Dear guests, President Daniels, Chancellor Hong, faculty, families, friends and the greatest and most gelivable graduates in the history of Hopkins-Nanjing Center, the class of 2012:

 

I am so excited to have this opportunity to share my ideas about life in Hopkins-Nanjing Center. As many of you already know, this is the third year of my study in the Center. I have been thinking for a long time about what are the most important parts of life in the Center, and finally I got the title for today: Parties, Papers, and People.

 

Before I came to the Center, a friend told me the two most important things about the Center, namely: smart and hard-working people. I heard that people here study until 2:00am in the morning. So I was thinking that this would be a great place for me to improve myself. However, when I came here, in the first two weeks—the orientation week and the shopping week, everyone was having parties everyday night. I drink more beer than I used to in undergraduate school. And Chinese students always drink beer and Chinese liquor, but international students drink many more kinds of alcohol, such as brandy, whisky, gin and vodka. One day a guy grabbed me and said, “Hey, buddy, this is for you.” Then I saw a cup in his hands with mixed alcohol and mixed colors. My chemistry in high school was pretty good, so I asked him, “Are you conducting an experiment?”

 

Then I realized that although my friend told me that people will work until 2:00am, she forgot to tell me that people will entertain and play until 3:00am. More importantly, those people are really smart, because they can find any possible reasons to have parties—so we have Halloween parties, Christmas parties, New Year’s parties, happy hours, and parties after the long Wall Walks. No matter where are we from, if there is music and alcohol, there will be happiness, and happiness is an opening for us to get to know each other.

 

If parties are an opening for us to learn about the cultures of other people, then papers and academic discussion represent the serious study of other cultures. As some of you know, we had a student named Max Massa last year. He was very interested in learning Chinese culture. One day I asked him, “Hey Max, what have you been reading recently?”  And he said “唐诗”.  I said, “Cool, I like it too.”  And then he added “I can also write it.”  I was shocked because I found that he knew more of my history than I did.  So I was thinking: you learn my history, and I’ll learn your history.

 

We don’t just study other people’s culture; more importantly, we gain a better understanding about how other people really think. For instance, I found that when we were discussing some political or social issue, international students would always want to discuss it from the perspective of democracy and liberty. That makes me think:  Why are they always framing the issue from this perspective?  It is not that I don’t like democracy and liberty, but I don’t take them as the primary basis of my thinking.

 

Another case involved our two great speakers in the Center, Mr. Andres Carrillo Perea and Mr. Xu Tongxin. One day when we were talking about China, Andres said, “We should not consider China to be a poor country any more since the GDP already ranks second in the world.” Then Xu Tongxin said, “No, China is still very poor if you consider the average level of income.” The debate went back and forth several times. I realized that when I am talking about China, I will always have some preferences and passion about it, because this is my motherland.

 

So I found that even though we are taught with formal and strict rules of academic training, including critical thinking and reasoning, we still have some fundamental differences, and our ideas are always guided by our embedded values, beliefs, ideology, and even bias. However, even though we may criticize certain values, what lies behind them is a real, live person, and our experiences in the Center have proved that we can have happiness and cooperation living together. If the current globalizing world is characterized by different people around the world coming together, and encountering each other, we will certainly continue to meet people from different countries and cultures in our future work—no matter whether we are in banking, finance, consulting, academics, or government—and the experience in the Center has equipped us with the confidence to cope with the differences.

 

At the end of my speech, I want to represent the Hopkins-Nanjing Center community to give thanks to everyone here. Thank you. Thank you for sharing this valuable and meaningful part of your life with every one of us. Thank you for your passion, your love, your criticism, your sincerity, and your energy. Let us remember everyone’s distinct personalities—for example, our “best smiles” nominated in our yearbook, Professor Fowler, Professor Armstrong-Taylor, Connie and Chynna. We came from different backgrounds, and will go to different futures. Tomorrow we will say goodbye to the Center: say goodbye to our teachers, our close friends, our lovely cat and pond, and our honorable gardener, Mr. Zhu—who always says “你好” faster than you by one second. We are going to leave each other, but what we will take away is the the knowledge of the sincerity and understanding that is possible among people.

 

Thank you very much!