Insight Cathay

This episode features our conversation with Abdul Ghaffar Memon, a PhD graduate from Pakistan, whose extensive involvement in campus life at Tsinghua has focused on developing cross-cultural communication within the student body. He discusses how, despite some challenges, it is easier than expected to communicate with people all over the world, and how these experiences impact on one’s behaviour at home. Ghaffar also discusses his experiences as a student in the School of Environment in the country he has come to call his “second home”.

In this episode, we speak with Kate Smith, an Australian student at Tsinghua’s School of Environment. Her accomplishments include a PhD, fluency in four languages and being one of the few international students to win the Tsinghua University Outstanding Student Award. Here she discusses adapting to Chinese life, differences between studying in Australia and China, and other insights including what it’s like to live in a house with its own KTV room! Details of her book, written in Chinese, are given at the end of the episode.

“It’s very easy to live with less, it is very easy to live without the trappings of modern life”, said Taylor Loeb sharing his travel stories in rural China, “Everybody there is some of the happiest people that I’ve known”. For our first episode, we are hearing from Taylor Loeb, who had spent two years in a village in Dali, Yunnan, teaching 5th graders English. Hailing from the United States, Taylor graduated from Tulane University with a BA in Finance (cum laude) in 2013 and has previously worked as a financial analyst at Harvard University and as business development manager for a Chinese startup in Boston. Listen to the challenges he faced when he first arrived to China without any Mandarin proficiency and from there, how he went onto teaching at a school in rural China where most students are children of migrant workers, also known as the “left-behind” children. How would the relationship between the children who had never met a foreigner before, and Taylor be like? In what ways did rural China experience transformation and change over the two years? Discover rural China with us.