1st Place - People & CultureI was grateful for the opportunity to visit my Chinese roommate's house in the countryside and celebrate her sister's and father's birthday with the whole family. I studied away through CIEE in Nanjing, China, and the program was structured so that each US student was paired with a Chinese native roommate for the semester. Her family lived in Hubei Province, close to Jiangsu Province (where Nanjing University was located). As in most traditional Chinese households during a celebration, the women cooked a banquet of delicious foods while their husbands played mahjong, smoked, and drank baijiu (China's signature alcohol). One of my favorite parts of visiting was hearing her family speak; they have a special dialect that only people in Xianning speak, and according to my roommate, it is an ancient dialect. I've showed many Chinese people from other areas a clip of my roommate speaking in her dialect, and none of them understood her even though they share a common dialect of standard Mandarin. This demonstrates a complexity and diversity in the Chinese language that English does not seem to have.
Location & Date: Xianning, Hubei, China; May 2018
Student: Sora Gallo
Expected Grad Year: December 2020
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