This blog post will be dedicated to why I decided to take my first trip to China in the holidays of my Nanyang Technological University course. Around this time, after spending a lot of time with Ryan from the US, I was growing in daring and confidence. In the past I would have been afraid to solo travel to far away places. But now I realised it was possible provided you were vigilant and planned the trip well. There is a fine line between bravery and foolishness and I ended up in a bad situation more than once in China, unable to even voice my predicament to the people around me.

It might seem very strange to my Scottish readers how I ended up in China of all places, there is a lot of anti-Chinese rhetoric in the British media at the time of writing, plus Chinese people who live in Scotland are often shy and introverted, it can be hard to get to know them. However once I had enrolled on the exchange year at NTU there were lots of factors pushing me towards China.

Firstly I had been learning basic Mandarin (Chinese) as an elective in semester 2 of my NTU course. I was quite attached to my Chinese teacher who was from Changsha (if I recall) and was very enthusiastic about teaching the language of her home country. She had previously worked in Hong Kong so she told us a bit about Hong Kong too.

Secondly my public speaking social club, as I have talked about in other blog posts, had many PRC students who were particularly friendly and sociable. I started to take part in these social sessions more and more. I got to know many of the PRC students quite well.

Thirdly there was a bit of romanticisation of China in film and the media at that time. In the film Looper which came out when I was at NTU, Joseph Gordon-Levitt starts off in Kansas in the US but ends up in Shanghai with a particularly picturesque scene of him in front of the Bund by the riverside. The Daily Telegraph was often my father’s go to newspaper back in Scotland (and I was influenced by his reading choices) and the columns and reporting often made reference to the excellent economic growth of PRC.

Fourthly was a general dissatisfaction with engineering and STEM. Where was all the number crunching and computer simulations leading? My internship with a large third party defence firm I found was unfulfilling and I wasn’t able to take part as much as I would of wanted to. When you write a blog for instance you can immediately share it with the people around you and see their smiles. I imagine aspiring GPs and nurses get a rush when they solve a problem for people they know. Teachers see before them their students progress. You get an immediate return on your effort of studying in these types of jobs. Scotland doesn’t engineer much in 2025, you have to relocate away from your community to get the work. Its certainly not the way I envisioned it when I selected my course choices back in 5th year of my high school.

And so I began planning my trip to visit the People’s Republic of China.