I will never forget my first night at Whitman because a girl who worked at Bright’s said to me, “Welcome to Whitman! You will learn to love it!” After a pause, she continued with a wink, “If you don’t like everything there, you will love our candies!”
On one hand, I was amazed by what an excellent spokesperson she was for Whitman and Bright’s. On the other hand, I wondered, “Why do I have to ‘learn’ to love Whitman?”
Oh! You can’t love Whitman at first sight because it keeps shocking you!
The first shock on the first day of this semester showed up right after I left my house for breakfast. A blonde girl walked towards me and I glanced at her as I would in China to any passer-by.
She smiled immediately. It was such a delightful smile that I felt like we had been best friends for 10 years. But she passed me by very quickly, which took me back to the reality that we were totally strangers.
Wide-eyed and perhaps a faint blush on my face, I kept walking. A second person passed me. With sagging jeans, a purple T-shirt and disheveled hair, he was a stranger too. He stared at me for a second when a big smile appeared on his face: what’s going on?! Did he have a crush on me?
Then, the lady in Prentiss who swiped my ID card smiled at me as if there were a hanger in her mouth. When I left, she smiled again and said, “So you have a great day!” I was so surprised with her enthusiasm that I stupidly stammered, “Oh yeah…”
An American teacher at my university once told me that she was surprised that many Chinese English learners enjoy saying “hello” to foreigners in the street. She told me, “In America, people are usually not that friendly.” At Whitman, however, I learned about an exception.
It’s not hard to learn to love a school abounding with smiles, but as I made more friends I found that Whitman seems to be enveloped in a halo of hypomania: which in the context of Whitman becomes “Whitmania.”
Before school started, I saw countless Whitties greeting their old pals in a way that seemed almost “violent” to me: they knocked into each other with so much force that I felt that they must have broken their spines, but then they burst into laughter which was so loud that I couldn’t hear how their spines cracked.
The first two weeks was more for making new friends than for taking class. You probably have forgotten how many times you introduced yourself during that period. Personally I was shocked by how fast I made new friends and how much faster I forgot their names. I felt terrible about my bad memory until a mutual friend of my RA and mine chatted with us for half an hour and then suddenly asked my RA, “By the way, what’s your name again?”
“I met a lot of people, I talked to them, but I just forgot their names.” The next day, I heard these words from a friend who sat opposite me in the dining hall, which was like a slap in the face: then what’s the point in making friends?
The Chinese writer Lin Yutang once wrote in his book My Country and My People, “Many Europeans in Shanghai wonder why they are dropped by their Chinese friends without realizing the simple reason that the latter are not able to stand the strain of a long and exciting conversation, especially when it is in a foreign language.”
I was ashamed that these words still applied to me even though they were written in 1935, since the loud music and happy conversations I heard at 2 a.m. really frustrated me because I couldn’t live a vigorous life like my Whittie friends. But now, wait a minute: what on earth is behind your “Whitmania?”
