Before coming to Choate, I had prejudices against people who came from certain regions. As someone grew up in Shanghai hearing negative things about people from outside the city, I retained some of these biases when I came to Choate.
For instance, I was told that city people are more productive and efficient, while country people are more lax. I also believed that city people are more social while country people tend to be more introverted and reserved.
I favored befriending and connecting with people from cities because I felt I would share their perspectives on many issues. Even though I still had some friends who did not grow up in the city, we were never that close, and I could never fully open up to them. It felt like there was an invisible barrier that prevented me from being genuine with them.
During my time at Choate these prejudices have changed entirely, as now, some of my closest friends aren’t from large cities at all. Nonetheless, it took time for me to break down my old biases. While participating in ice-breakers during orientation on the first day of school, the bias I had about personal identity forced me to pay particular attention to where people are from. I frowned when I heard the names of towns that I had never heard of. To me, these places represented a certain backwardness and lack of modernity. So when I was grouped with a girl who was from Xinjiang, a suburban region in China, I naturally didn’t want to talk with her very much. But to my surprise, I we had a lot of interests in common and attended the same clubs, so I gradually started getting to know her better. At the time, I would never have known that we both liked the same rapper, TizzyT, or that she would later become one of my closest friends.
Sometimes I question myself and wonder how I started to befriend people who were not from cities, thus violating my “principle.” I was afraid that I had become the “suburban person” that I had long detested, growing used to the more backward, less modern lifestyle because I had been away from city life for too long. But over time, these paranoid ideas became less and less prevalent in my mind.
Choate helped me discover that personal backgrounds don’t define a person. Choate is a diverse community with people of many different backgrounds, and all of our interests are bound to cross at some point. The idea that one’s origins defines or separates people is, of course, foolish. The bias that country people are more relaxed and that city people are more productive is likewise false.
Last summer, I had the opportunity to visit Xinjiang. I discovered that it was a beautiful place. I was astonished by the mesmerizing scenery of rising mountains in the distance and the calmness of air undisturbed by the constant blare of car horns found in the city. The diversity and atmosphere at Choate have led me to embrace the difference between country and city, broadening my perspectives and acceptance of those unlike me.
