Lucky in Hainan

By Kacie Miura

Watch the audio slideshow on this story.

Children in a Hainan village make a small fire outside an old temple.

Spending my summer vacation in a classroom only added to the many inconsistencies that riddled my study abroad experience in China. Modern and traditional, capitalism and communism, and, most strikingly of all, wealth and poverty, all intersect within the "Middle Kingdom," as China is often called.

I was curious to see the effects of China's booming economy and rapid development, so I enrolled in the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa's study abroad summer program at Hainan University, located in China's southernmost province. For nine weeks, 17 other UH students and I took intensive courses in Mandarin for eight credits that would later transfer to our home campus.

Because the university is located on an island, I saw much less development than I had expected. Compared to larger mainland cities, such as Beijing or Shanghai, industrialization in Hainan has been progressing at a much slower pace.

The Hawai'i of Asia

The laid-back attitude of the islanders, much like that of people of Hawai‘i, helped me adapt to Hainan, even though most of the people there did not speak any English. I even became comfortable with navigating through crowds in unkempt alleys, using squat toilets and riding in rickshaws amid what seemed like an anarchy of cars.

My UH classmates and I followed a strict daily schedule of language instruction in the morning and tai chi or kung fu in the afternoon. Perhaps the best part of the day was right after lunch, when most people in the city are allowed to rest from the unbearable midday heat.

During this rest period, we would retreat to our private, air-conditioned dorm rooms in the newly built foreign students building, while the Chinese students had to sweat out the afternoon in their tiny, worn-down rooms they shared with as many as five other people.

Although I was shocked by the glaring discrepancies between our living conditions and the Chinese students', I was even more amazed at how they still considered themselves to be lucky. For many of the Chinese students, simply going to college is an honor. This is due to lack of space in China's universities because of its exceedingly large population.

An inexpensive, but valuable lesson

After exhausting days of instruction, my friends and I would often spend our nights getting $2 massages followed by a late-night street barbecue. However, regardless of how much I reveled in the cheap food and massages, I couldn't help but compare the luxurious life I was enjoying to the stark poverty of China's large class of uneducated peasants.

While I was snacking on grilled oysters and lamb sticks one night with my tutor, a wrinkled, hunched-over woman approached me and, with shame in her eyes, asked for a dollar. As I reached into my purse, my tutor, afraid that the beggar had offended me, shouted at the woman to leave.

At first I was shocked by my tutor's treatment of the old woman, but I soon realized that elderly and sickly beggars are fixtures on many of China's streets.

As in most parts of China, bargaining for goods and services is a common practice. I especially enjoyed the chaotic and colorful markets, where rows of vendors compete to sell their goods. Part of the markets' chaos comes from the many different Chinese dialects spoken by the vendors, who come from all over the country, economics graduate student Tom Cai explained to me.

While shopping, I would often turn to him for advice on what prices to bargain for. Thanks to him, I bought lots of jewelry and clothing for a fraction of what they cost in the states.

However, as much as I love a good bargain, I was plagued by a guilty conscience. Because the U.S. dollar is strong in China, mere pocket change for me was a huge profit for the vendor. Not knowing how else to appease my conscience, I bought more, ate more and got massages more than necessary.

From my study abroad experiences, I concluded that, until there is a better solution for how to deal with the social effects of China's booming economy, the contradictions between living conditions will remain a riddle. The poor will continue to worry about surviving, while the elite will not need to worry about anything - especially getting richer.

Perhaps because I had never before seen a family dwelling in a weather-beaten shed, a father displaying his deformed son on a sidewalk for sympathy cash, or an elderly man washing himself in a puddle, I had never been able to see so clearly the depravity in my own life.

My life should not be full of material things, but of appreciation for how easy my life as a college student in Hawai‘i is compared to the poor's in the developing world. Therefore, no matter how bad my day ever gets in Hawai‘i, all I need to do is think about the many people I came across in China to remember how lucky I really am.

Click here to find out more on studying abroad in China.