Today
was registration day at PKU, and my second experience with a Chinese brand of
bureaucracy. My first experience, getting my Chinese visa, was incredibly
efficient. I spent probably an hour total at the consulate in Chicago, of which
roughly 90 seconds were spent at the counter itself. The waiting time would
have been even shorter if I had made semi-decent copies of my documents; the
process of finding coins to operate the consulate’s copying machine took up
probably a half hour of that time. My biggest (positive) surprise though came
when I picked up my visa and passport four days later. I had prepared for the
possibility of spending the posted visa fee of $140, but it turns out that that
amount only applied to American citizens – my lovely dark red passport gave me
a discount down to $30!
The
titular second experience with Chinese bureaucracy came with PKU registration. Campus
was crazy today. PKU is a pretty large institution, with roughly 30,000 total
students (roughly 15,000 undergrads), and registration/move-in day was
correspondingly busy. For those lucky enough to have parents accompany them to
their first day at college, someone was waiting with their luggage outside of
the Olympic Khoo Teck Puat Gymnasium. Inside, each department had a stand to
process documents and welcome their students (I looked wistfully over to the
sign marked ‘physics’). The president of 北大 posed with new students for photo ops,
though we seemed to get a special treatment when he walked over to personally
welcome us. While we were waiting in line at the Yenching booth, an undercover
journalist had apparently snuck in and interviewed one of us – this was news to
the interviewed, who found out after the article popped up on a Japanese news
site and was quickly shared on our group WeChat thread. Fun stuff.
The
Gymnasium itself marked the first time I have ever been inside a Summer Olympic
venue – it was apparently the first purpose-built table tennis stadium in the
world. The venue still carried all the branding from those Games, including the
large, colorful Beijing 2008 logo still gracing much of the ceiling. The two large video screens, presumably
retired from a glorious history of showing Ping-Pong close-ups, were now busy
playing a very melancholy but seemingly high production value video loop whose
meaning we couldn’t quite make out. Part of it seemed to be about the death of
a well-loved professor because of its close-up shots of a gravestone marked as
such, but it had the kind of tone and feel of those ‘welcome to America’
propaganda reels they play at the immigrations and custom lines at U.S.
airports.
 |
| PKU Registration |
This
day more than anything marked how efficient bureaucracy can be when it wants
to, if you happen to be the person its trying to help. As far as we could tell,
we were able to skip the entire line during at least the international student
registration process, as a special time block was ‘reserved’ for us in the
morning. The entire process took roughly
an hour for us, as our visas were checked and our information entered into the
system (hey, looks like I’m even bureaucratically listed as 施楷文！ Those without Chinese names were assigned
one at the process, I was told). Talking to a non-Yenching international
student also in our dorm revealed that the process can take up to four hours
for those without our line-jumping ‘abilities.’ This kind of overt privilege our
program receives has been an issue since its inception over a year ago, and the
(legitimately) perceived elitism on our program’s part is likely going to be a
major issue affecting both our standing among the student populace at 北大
and our legacy on this campus.
On that note, there were some very interesting
developments concerning this kind of tension tonight that I may or may not get
into on the blog, but this debate over elitism and my program will definitely
not go away quickly.
Finally, I’ve been called a grad student
several times so far, and it still sounds weird to me. I guess I have at least
a year to get used to it :p Tomorrow will be fun: I get to see the inside of a
Chinese hospital for my medical check required for my residence permit!
No comments:
Post a Comment