Alice Hindanov
China Summer Fellow 2015
Shanghai, China
Hi! My name is Alice. I’m a senior at Gallatin and will be graduating too soon. My area of study is “Entertainment Business and Visual Theory,” which focuses on how aesthetics affect and reflect societal systems, and how we can use that knowledge to create more ethical and revolutionary media under capitalism. A mouthful, but it’s my mouthful.
I traveled to China in January with the Albert Gallatin Scholars and felt so overwhelmed and intrigued that I knew I would have to go back and get a second look at things. I summed up my feelings pretty well at the time:
I didn’t think I would ever have a chance to go back and unravel or even taste that particular uncertainty again. China was a locked door that had opened for me once, for a week, and would never do so again. Then, thanks to Gallatin and the China Summer Fellowship, I got to study Mandarin at NYU Shanghai over the summer of 2015. It was, overall, a really great experience, though it ended up being much more packed with personal growth than academic inquiry. Although, when you’re in class for three hours and studying for another three to five, there’s not much brain energy left for more. Just as in January, I found myself struggling to stay awake through dinner:
Mandarin is so much fun, though, so it was a joy to study it with such intensity and immersion (although, it’s my fifth language, so I’m a special case). The learning curve is steep, unlike with more familiar Latin and Germanic languages, but once you have a basic understanding of how pinyin, characters, and tones work, the grammar is nothing. But when I say steep, I mean steep:
God, I love this language. And there’s always something new and fun to learn about characters. Of course, as a non-native speaker, you run the risk of fetishizing the language when you read too deeply into the words. Still, there are a lot of fun tidbits to ponder. My absolute favorite concerns the moon radical, because I am all about the meatship theory of body. A radical is a part of a character, usually pictographically related to the meaning of that character’s word. The moon radical is the same shape as the character for moon, so you’d think it would be in time, location, and space words. And it is! But it’s also commonly, perhaps more commonly, used to denote flesh and body parts.
So, my moonlit hand-holding flesh vessels, that’s it for introductions. If you know any characters with fun stories, let me know in the comments!