This morning, we started by visiting the Shanghai Supercomputer Center. We had a tour of the facility and the museum they have inside the company building. At some point, the guide who gave us the tour showed us real time videos of the Bund, shot by cameras they have on site. She then said that on average around 800,000 tourists visit the Bund per day. That statement confused me, as I thought to myself, how can they tell whether the person visiting the Bund is a tourist or a local? So I asked her and she said their cameras have facial recognition features so they know exactly who’s a tourist and who’s a local. I found that to be impressive yet somewhat intrusive and concerning at the same time. Then we had a walk around the Hi-Tech park area where the supercomputer center was located. It was massive!
After lunch at the university, we met some Chinese students from Sanda. We had two different activities: the women went to play ping-pong, the national sport, and the men went to have a basketball match with the university’s team. I was a little nervous about playing ping pong because I didn’t feel like I had enough hand-eye coordination, but once I opened up to it, and with the help of Dr. Li, I actually found it to be enjoyable (and difficult too! I was sweating from just running to pick up the ball when I missed, which happened quite often). We saw students from the university’s ping-pong team play and it was really impressive. They were so fast that it was almost impossible to see the ball. Then we went on to watch the guys play basketball. It looked like they had fun and I must say that our guys represented CSUN very well. Even though we lost, it was a close call, and I think that’s impressive considering the fact our guys are not part of a basketball team. Then again, the Chinese students might have taken it easy on them, which I won’t find surprising as they are such incredible hosts.
After the match ended we went on to meet more Chinese students, which was organized by Sanda’s student union. We were given some topics of discussion, one of them being the current trade war happening between the US and China. I could tell the students were nervous to bring it up thinking we may support the president and his actions and were surprised and relieved to hear we didn’t, along with many other Americans. It was an experience I was really looking forward to, as I wanted to see if and what were the differences between us. I learned there are many differences between the American and Chinese student experience. For example, the Chinese students don’t get to pick their classes, their schedules or professors. They have classes for 12 hours a day sometimes! They have absolutely no time to do anything other than studying, and they were surprised to hear most of us work while attending school. We also met them during finals, which take over a period of a few weeks, and they were under a lot of stress. They were shocked we had all our finals in just one week. I feel that having those meetings with the Chinese students are going to be something I am going to remember for a long time, as it had a big impact on me. One of the reasons I wanted to go on this trip was to have a cultural exchange experience and meeting the students definitely fulfilled that. I wish we had more time with them, maybe an organized outing or taking classes together.