2002 - Alice Song Weekly 宋 旻 潔 週 記

Issue:606 Date: 04/04/2002

(8) 接待宋旻潔的感想
One Month of Culture Exchange in Both Ways - by Richard Spicer

Richard Spicer (left) and Alice Song

By Richard Spicer
St. Louis University High School

My entire family members were excited when we finally met the exchange student from China. During the month of February, I had the pleasure of hosting Alice Song from the Nanjing Foreign Language School which is a sister school of my school, the St. Louis University High School. Many of you might already know her from the weekly article that she writes in the SCANEWS, but I had the chance to get to know her a little better.

Throughout the month, I found out many interesting traits unique to Alice, as well as many commonalties between her and my American friends. For instance, Alice has a very unique gift for painting beautiful pictures of landscapes. While she stayed at my house, I would often find her in her room painting pictures of plants, trees, and mountains. Also unlike to many Americans teenagers, Alice spent countless hours in her room studying and reviewing over and over until all hours of the night. I was very impressed by her studiousness and how she easily learned things in a foreign language that most people her age cannot learn in their native language. Although I was impressed by her abilities, I was not surprised because my Chinese teacher at St. Louis University High School has always reminded my class of how diligent and studious Chinese teenagers are in comparison to Americans.

Aside from her acute thirst for knowledge, Alice's social skills also proved to be very compatible to American standards. She immediately bonded with my family and was very open to interaction with my five brothers and sisters. I can only imagine the shock she must have felt coming from an only child environment to the crazy playground atmosphere of my house. She especially grew fond of our family dog Scamp. Scamp is a very lively dog, to say the least, and initially shocked Alice a little bit, but eventually Alice and Scamp became very good friends and she never passed up the opportunity to play with him, or the rest of the rambunctious crew known as my family.

On a more personal note, the time I spent with Alice proved to be very educational and entertaining. I enjoyed the long car rides home from SLUH as a time to communicate with Alice in Chinese. I was able to test my own abilities and allow Alice to speak a little bit of her native tongue. The conversations always ended up being about something relatively unimportant, but they were always fun. She always had something to say about ancient Chinese history or an ancient proverb to quote in every situation. I was very moved by the passion and interest she had in her country's culture, and I realized that the only time that sort of passion is expressed by Americans is after a great tragedy or victory.

Alice also enjoyed hanging out with my friends on the weekend. I brought her along to two school dances, where Alice seemed very surprised and proceeded to take a whole role of pictures of random people dancing and acting crazy. It wasn't until the very end of the night when I finally caught a glimpse of Alice twisting to the The Blues Brothers "Shout" out the corner of my eye. I was very happy to see that she was enjoying a little bit of American teenage culture, although she obviously wasn't used to that kind of activity because she fell asleep less than five minutes into the drive home.

In conclusion, my experience hosting Alice proved to be rewarding for my all my family and friends. My mother stated about Alice's stay, "I think all of the noise in the house drove her crazy, but I enjoyed her presence and we were able to learn a little bit about Chinese culture that we would have otherwise never been exposed to." Alice showed capped off the stay by presenting each person in my large family a special gift that she had brought with her from China. However after staying at our house, Alice was forced to call her mother and have her send more gifts because she had no idea that her host families would be ever be so large. That's a small piece of American culture that I was able to offer to her.