People who know that China’s capital is Beijing may not know that the city’s name literally means the “northern capital.” I was born and raised in Nanjing, the “southern capital” that witnessed the vicissitudes of ten dynasties in imperial China. After the abolishment of the imperial system, the Republic of China (1911-1949) also picked Nanjing to be the capital. Yes, Beijing (Peking) University is regarded as the “Harvard of China,” but we Nanjing natives, backed up with affection for our hometown, think that Nanjing University is of the same caliber. Therefore when I, and many of my other high school classmates chose to stay in our hometown and attend Nanjing University, we did not consider it was anything nearly provincial. I became a member of the class of 2002 at Nanjing University beaming with all the pride about my prior academic achievements and the readiness to showcase my intellectual capability in one of the country’s topnotch universities.
The first blow came the very first day of the semester. During the week-long military training session (similar to a PE class, designed to help freshmen build a sense of community), we were supposed to use the bedsheet that was distributed to us before the convocation. However, I found that I left mine at home, and I quickly panicked. I called my parents, literally crying out loud. And my father, despite living in the same city, took half day of work, journeyed two hours on bus from the other end of the city and delivered the bedsheet to me, which brought a formal closure to the drama on my first day at college.
Looking back, there were a few other ways through which the “crisis” could have been handled, and it was not even an “academic” failure, but what it struck me with became the first, and one of the biggest, revelations I had during my college career – I was not as prepared, sophisticated or mature as my pride had led me to think.
This revelation helped to control the damage of what could have turned to be the second biggest drama of the first semester when I soon failed the midterm of “Advanced Algebra,” a course I was struggling with from the beginning. Determined to be a literature major, I entered this mandatory course with a “prejudice” – it was not doing me any good toward my major other than eating up the time that I could have spent reading for “Aesthetics Theories.” Math was not my favorite subject since high school, and the hostile attitude further contributed to my mid-semester landslide. After receiving the grade and progress report after midterm, I was presented with two choices, either withdrawing with a barely-passing grade, or pick myself up and wrap up the “ordeal” that I had gone through in this course with some dignity. I was glad I chose the latter. It would be lying to say that I came to understand overnight the value of a liberal arts education and how this course would add to my intellectual width. However, I did decide that I probably should neither let my over-inflated sense of pride delude me into thinking that I could excel in every single course, particularly the subjects beyond my academic strengths, nor let unreasonable prejudices preclude me from striving in areas outside my intellectual comfort zone. The change in the attitude and the realistic adjustment in my expectations made an incredible difference. I went on to tackle the issue with a more positive attitude, which led me to seek more help from the professor and my classmates than my narrow-minded and passive attitude allowed me to at the beginning. Even though my final grade for that course turned out to be the lowest on my college transcript, I had no regrets about it.
These were the significant cases of adversity that I encountered during my first semester in college. Both were minor, retrospectively. Yet they both taught me a big lesson in their own way. My ego was bruised at that time – no question about it. But I was glad that I fell forward and carried on.
Han Li, Modern Languages & Literatures