This winter, I worked with Chinese students at Cornell to arrange for a group of editors and a photographer from The Cornell Daily Sun to visit China. This undertaking gave us all valuable experience on how to promote mutual understanding between students of different backgrounds.
In 2006, my wife and I had the great honor to receive an invitation from my fellow trustee Ratan Tata, who is the head of the Tata group, the largest Indian business conglomerate. The trip was a life-changing experience for my wife and I. Before we left India, we had a discussion with Mr. Tata that focused on two issues: how should Cornell engage its international students in campus life? And how do we facilitate more interaction between international students and their American peers?
Cornell has already brought people of different cultures here to Ithaca and its other campuses. However, even if we have many cultures represented, some students may still live here like Robinson Crusoe, keeping within the confines of the island of their own culture, and separated from all the other cultures that we have here at Cornell. For that reason, though it is very important to enroll students of different backgrounds here at Cornell, it is far more important to promote positive interactions between these students.
Through The Sun’s trip to China, we realized that the way to promote mutual understanding is to sponsor the engagement of international students in projects with American students. It is easy to understand how it could have been a life-changing experience for the four people in the Sun’s delegation. However, the trip was just as significant for those who helped plan it and those who The Sun visited on the other side of the Pacific
First off, all of us who helped plan the trip are immensely proud that we could make something like this happen. Second, I benefit greatly from reading these articles about China and, more importantly, I greatly enjoyed several discussions with the editors and photographer from The Sun about this trip. Those articles and discussions have actually helped me to understand my county better. They wrote about things I already knew, but since I was born into that society, I take many of the cultural differences for granted. And as Cornell students, we can benefit from frank and in-depth discussions on issues so that our understanding of a different culture will not only be at a superficial level.
It is true that Cornell does currently have many study abroad programs, and I actually met two students who went to India through one of the programs last year. What surprised me most from our discussion was that they still do not know any Indian students at Cornell despite the fact that they studied to India for a semester! It is an untapped learning opportunity for Cornell to provide incentives and promotion to students who have or plan to study abroad and our own international student community.
Something else I learned from my experience planning The Sun’s China trip is that our alumni have left an indelible mark on China and the rest of the world and continue to do so. Indeed, the opportunities ahead for Cornellians to effect change on the world are so endless that many may remain unexplored unless we are proactive. Take China for example: while we planned the trip, we noticed that Cornell alumni have helped to established several important institutions in China. We tried to contact them, and they were very helpful even though most of them had never been contacted by representatives of Cornell before. They provided huge support in translation, transportation, and room and board. This trip couldn’t have happened without their help.
While in China, Southeast University in Nanjing, where six Cornell alumni were senior administrators, let The Sun meet all of the students in an honorary society dedicated to Cornell alumnus Mao Yisheng, masters ’17. Our alumnus Lu Yanzhi ’18 designed the master plan of the city, which was at that time the capital of China, as well as the city’s most significant landmark, the monument of Dr. Sun Yat-Sun, the father of the Republic of China. They also had lunch with Mr. Yang Xiaofo, now a congressman of China. His father Yang Xingfo ’18 is one of the most famous civil right leaders in China, for which he was assassinated in 1933. The Shanghai Publishing Museum even arranged a TV interview by Shanghai TV, a major television station in China for The Sun’s visit. I believe Cornell has left a huge legacy in China and many other places in the world, and we don’t even know about most of it. It is our responsibility to inform ourselves of our history of international development to have productive interactions with the global community as Cornellians.
2000 years ago, there was a kingdom inside China called Yelang. The King of Yelang made all kinds of funny claims because he is so preoccupied by the illusion that his country was so big that he did not even need to consider other countries in the world. Just like Robinson Crusoe, I hope nobody at Cornell will live like the King of Yelang, who future generations made fun of because he thought his kingdom was the biggest one in the whole world — and in reality, it was the size of Tompkins County. It is important for Cornell to enroll international students, but what moves us a step ahead of our peer institutions is the promotion of positive interactions between international and American students. It goes to the heart of our founders’ mission of “any person, any study”, and it will make Cornell the locus for dialogue between the next generation of global leaders.
Mao Ye is a student-elected trustee. He can be contacted at my87@cornell.edu [1]. Trustee Viewpoint appears alternate Wednesdays.
Links:
[1] mailto:my87@cornell.edu