From Nanjing to DC, The HNC Connection Continues

As if the HNC wasn’t already special enough, another of the unique characteristics of your time in Nanjing is that almost every student rooms with another of the different culture. In this blog post, I wanted to write about my personal experience of living with my roommate Ning Xinyuan 宁心源. While our experience can’t count for everyone’s (people are different, and we all have varying dynamics) I thought it would be helpful to provide an example of what this was really like in practice.

A photo of our room from the very first week

The first step in my roommate journey was the online form I filled out in May of 2016, a couple of months after finding out I had been accepted to the HNC. There are questions about your habits and personality and sections to describe your sleeping schedule and to mention if you mind having a roommate who snores (!) (I don’t remember what I picked, but luckily for me Xinyuan did not snore, haha).

The thing that amazed us both on the very first day we met was how tailor made we were for each other – it was like we had magicked each other up out of our descriptions. Xinyuan fit all of mine and more that I wouldn’t have thought to ask for: she was an economics major which thrilled this econ nerd, and was the oldest of three kids, just like me. It’s sweet to look back at my hopes for what activities I would do with my roommate, since I can confirm now that we did indeed do all of these things.

At the beginning, it was great to have Xinyuan helping me set up things like my bank account and phone plan, as well as going to meals and orientation activities together. We hung out with our neighbors on the first floor of the dorm and had fun exploring Nanjing and going to yummy restaurants. I tried to focus my friend making energies on Xinyuan and our Chinese neighbors at the start, because I knew I would end up making lovely international friends just through virtue of living in the same place and having classes together. Hence, I wanted to be sure I was getting to know my Chinese classmates really well and building a good relationship with my roommate.

Eating dinner at our favorite Sichuan noodle joint

Some traditions we created over the year were leaving each other little treats on our desks, having sweet chats while lying on our beds during an afternoon rest or before falling asleep, and having a fairly regular Friday night dinner date at a Sichuan noodle shop (where we always ordered spicy vegetarian mixian and langya tudou, delicious cold slices of potato in a spicy mala dressing).

Improving in our target language was a big priority for the both of us, so we tried to talk in both and help the other with grammar and vocabulary. We practiced presentations and corrected pronunciation: for example, when Xinyuan was asked to deliver an introduction in English for a visiting speaker, she got me to read out the introduction to her as if I was the one presenting, so she could hear what words to stress so as to make it sound the most natural and polished possible. Likewise, when I was working on my presentation for my econometrics class, it was to Xinyuan I turned to ensure the Chinese words I had found matched up with the specific terminology I was referring to.

Xinyuan writing calligraphy

Of course, you can’t be serious all the time, certainly not these two bouncy, giggly girls, and so we had great fun playing with language too. I giggled as I listened to her speaking in her dialect with her family back in Shanxi on the phone, so growly and wild sounding compared with the precise standard Mandarin she spoke at the HNC. She was entertained by my sassy conversations with my sister, and was initially surprised by my habit of ending phone calls with “love you!” thinking it was overly demonstrative. When I used my New Zealand slang, she would try to adopt it. However, as much as I loved the thought of her spouting about jandals, lollies and paddocks, I had to caution her that the majority of English speakers she would be talking to would not understand her meaning! I did have fun though telling her pop culture English, and it always gave me such a thrill to hear her say it in the right context. For example, the line “started from the bottom now we’re here” from Drake’s song. I explained the meaning to her, and months later, after we got some good grades back in the second semester, Xinyuan proudly announced it. It was perfect.

At our commencement ceremony, a true “started from the bottom now we’re here” moment

When we left Nanjing, we each gave the other a present of calligraphy: mine in English, hers in Chinese. It was a common hobby of ours that we loved to do as a break from classes. Xinyuan’s calligraphy scroll is currently hanging on display on the wall in my bedroom in DC, and she has informed me mine is on display on her desk in her Beijing dorm. It’s a special way we can continue to have the other’s presence in our room, even as we live in different countries and time zones. I don’t know the next time we will see each other, but I know we’ll always be in touch some way or another, thanks to the profound influence we had on each other’s lives during that special year in Nanjing.