outreach program based out of New York. But checking off the "find program" box on her to-do list was only the beginning.
Visiting China demanded mountains of paperwork, a plethora of injections for diseases from tetanus to polio and incited some apprehension from her family.
"Everyone else thought it was insane," Tracz said. "But at the same time, they knew it was sort of a 'me' thing to do."
Once in Shanghai, Tracz discovered she was one of the most inexperienced travelers in the program. She had expected to be one of many college students seeking the ideal summer abroad, but once she arrived, Tracz was surrounded by seasoned backpackers, nurses and ex-Peace Corps volunteers.
Hitting the streets
When Tracz left Luo Shan at the end of the school day, she shed her English teacher skin and slipped into the crowd of twenty-somethings exploring booming Shanghai. China's largest and most-rapidly developing metropolis offered Tracz an urban carnival of rainbow-colored neon signs, cloud-skimming skyscrapers and fashion-savvy fusion restaurants. She spent time strolling the shops on Nanjing Road and visiting the Yuyuan Old District.
While the entertaining sights dazzled her, she also was crushed by the realities that lied beneath them. Shanghai's underbelly was hard to ignore, despite the city's modern trendiness.
"On the same streets as a Ritz-Carlton and a Gucci boutique, were half-naked children urinating in sinks and mothers doing laundry in cement buckets," Tracz said. "If you buy into all that the city projects, it's easy to forget [China] is a third-world country. But if you go off the main street, it's right there."
The poverty that she saw off the glittering avenues of Shanghai sparked a startling reality check and a profound sense of guilt. The teachers she worked with at school were college graduates earning $150 per month, less than Tracz had spent on a purse.
"My priorities adjusted a lot," she said. "I realized we have opportunities that so many of the Chinese people I came in contact with are dying for."
Tracz plans to return to China once she gets admitted to a law school. In the meantime, coming home has shown her something she hadn't seen abroad.
"I thought I was going to have a hard time coming back to U.Va.," Tracz said. "But as homogeneous as it can sometimes be, there are people here doing a lot of amazing things. I don't feel like such an oddball."
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