EVERYBODY CHEN WANG TONIGHT
You meet the damndest people in a second-rate graduate school. Mine was near Preston, England, not far from Manchester, slightly closer to Blackpool. If you’re not familiar with Blackpool… you lucky bastard. The main administrative building on campus flew an English, a British and a Chinese flag. This struck me as odd for about an hour. I’d soon learn that “UCLAN,” as it was called, offered much lower acceptance standards for Chinese students who came from wealth. There must be an awful lot of wealthy Chinese families as UCLAN wasn’t lacking in Chinese students. A proud and respected people and culture. After the first couple of weeks of some pretty tricky classes, International Accounting and the like, it became painfully obvious that 8 of the 10 Chinese students in my 28-person course couldn’t read, write or speak English. This was fascinating, not because they all seemed to rely on one person to translate the coursework to them then use the same person to tran...