Day 31
Our last morning in China had us drive in two cars to the Shekou port, since we wouldn’t fit in one with all our luggage. Somehow, Alex, Ben, Khang, and I found ourselves alone in the much larger car, while the other 6 were packed in the smaller one, a situation with which I was perfectly fine. On the ride, the driver tuned into what I have to assume was some official state broadcast channel due to the following clues: a very dramatic speaker, thunderous applause, patriotic music, and the names “Xi Jinping” and “Mao Zedong” scattered throughout all the Mandarin. I was impressed by the ability to check in for our flight and drop off our bags at the port, which would then be sent to our plane.
We got noodle soup for lunch, where we were happy to meet up with Simon Ma #275. We said goodbye to Jason Shi, our Harvard Club host who had organized the stop for us, got on the still-epic ferry (see above), and upon arriving directly at the airport, boarded our remarkably purple Hong Kong Express flight to Osaka. 再见, 深圳! 再见, 中国!
Day 30
After our hotel breakfast, we traveled to the Shenzhen Urban Planning Exhibition Hall, which for whatever reason shared its building with a contemporary art museum. Alex, who never fails to remind us what a big urban planning nerd he is, looked like he was in heaven. They had a cool gimmick where our tour guide held up her tablet and showed us some of the exhibits in augmented reality. Since Shenzhen is such a young city, the government had a lot of control over shaping the city and designing it deliberately; apparently, it’s even called the “City of Design” in China (though I’m not sure by whom).
We reunited with our friend the enormous lazy Susan for lunch back at SFLS, and the moment I had been waiting for all tour finally arrived: I got to drink a real Chinese Coca- Cola while wearing my Chinese Coca-Cola t-shirt I bought at the World of Coke in Atlanta. Next, we headed to an art classroom to try our hands at cloisonné, a traditional Chinese artform involving enamel separated by metal wire, or in our case, a 3-D printed flower outline. I hadn’t really made a physical piece of art in a while, so it was fun and relaxing to try out something new. I picked a relatively simple symmetrical flower, but it still didn’t come out perfectly (not that I had any expectations of it doing so). The SLFS art teacher only gave the instructions in Mandarin, and the other students couldn’t really give me much advice since it was their first time as well, so I don’t really blame myself too much. The school fired them for us in the kiln, and they were returned to us by dinnertime.
Our final excursion of the day was to the Dapeng Fortress, a military from the Ming Era. It was neat to see the traditional Chinese architecture (which reminded me a lot of the Chinese Garden back home in Portland, Oregon), in contrast to some of its occupants—plenty of food and souvenir stalls. Much of the fort was still preserved, with historical artifacts and paintings to look at. We saw an opera stage, on which performances are held only once every five years, and some of the SFLS students demonstrated some of the traditions of a Chinese wedding, which included the bride sitting in her room all evening while the groom parties with everyone else. Rough. Before we left, we saw a woman with some kind of medium-size rodent with a leash and a little costume, with another one in her backpack. We headed back to the SFLS to enjoy a Chinese dinner at the faculty canteen, and finally said goodbye to the students who had accompanied us the past couple of days.
As we got back to the hotel, I was very excited to discover that the hotel had free laundry machines, which I promptly made great use of. The washer worked well, and the dryer also worked well, as long as your definition of working well involves heating your clothes up to one billion degrees without actually drying them that much. Ben, Khang, Chris, and Chris’s friend set off to explore downtown Shenzhen, stopping for a while at a bar on the 51st floor of the Bao’an St. Regis hotel. Most of the rest of us gathered in Ben and Kieran’s room for another chat session, with some Geoguessr to boot. We tried to use the hotel pool, but they would only let us in with goggles and a swim cap, and we hadn’t brought any since Alex hasn’t yet designed those items on our online merch store. Right before we went to bed, Cassidy shared with us the good news that Allegra had received her Japanese visa, and that there would be 14 of us again very soon.
Day 29
I woke up bright and early in order to beat the Shenzhen morning rush hour, as the Dins had to meet marginally less bright and early at the hotel where we would be staying the next two nights. Oliver’s mom served a yummy shrimp and pork wonton soup for breakfast, and Oliver very kindly gifted me a calabash charm (meant to bring good health in Chinese culture) and then we were off in another taxi (Oliver’s dad had taken the family car on a business trip, but apparently Shenzhen taxis are pretty cheap). As we arrived, I noticed that we were in fact not at the Yating Bay International Hotel Yatian Seaside Park Branch, but instead somewhere called the Acotown Hotel, but given that they seemed to have our room reservations, I decided not to worry about it. I settled into my room with Khang, and then we gathered downstairs to sing for our hosts to thank them for their generosity.
The Dins packed into a van that looked like it could withstand a nuclear blast, and we were off to the Shenzhen Foreign Languages School. Some of the high schoolers showed us around the, admittedly, very nice campus, and encouraged us to take a lot of group photos. It was also boiling hot outside, I fact that I failed to consider when I brought an overshirt, no hat, and no sunscreen that morning (Mom, Dad, don’t worry, I borrowed some from another Din), which meant that the air conditioning inside their School History Museum (that is, a museum of the school’s history, not a history museum that happened to be at the school) was deeply appreciated. My high school has about 40 years on SFLS, and we certainly don’t have a school history museum... The real highlight of the tour was the “AI-powered gym.” What exactly was AI-powered about it? Don’t worry about it! We arrived at the school’s purpose-built Model UN room (that such a room exists was pretty cool), complete with microphones installed at every seat, and answered some questions from gathered students.
We ate lunch in the private dining room of the school’s Western-style cafeteria, which contained perhaps the biggest lazy Susan known to mankind, which was also remote controlled. Maybe we really are in the Chinese century. We then headed over to the school’s auditorium for our concert with the SFLS Xinhang Choir, titled “In Harmony of Song: In Kinship of Shore and Sea,” which I have to assume sounds more normal in Chinese. The SFLS principal introduced the concert, although he was introduced as the “party secretary” of the school, which I found amusing. My tails felt physically disgusting from all the sweat that had accumulated in them over the past couple of stops, but we persevered and sang a half-hour first act to the concert (I now understand why my dad called his tour clothes a “battle tux”). I gave my first ever solo “Sh’Boom” joke break (“two whales walk into a bar..”), which felt like a rite of passage into the group. Unfortunately for the Dins, our consensus was that we were “mogged” by the SFLS choir. Two fantastic soloists performed a Chinese folk song, and an aria from The Marriage of Figaro, respectively, and the first of the two full-choir pieces they sang, “Soar,” was honestly breathtaking—they sang what seemed like a very complicated arrangement with some insane chords and overtones extraordinarily well. The Dins were very honored to share the stage with them to sing “The Moon Represents My Heart” together. We were then each given our first goody bag of the day, and one of the students presented a beautiful hand-painted scroll with a picture of Shenzhen to us. During our post-concert mingle with the students, one of them told me, “At first you seemed like a nerd, but I was surprised by your good stage presence,” a compliment which I gladly accepted.
We then jetted off in our probably armored van towards the SCIE, where we were welcomed with goody bag number two. We found a dance classroom to briefly rehearse our new song for Japan, before coming on stage for our second concert of the day, jointly hosted by the University of Hong Kong Pearl River Delta Alumni Network and the Harvard Club of South China, Guangdong. During what would have been the “Sh’Boom” joke break, we held this year’s first official bowtie tying contest, which was won by yours truly. After our set, we were presented with goody bag number three and sat back down for the second half of the event, a Chinese-language panel discussion including, among others, our very own president Khang to offer a current Harvard student’s perspective. Now, you may be thinking, “Wow, Khang speaks Mandarin? That’s so impressive!” Unfortunately, you would be wrong. Instead, he was lent a pair of AI smart translation glasses, which apparently worked great...until the host turned off his phone,disconnecting the glasses from Bluetooth, and rendering them useless. Ironically, I probably better understood what was going on, since Mark gave us periodic translations of the discussions, until he “got tired” and stopped. After the panel, the audience seemed to have thinned out significantly, but we still managed to sell plenty of merchandise, including a typo-ed tote bag with “Teh Harvard Din & Tonics,” which one boy who bought it was very proud to show off.
We got back to the hotel and hung out in Ria and Kiesse’s room. I tried turning on the TV, but believe it or not, the TV channels were all in Chinese. In my defense, some of us had great fun in Hong Kong watching Lifetime original movies in that hotel. It turned out to be quite difficult to actually all gather together, as the elevators only gave us access to our own floors, so we devised a scheme where one Din would summon an elevator to their floor from the hallway with another Din already inside. It worked about half the time. A couple people went down to a convenience store to get instant ramen, while the rest of us raided the snack bag Kiesse’s host had given her. Winners included the very spicy gluten stick, and losers included the moon cake that set off Kieran’s (minor) peanut allergy. We also had fun trying and failing to separate and reassemble some wooden puzzles.
Day 28
Do you remember that scene in The Incredibles where the Parr family makes their way to the island after their plane was destroyed by Syndrome’s missiles? I always thought that scene was pretty epic. Well, our boat ride from Hong Kong to Shenzhen was kind of like that, except of our boat being Elastigirl, it was...a normal ferry, and instead of it being propelled by Dash kicking at super-speed, it was propelled...by the ferry’s motor. Okay, maybe it wasn’t like that at all. But it was still epic.
Despite our prepping for the Chinese border, Chris’ friend from Shenzhen told us earlier that the immigration officers, quote, “dgaf,” and lo and behold, she was pretty much right. I was only asked two questions by the officer: “Are you travelling with [Kiesse, who was immediately in front of me]?” (“Yes”) and “Are you just visiting Shenzhen?” (“Yes”). By far the most arduous part of the process happened a month earlier, where we had to enlist the help of both Alex and James Baskerville #232 to get my passport to and from the Chinese consulate in San Francisco to obtain a physical visa.
After getting a quick group photo of the Dins with our hosts from the Shenzhen College of International Education, I got in a taxi with my 16-year-old host Oliver and his mother, and we headed to their apartment. During the ride, I marveled at how it seemed like skyscrapers were placed just about everywhere in the city (the second-highest quantity in the world), not just in one downtown core (China: 1, Zoning laws: 0). Oliver explained to me that despite the fact that Shenzhen is the third-biggest city in China, the other three biggest cities (Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou) like to tease it by reminding it of the fact that only forty years ago, it was just a fishing town, and that its rivals hold much more historical and cultural capital. Today, it’s mainly known for being the Chinese Silicon Valley, due to the presence of companies like Huawei, Tencent, and BYD. Oliver bemoaned the presence of the electric motorbikes we saw whizzing around, and when I asked him why they were considered such a nuisance, he gave a sly grin and said, “You’ll see.” And as we reached their apartment building, I did see: nearly every square inch on the sidewalk was parked with an ungodly number of motorbikes (a testament to the city’s truly massive population).
As we reached their apartment on the 28th floor of the ritzily-named Royal Hill building (beating my Hong Kong hotel room on the 21st floor), I was quickly served an appetizer of lychees, green tea, and coconut water (obtained by stabbing a straw into a coconut, obviously), followed by a delicious home-cooked traditional Chinese dinner. Our dessert course included copious amounts of watermelon along with double skin milk. We went off on a postprandial constitutional, where we walked past the very concisely named Shenzhen Longgang District Second People’s Hospital Dafapu Community Health Service Center and a new subway station (emblematic of the city’s commitment to continuously improving its infrastructure), before ending up at what Oliver described as the only interesting thing in the neighborhood, the Huawei flagship store. (His mom had worked at Huawei for many years, in both their Chinese and British offices.) After walking past the expected “phones” section, we entered the quite-unexpected “luxury cars” section. We got a showroom attendant to demonstrate the cars’ features to us, including voice-activated massage chairs and a large projector screen that rolled down for the kiddos in the backseat. It sure beat my mom’s 1997 Toyota Corolla. (If Huawei wants to sponsor the next Din-Mobile, contact us at vroomvroom@dins.com.)
Afterwards, we headed back home for a well-deserved night’s sleep, a strong end to my first day in the People’s Republic of China.
- Soren Cowell-Shah #287
