About a month ago, I was bound to embark on my journey to Beijing where I would be pursuing my master’s degree for a year. As I packed in preparation for my trip, I suddenly got swamped in anxiety, which was odd especially for someone like me that had barely been home for more than three weeks in the past three years. I spent the past three years in a Southeast Asia country Malaysia. The country had a good share of the Chinese population that I had clearly gotten accustomed to. 

In an attempt to understand why I was feeling anxious, I thought about the first time that I left home for my undergraduate studies, cherishing a dream of living the college life like that I often watched in Western movies. However, it was totally shattered by reality at least for my first semester. The first month was probably the hardest test of my self-esteem and it made me finally believe the quote "there is no place like home" for the first time. It was clear that I was different and that meant I had to work harder towards belonging either by making friends, being smarter, or even just smiling more. So I finally discovered part of what had undoubtedly caused my angst, which was the thought of starting over again in a country where I might not be accepted. 

Sometimes, the simple act of getting started is the hard part. So I boarded my flight to Beijing with all these calculations in my mind. I consoled myself with the fact that I wasn't going to face all this alone since I had come with a couple of colleagues from South Sudan. I arrived late in the evening. After the jet lag of a 10-hour flight, all I looked forward to was a warm shower and a cozy bed to energize for what was to come as of my assumptions. 

My friends and I decided to discover the city a bit the next day after completing our registration process with the university when we faced one of the biggest challenges of language barrier. A few people within the university could speak English, but we encountered none outside the university, the sound of camera shutters as we are photographed by the curious folks, and, of course, the occasional need to feel the texture of our skin.   

Being the adventurous bunch, we decided to take advantage of the period before the start of the course to find a shopping mall that had more than just food stuffs. By using sign language, we talked to a tricycle, sanlunche, driver who took us to a really far shopping mall that was already closing on our arrival. So we just took a picture of its name in Chinese for the next time that we were to return, and then started trying to find our way back to the university. At that time we only knew nihao and Zhongguo Chuanmei Daxue, the name of our university. That made us feel like experts in the Chinese language. So we stopped by to ask this girl that was trying to get herself a taxi how we could get back to the university. She could barely understand until she saw my school ID. She clearly knew there was no way we could have made it back to the university, so she found us a taxi. We later learned she had paid for it on our arrival. I remember being so overwhelmed by her kindness. I kept wondering how she could pay for the fare of total strangers without expecting anything.  

Similarly on a different adventure, after failing to find a taxi, we looked for directions to the nearest subway station. A lady besides us saw our puzzled faces and pointed us in the right direction. Deciding that we might not find the station, she went out of her way to personally take us there when she had clearly had a long working day. On our way there, I remember she asked us "heshui ma," which means do you want some drink. After that, she entered a convenience store and came out with four bottles of water for all us.  

After this, I had come to acknowledge the refreshing feeling where my skin was not associated with crime. I began to adopt positive attitude and open mind as I continue on my discovery of China for the next 10 months. 

(Estella Malek Reuben is a student from South Sudan studying in Beijing)