When Dr. Kay Siebler, professor of English, realized she had the chance to teach English at a Chinese university for a year, she just couldn’t pass up the opportunity. Siebler was the first Missouri Western professor to participate in a 2012 exchange agreement with Xidian University in China, and taught English there for the 2013-14 academic year.
“The cultural experience was amazing,” she said. “It was really difficult to leave.”
In one of her last blog entries before she left China, Dr. Siebler wrote,
“I will miss the feeling of walking around in an exciting and interesting culture so different from my own. Every day I step outside into a new adventure; every moment I look around I see something new, interesting, puzzling or flabbergasting. I will miss struggling to figure out a way to say what I want to say in a way people can understand, a linguistic puzzle of tones and words. I will miss the sounds, smells, and people that this corner of the world has generously offered to me as a home for the past year.”
Dr. Siebler said the first noticeable difference between the U.S. and China are the crowds and the lack of quiet. Another big difference was in her classroom. “Chinese students revere their teachers. They really honor and respect them, and it was a real ego boost. And they were acutely interested in everything I said about American culture.”
She had weekly lunches with the female students in her class, which consisted of about 20 men and only three or four women. “I loved that time, and I really miss those women.”
She also missed unlimited Internet access. Since the Chinese government limits what is online, including blogs and Facebook, a Google search yields about 10 results, Dr. Siebler said. It was also difficult to make international calls because no home phones have the capability of calling internationally.
Dr. Siebler did know one person at the Chinese university when she arrived – Tiantian Zou, a Xidian University professor who taught Chinese at Missouri Western during the 2011-12 academic year as a Fulbright scholar. Toward the end of her stay in the U.S., Zou initiated the exchange agreement between the two universities.
Last year, as part of that agreement, two Xidian students attended Missouri Western and for the current academic year, Dana Andrews, instructor of English, is teaching in China.
Dr. Siebler knows Andrews will have a great time, and she hopes other Missouri Western professors will take advantage of the opportunity.
“Everyone should take the opportunity to do this, pack up your life, cram everything you can’t live without into two suitcases, update your passport, and go live someplace else for a year. Forget worrying about whether you can afford it. Forget worrying about how scary you think it might be. Forget telling yourself your life is too complicated to do something like this.
You will reach and grow and learn in ways that are unfathomable to you – in ways that are unavailable to you in your own culture, in the comfort of the familiar. Traveling as a tourist to a country is not the same as living there. Living there means making friends, struggling through setting up house and learning a community, and calling that new, foreign, complicated, frustrating, beautiful place home.”
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