Learning Through Traveling: Postcards from the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Hank Wang, Kitty Deng, Wystan Wu and 4 more

Six Chinese students travel through China during the COVID-19 pandemic, recording their travels in prose, diary, and photographs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781387636778

Book preview

Learning through Traveling

Postcards from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Hank Wang 王锦辉

Kitty Deng 邓贤慧

Wystan Wu 吴彦宸

Tiffany Zhang 张天艺

Josh Li 李明政

Andi Wu 吴安迪

with an Introduction by Jessie Chen

EastWest Press

2022

© 2022 by Hank Wang 王锦辉, Kitty Deng 邓贤慧, Wystan Wu 吴彦宸, Tiffany Zhang 张天艺, Josh Li 李明政, Andi Wu 吴安迪

Edited by Douglas Ray

Design and layout by Jessica Smith

EastWest Press

Birmingham, AL USA

Editors Douglas Ray and Jessica Smith

978-1-387-63677-8

Imprint: Lulu.com

Introduction

Jessie Chen

Travel as Transformation: An Introduction

Summer of 2020—the world was in the thick of dealing with the COVID 19 pandemic.  Chinese students in US boarding schools were faced with travel restrictions that prevented them from going back to campus.  Schools were busy developing online classes for the coming school year.  A group of students and their parents from Western Reserve Academy, a boarding school in Hudson, Ohio, decided that kids needed a social life rather than depending solely on screens and Zoom for interaction; therefore, these kids were to live and study together in Shanghai as a group. 

I was invited to create a boarding program for these ten kids.  Also in that summer, a dear friend of mine quoted what Ted Faunce, the former head of school at Avenues: The World School in Shenzhen, had said, A global crisis is an opportunity that must not be wasted. This line made me pause and re-evaluate this harsh interruption of our lives in different angles.  After a month of boarding together in Shanghai, we took our group on the road, taking full advantage of the location flexibility of online classes.  From October 2020 to June 2021, we traveled over 40,000 kilometers in China, visited 12 provinces and 33 cities and counties. 

In a year of continuous moving every two to three weeks, this group of kids learned to travel efficiently and to deal with unforeseeable inconveniences with a great deal of calm and agility.  They bonded as a group, exploring ever-changing environments, helping each other, arguing and compromising among themselves, and embracing their differences.  They became, in essence, a community at a time when the idea of community was threatened or, at least, thoroughly tested.

When online classes were in session, we would spend two to three weeks in each location, living in a rented house or a hostel.  The kids would have online classes from 6pm to 12:30am.  There were activities during the day.  When school was on break, we would travel intensively with an historian on a small bus, moving from place to place on a daily basis.  We traveled through mountains and remote villages.  We rested at places with no running water or toilets.  China’s many faces were unveiled to us. How we picked routes depended on the richness and importance of historical relics or natural landscapes, on weather conditions and on local COVID ordinances.  In order to cover the entire country well, we needed another two to three months of intensive travel.  By fall of 2021, this group of kids had all gone back to school in the US.  We planned to continue our journey through China in summer of 2022.  However, COVID restrictions tightened even further and prevented the group from coming back to China in the summer of 2022.  Travel will continue, hopefully, in 2023. 

Chinese schools don’t teach history well.  There is too much taboo.  As a result, these kids, especially the ones that have been preparing for US boarding schools, mostly grow up in glitzy modern metropolises, focusing much of their time on English and science, and lack solid understanding of their own history.  In recent years, there has been a revival of Chinese traditional culture in China.  However, it is mostly in superficial forms without understanding the underlying logic.  One of the reasons US schools bring in international students is to bring diversity into the classroom.  These ten kids will be able to bring real diversity that comes from deep, personal, visceral understanding.  They do not just know China superficially or through the official narratives, they have had serious, John Dewey-esque education as experience.

Beyond witnessing their collective growth into a community, watching how they have transformed as individuals has been the most rewarding experience in my life.  This book is to give a glimpse of how teenagers interact with historical relics and nature; how they reckon with culture and community.  Travel has expanded their boundaries in many directions.  They are becoming global citizens with global values and Chinese roots.  Most importantly, they are becoming interesting individuals. 

Jessie Chen

Hank Wang 王锦辉

Reflection/Introduction: Learning Through Traveling

My sophomore year started as a year of Covid-19 Pandemic and online learning. Staying home 24/7 and staring at a screen with 14 pixelated faces for months was a blend of loneliness, boredom, and depression. So, I sought change. I decided to join a travel study group of Chinese students from US boarding schools who were unable to return to campus, like myself. China became our campus, while we still had our online classes.

Our travel study group focused on a single field of study: ancient Chinese history and culture, which is a topic of great scale and complexity. We learned about important relics that survived through time and history. Sometimes they were wooden halls and towers, sometimes Buddhist grottoes and stone sculpture, and sometimes frescoes and steles. We immersed ourselves in local cultures, experiencing food, customs, and linguistic differences. While we were not earning formal course credit for what we were learning, that did not stop us from engaging.

We constantly moved from site to site, from plane to bus to reach remote parts of the country and sites that were in relatively unexplored places. We were doing fieldwork instead of schoolwork. Learning in a classroom is like watching a movie; learning in the field is making a movie. One gets to be present at every scene and angle. Our Chinese history guide and teacher Mr. Xu would explain the background and reason of existence of every relic the group traveled to. I enjoyed the fact that I was able to learn while appreciating the sheer volume and level of sophistication of hundred-years-old artifacts and buildings.

Traveling can be truly exhausting in the long run. But traveling this year has built my sense of independence and self-discipline. I have learned to pack light, to wash and dry clothes without a washing machine, and to identify different art and architectural styles. Though the pandemic presented a real set of challenges, I believe that we did our best to make the best of it.

在旅行中成长

高二那年的开头，我的生活被新冠疫情和网课所折磨。花几个月时间宅在家里并盯着一个14 张像素化面孔的电脑屏幕只会带来孤独、无聊和抑郁。所以，我寻求更好的变化。我决定加入一个旅行学习小组，由像我一样无法返回校园的美国中国留学生组成。虽然我们继续上美高的网课，但中国却成了我们的新校园。

我们的旅行学习小组专注于一个单一的研究领域：中国古代历史和文化，这是一个规模巨大且复杂的课题。我们有幸了解了幸存于时间与历史的重要文物。有时是木制的殿堂和塔楼，有时是佛窟和石雕，有时是壁画和石碑。我们沉浸在中国的多元文化中，体验食物、习俗和各地方言。虽然我们没有为此获得任何课程学分，但这并没有阻止我们参与。

我们不断地从一点跋涉到另一点，从飞机到公共汽车，从而到达中国那些偏远和相对未开发的区域。我们做的是实地考察而不是学校作业。在教室里学习就像看电影；实地学习就是拍电影。我们可以享受并品尝不同场景和角度的味道。作为中国历史的向导，徐老师会解释每件文物的背景和存在的原因。我很享受一个即能够一边学习，又一边欣赏具有百年历史的文物和建筑物的庞大数量和复杂程度的生活。

从长远来看，旅行真的很累。但今年的旅行让我尝到了独立和自律的感觉。我学会了轻装上阵，学会不用洗衣机洗衣服和烘干衣服，学会辨别不同的艺术和建筑风格。尽管疫情带来了一系列的挑战，但我相信我们已尽力做到最好。

China’s Unique Architecture

I didn’t really know my country’s history before I traveled in the past year. Chinese history is long and complicated, spanning more than 2000 years. For a beginner to Chinese history like myself, the best way to navigate the labyrinth of dynasties is to study it through a specific angle: an angle which may be thought of as the thread beyond time that connects an era with another era. My thread of study was architecture.

But what