Hi. I’m Yixuan Dong from Shanghai, China. I came to America as a junior student in High School six years ago. As we all know, our family have to spend a lot of money to send us to America. However, the hardest thing is to stay in America. There is a huge difference between American and Chinese such as education, food, communication and so on. For us, it’s not only challenges but also a growth.

In Chinese high school, the only thing we need to do is study. We spend all the weekends on taking tutorial course or prepare for the “Gao Kao”. “Gao Kao” is a college entrance examination which only host one time per year. If you failed in it or you don’t do very well in it, you have to go to a bad university or spend another year on retaking it. When I was still in the high school in China, I get up at 6:30 since the school require us to be there before 7:30. The homework is very hard, I usually studied till 1 or 2 at night. After I came to America, the education system is completely different. Each student have a different schedule and students are walking to different classrooms for different courses. Instructors will not taking the time between each class for teaching extra materials. In addition to this, homework is not like that hard as I have in China. As a result, I think education in China is determined by only one exam, you can still get pretty good grade even you didn’t do very well in homework or midterms. The education in America focused on basic things, which is determined by a lot of things such as homework, midterms and finals.

One of the most difficult thing in the first year when I came to America is the culture difference. For example, there is one time I had dinner with my host family. After dinner, I saw Mrs. Adams was washing her own plate. I thought washing one plate will not take a long time so I just wait there till her done for getting something from the shelf behind her. Later Mr.Adams told me she was mad about that because I didn’t say “ excuse me”.

Some different thing between Chinese and American is the attitude about participating activities. For example,  when I was still in High School, the school will hold activities on every friday afternoon. In the morning as the house leader determine who want to join it, and almost every American are happy to join even they are not good at it. But every of us will be silence at that time.

Another difficult part is the food. As the professor taught before, there are a lot of ways in cooking food.As I noticed, my host family cooked food is simply boil it or decoct it. For us, it’s different. Sometimes one same dish will have different tastes due to different areas. In china, I don’t need to worry about food, my grandparent will cook it. When I was a freshman in Stonybrook, I started to learn cooking. My favorite dish is a kind of pork (红烧肉）, cooked by my grandparents. I failed in cooking it many times for several reasons such as putting wrong sugar, putting too much soy sauce or some other reasons. I searched online about how to cook it and sometimes I just made a phone call to my grandparents and asked questions about it.  One of my friend, who is very good at cooking, cooked it in last Spring Festivel. It tastes good but probably because we are from different area, it’s not the one I want. After cooking five to six times with different seasonings, I finally got it. Ordering food  is also different to us, in China, we don’t need to pay tips. When I order a Papa johns, I need to pay a pizza for 12 dollars, but tips, taxes and delivery fee for another 10 dollars.

We still celebrate the holidays but not celebrate at the same day because we don’t have break for it. For example, We cooked by ourselves with friends instead of with family in last spring festivel. However, we do not pay these much attention on it like what we did in china. In china, we need to let off fireworks at night, eating rice cake and giving or receiving red packets. After I go to U.S.A, we only eat rice cake since we are not interested in fireworks and the red packets is only give to someone who is younger than you.  As a result, the celebration is much more simple than the one in china.