Good morning! We had a great flight over, including an OJ Simpsonesque-dash through the Detroit airport to make our connection after the Greenville flight arrived on time but sat on the tarmac for 20 minutes as the crew tried to unjam the aircraft’s main doors! We were greeted at the Pudong Airport by Meng “Harrison” Xiangchun and the Dean Liu Zhiming of the Foreign Languages School.
We have a packed day planned today—starting with a briefing by Chen Gao, Vice Director of the Suzhou Municipal Foreign Affairs Office. When we began our exchange program with Soochow University (SuDa) in 2005, Chen Gao served as our primary “facilitator,” helping us manage our numerous programs on the ground and coordinating relations between the two schools we work with here at Soochow University, the School of Foreign Languages and the School of Overseas Education. (We partnered with East China Normal University in Shanghai from 1988-2005 and then made the switch to SuDa). Chen Gao was a professor in the Foreign Languages School and the Department of Translation. We were delighted to have him working on our programs as he’s extremely hard working and well connected, which also enabled him to help us set up internships for our first batch of Fall in China students who were required to take an internship as part of their coursework in the fall of 2006. The concept of internships is still not fully understood or embraced here, so setting up suitable positions wasn’t an easy task, and would have been much more difficult and time-consuming for the FIC faculty director to manage directly from 6,000 miles away. Chen Gao was elevated to his current position in the Summer of 2008, and he continues to be a very strong friend of Furman.
The board room for our briefing!
After our briefing, each of our group is going to be hosted by a SuDa faculty member for lunch at their home and then accompanied on a tour of the city. So often tour groups just whisk through a city without having a chance for a more indepth conversation with people living there or visiting their homes, so we’re all looking forward to the opportunity. I’m going to sneak out to have lunch with the four teachers from the Overseas Ed School who will be coming to Furman July 7-25th to teach our Startalk Furman Chinese Language Camp. We’ll be bringing in 24 high school students from across the US for two weeks of immersion Chinese, and are developing a new curriculum for the program. The teachers are going to be attending a pedagogy workshop here for the program taught by Zhang Xiaolu, who served as Furman’s Language House Assistant on campus all the way back in 1998, She’ll be joining us for dinner on Tuesday night with several Furman alumni.
A host family shows us their daughter's dance class
This evening we’ll have a meeting with Soochow University President Zhang, before he hosts a welcome dinner for us. Lots more to share, but there’s AT LEAST one giant pot of coffee waiting for me downstairs.
Kathy McKinney representing Furman with President Zhang
Dave Ellison presents Chinese delicacy at dinner
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