September 2004 Stories

China Experience Awakens Passion

Nick Winn, a senior with a double major in economics and Chinese, recently returned from a five-month study abroad experience in China. He says it changed not only his view of China, but also his career direction.

Winn won a $5,000 Freeman-Asia scholarship, which enabled him to study Chinese at Beijing (Peking) University. “Whenever I hear stereotypes, I want to go and find out the truth behind them,” he says, in explaining why he chose to study in China. “We have a lot of stereotypes about China. I wanted to see for myself.”

Winn was one of five Willamette University students to study in Beijing last semester. He lived in one of the international dorms on campus, which exposed him to students from all over the world. “There were students in my building from everywhere – Rwanda, Bulgaria, Venezuela, Japan, Korea, France, Spain,” he says. “It was one of the poorer buildings and the living conditions weren’t good. The bathrooms were repulsive and the halls smelled ripe. I could have upgraded to another dorm, but I loved the community there. We had communal bathrooms and kept our room doors open so it was easy to meet and talk with new people.”

When he wasn’t studying Chinese language at Beijing University, Winn and fellow international students explored other parts of China. “We traveled everywhere in China except the southeast corner of the country,” he says. “My language classes gave me more confidence to speak Chinese. I planned trips, got plane tickets, traveled on busses, rented hotel rooms. I learned that we could easily travel on our own. Things I thought were impossible, I learned I could do.”

One memorable side trip involved a four-day horseback tour of the Himalayan foothills. “It was like Lord of the Rings,” he says, describing the intriguing countryside. “There were all these rocks and waterfalls and mountains and trees. There were Tibetan villages on mountainsides where people raised yaks. At one point, the fog closed in and we couldn’t find our friend. It was amazing, like we were in Modor [the dark land] from Lord of the Rings.”

Another adventure put Winn, who was videotaping his travels as part of his scholarship project, inside a Chinese jail. Winn and his travel companions were hiking along a mountain road outside of the city of Beijing. “We could see this green temple in the distance that wasn’t on the map,” he explains. “We went down there and I was videotaping the temple. Suddenly this guy came up, shouting in Chinese. It turns out we were on a Chinese military base.”

The students ended up being questioned by military and then civilian police for nine hours over a two-day period. “There were times during the questioning that I felt a bit nervous,” he admits. “But they were very nice to us. They gave us hot water. At one point, they gave me a military jacket to wear and brought over a heater because I was cold.”

Once the authorities were satisfied that the students weren’t spies, they deleted the pictures the boys had taken and released them. “Afterward, I realized that we’d committed a pretty serious offense,” he says rather sheepishly. “We’d videotaped a military base. In many places in the world that would be considered treason or conspiracy. If China is a police state, it’s certainly a nice police state. The experience actually relieved a lot of fears I’d had about accidentally breaking laws in China. I’d gone through it and it wasn’t that bad.”

He adds, “I also grew to love the international community in China. Our international dorm gave us a base of people with different perspectives. Talking to these people and listening to their life experiences makes what you read in a book or hear on the news real. For instance, my roommate, who was from India, spent two nights explaining the Indian-Pakistan relationship. It was like having a live history book.”

Winn says he was impressed with the uncomplaining nature of the Chinese people. “The Chinese people put up with a lot more than Americans, but they don’t complain about it and that’s a very noble attitude,” he says. He tells a story about riding in a hot train car and asking the man next to the window if he’d mind if they opened the window. “The man said, ‘You can’t do that.’ The train attendant came by and we asked if it was okay to open the window and he said yes. The Chinese passenger was willing to suffer with the heat and not even ask. I’m intrigued with that attitude. It’s like ‘we’ll get by.’ They never seem upset or unhappy. Here in America, if people aren’t getting their way, they complain like crazy.”

In addition to vivid memories and impressions of China, perhaps the most important thing Winn brought back from his adventures in China is a new career direction. “Since I’ve come back, I’ve picked up a second major in Chinese studies,” he says. He plans to pursue an internship with an international company. “I want a career in international trade or international business. I’ve fallen in love with this international stuff. Now I can’t get enough of it.”

China Trip Inspires Love for Democracy

Linsey Kunes has gained a new appreciation for freedom – and for small towns like Salem. A senior at Willamette University with a major in psychology and a minor in Chinese, Kunes won a $5,000 Freeman-Asia scholarship last semester. The funds sponsored an eye-opening, five-month study abroad experience in Bejing, China, a city with a burgeoning population of more than 7 million people.

“It was really overwhelming, especially at first,” says Kunes, commenting on living in China’s heavily populated capital city. “In Beijing, you can never get away from people or noise, no matter what time of the day or night. You have to get used to people pressing up against you and bumping into you all the time. In the subway, if you don’t push people, you don’t get in. That was hard for me to get used to.”

Kunes, who grew up in Crested Butte, Colo. (population 1,600), lived in a big pink apartment building off-campus with a student from Thailand and a student from Beijing. “My apartment was in an area near the university,” she says. “Every morning, I’d ride my bike over to the university. It was really stressful because there were so many other bikes and cars.”

Another challenge for Kunes was the language classes taught only in Chinese. “I took listening, speaking and writing Chinese language classes,” explains Kunes, who attended small classes of about 15 students. “The professors were Chinese and the students were of all nationalities. Many of them didn’t speak English, so we’d communicate in Chinese. It was really interesting. Believe me, my Chinese got significantly better.”

One of the perks of her travel abroad experience was meeting people from all over the world. “The international students were easy to meet,” she says. “I got to hang out with students from everywhere – Africa, Cuba, Asia, Europe.”

Unlike Kunes, many of the international students weren’t able to travel throughout China. The Freeman-Asia scholarship enabled Kunes to travel with five other Willamette students to many of China’s historic and architectural gems, including the Great Wall, the Military Museum and the Temple of Heaven. She also explored many of the provinces throughout southern China.

Whether studying in Beijing or traveling throughout the country, Kunes says she always felt the presence of the communist government. “I’d never lived in a communist country and it was hard for me to feel how the government affected my life every day,” she says. “When I first got to China, I had to go to the police station five times to get my visa straightened out. Each time, I’d need a different person’s signature. The police harass people too, especially foreigners. My roommate’s boyfriend was stopped and fined for riding a motorbike in sandals, even though everybody does it. They told him he had to pay or go to jail. If you have something stolen, don’t report it to the police because you’ll end up paying them.”

She also struggled with feeling like she was being watched all the time. “I didn’t realize how much I appreciate not feeling like my every decision is scrutinized,” she said. “The Chinese government wants to know where foreigners are all the time. Because I lived off-campus, I had to register with the police. Government officials came by our apartment all the time asking for our information. They track every time you go to the library. They record all the things you buy at the store. When I traveled, I had to stay in three-star, so they’d know where I was and what I was doing.”

Kunes, who plans to go to Alaska to graduate school next year and then teach in the Aleutian Islands, says her experiences in China have changed her forever. “I’m naturally really shy, but I learned to find other people and depend on them. Now I’m not so worried about asking for help. I feel more confident, like I can do anything.”

It also gave her a keen appreciation for democracy. “Before I went to China, I’d taken our government for granted,” she admits. “But, you know, freedom is really a beautiful thing.”

Cultural Research Broadens View

When Willamette University undergraduate Gale Lucas applied for a National Science Foundation research grant, she never dreamed it would change her whole view of psychological research. Lucas, a senior majoring in psychology and religious studies, spent six weeks of her summer at Northwestern University in Chicago studying how Western and Eastern cultural differences impact compliance with requests. It not only taught her about the importance of cultural perspective, it gave her a new direction.

Lucas, who is also a Presidential Scholar, won the $2,500 grant to study culture, language and cognition, an intersection of psychological subfields that’s being researched at Northwestern. “My research project looked at differences in compliance with requests between Asians and Americans or Eastern versus Western,” she explained. “In cross-cultural psychology, we often compare Western and Eastern thought. That’s where we see the most dramatic differences. Everything else is seen as a continuum between the extremes of East and West.”

Lucas and the Northwestern research team wanted to know if people of Asian ancestry differ from others in their willingness to comply with requests. “There’s an assumption in psychological research that Asians are more compliant because of cultural differences, but that hasn’t really been studied,” she said. “This was the first time researchers were actually studying this assumption.”

Using bi-lingual flyers, they recruited about 70 study subjects, about half of which were Asian. They presented the subjects with different scenarios to see whether or not they’d comply with various requests. “We gave the participants scenarios with different levels of closeness – how well you know the person making the request – and different costs – whether complying with the request is going to cost you something personally,” she explained.

She offers this as an example of a high closeness-low cost scenario: one of your closest colleagues at work asks if you’d immediately install some software on her computer. Your lunch schedule is free and you have nothing else you have to do. Do you comply with the request to install her software?

In a low closeness-high cost scenario, a stranger comes up to you in a train station and asks if you’d watch his luggage. Your train arrives and is about to leave, but the stranger hasn’t returned. It’s vitally important that you arrive at your destination today and this is the last departing train. Do you comply with the stranger’s request to continue watching the bags?

The results of the research didn’t turn out like they expected. “The answers people gave depended on the question we asked, not on cultural differences,” she said. “On some questions that we thought were moderate closeness and moderate costs, people thought they were high cost. Many of our questions were perceived differently than we thought they’d be.”

Lucas said they couldn’t draw any conclusions about cultural differences from the results. In fact, the researchers need to go back and standardize the questions by testing and pre-screening them. “It was really a design flaw,” she admitted. “But this is the first time we’d tried testing these scenarios. Part of figuring out how to measure anything in psychology is testing it. That will be the next step in this research.”

Even though Lucas couldn’t make conclusions about Eastern versus Western compliance from her study, she said she learned about the importance of cultural differences. “When we make a conclusion in psychology and say what it means to the population, we have to consider whether or not the conclusion extends across cultures,” she explained. “When we make sweeping generalizations, we have to ask whether it applies just to Westerners or whether also applies to Easterners or to people of other ethnicities or nationalities. It’s made me realize how important it is to consider cross-cultural differences.”

Her research experience at Northwestern, she says, has brought her years at Willamette into perspective. “All the interdisciplinary work I’ve done at Willamette has focused on the importance of perspective and the world view that you’re using,” she said. “We’ve been taught that knowledge is not universal, that it depends on who you’re talking about. This cross-cultural study was really a culmination of all of that work. I’m really seeing how cross cultural differences apply in my area of interest and research.”

It’s also changes her career direction. “Before this, I’d only had a brief exposure to cultural research and this has changed my direction,” said Lucas, who plans to pursue an advanced psychology degree after she graduates from Willamette this spring. “I’m applying to graduate schools where they’re doing cultural research. On the next research papers I work on, I want to be able to say whether or not the conclusions extend across cultural boundaries. Because if you don’t know it, don’t say it.”

Sled Dog Girl

A cacophony of 100 barking sled dogs is the first thing you hear when you approach Cali King’s ’07 Alaskan home.

The spacious cabin, hand built by her Iditarod champion dad, Jeff King, is nestled in the woods a mile off the highway, a stone’s throw from Denali National Park. In the summer, the home’s big windows look out onto a lake. Today, in late March when the temperature stubbornly refuses to climb above six degrees Fahrenheit, the lake is completely frozen and covered by a blanket of snow. Out here in the Alaskan bush is where Cali grew up to become a sled dog girl.

In the dog yard, dozens of barking dogs dance in a circle on the hard pack snow around their wooden houses. For warmth, the boxy dog shelters are raised off the ground. Each dog is tethered to a lead that allows the animal to move 360 degrees around the structure, leap onto its top or go inside.

Two sleds are anchored in the snow, tow lines strung out in front awaiting dogs. Jeff, who has just returned from placing second in the Iditarod, the Indy 500 of dogsled racing, scans the dogs in the yard. He calls out, “Get Conan and Alberta. Take Jersey.”

Cali and her younger sister, Tessa, scramble to retrieve each chosen dog and hook it, two abreast to one of the sleds. The girls are dressed in thick boots and fur-lined parkas with the name Cabela, one of their major sponsors, emblazoned on the front. They move with sureness and practiced efficiency. Handling these canine marathon runners is some-thing they’ve grown up with.

As the spots along the tow lines are filled, the barking, jumping and lunging increases, each dog begging to be selected. These are Alaskan sled dogs and there’s nothing they like more than running sleds.

Two lines of dogs stand ready in front of each sled. Jeff conducts a quick assessment of his daughters’ work, checking the lines and ruffing each dog’s head and neck as he passes. Satisfied, he steps behind the lead sled and calls out, “Ready?”

Tessa pulls the parka hood over her head and steps onto the second sled’s runners. With a smooth motion, Jeff releases the claw-like anchor and the dogs sprint off. Following close behind, Tessa’s sled careens out of the yard. As she disappears around a sharp bend, the howling begins. First one dog, then all join in a mournful chorus.

“They’re sending them off,” Cali says, grinning. “It’s their way of saying goodbye.”

She should know. Cali’s an expert in Alaskan sled dog behavior. Before she could even walk, she was cuddling and playing with sled dogs. Each summer, she and Tessa name and raise about 30 puppies. “There are pictures of us when we’re just a couple of years old with the puppies,” she says. “The dogs are all pretty friendly. They should be after putting up with being dressed in our doll clothes all summer long.”

The breed is Alaskan husky – small, lean long-distance athletes who have happy dispositions and few health problems. “The AKC doesn’t recognize Alaskan huskies because they all look different, but they’re not a mixed breed,” explains Cali. In the summer, she leads tours around the King’s kennel and gives talks to tourists interested in the sport of dog sled racing. “Alaskan sled dogs are not mutts, but they can look like border collies, Siberian huskies or German shepherds. Because they’re not inbred like purebreds, they don’t have problems like hip dysplasia, weeping eyes or hot spots.”

Cali loves the dogs and says working with them has taught her how to live. “The dogs are really happy,” she says. “They get along with their neighbors. They’re resilient and they have a passion. They’re great examples for anyone.”

It wasn’t until she was a high school sophomore that she became interested in sled dog racing. Cali attended Tri-Valley School, a K-12 school with about 200 students, located 20 miles from her home in the small community of Healy. She’d participated in gymnastics, basketball, soccer, volleyball and dance before she decided to give sled racing a try. “Being 5’3”, I couldn’t really be a basketball or volleyball star and dance wasn’t competitive,” she says. “I was at a plateau as an athlete so I decided to take advantage of our excellent dogs and my dad’s racing knowledge to enter the Junior Iditarod.”

The race is a two-day, mini-version of the original Iditarod Race that traces the historic Anchorage to Nome route used to deliver vaccine that saved hundreds of people from an epidemic. Open to teens 14-17 years old, the Junior Iditarod is approximately 170 miles and follows the Iditarod Trail route from Wasilla to Yenta, the first checkpoint, and back.

During the first day, Cali ran the dogs seven hours and then rested the mandatory 10 hours at the checkpoint. On her return trip, she left at 2:00 a.m., mushing through the darkness to come in seven hours later at the finish. Although it was her first Junior Iditarod, she came in second by a mere 34 seconds. In addition to promotional prizes like hats and lanterns donated by local businesses, she earned a $2,500 scholarship for her effort.

In her senior year in high school, Cali set her sights on the grueling 1,100-mile Iditarod. Unlike the two-day junior version, this race can take mushers up to 15 days through some of the harshest conditions in Alaska. Once she turned 18, she had to run at least 500 miles of qualifying races sanctioned by the Iditarod Board. In one month, she raced in two 300-milers to qualify.

That kind of performance is typical of Cali. She possesses the essential characteristic of successful sled dog racers – determination. “Once I decided I was going to race, I was going to do it,” she says. “I knew if I started the race, I’d finish it.”

Following a race-rest schedule she worked out with her dad, Cali and 15 dogs raced through the Alaskan bush from Fairbanks to Nome. (Snow was scarce so the start of the race was moved from Anchorage to Fairbanks.) Because sun reflecting off the snow can overheat the dogs, she often ran at night. “Darkness doesn’t stop dog mushing,” she says. “Most of the top Iditarod mushers run at night because their dogs run better in colder temperatures.”

At the 22 Alaskan village checkpoints, she bedded her team down on straw and slept on the floor of churches or community halls. “I’ve learned to sleep anywhere,” she says, laughing at the memory. “You don’t get your own quiet little room. People are milling around, going about their business, eating and talking all around you.”

A couple of times during the race, she slept outdoors alone in the bush. She says she wasn’t afraid. “I wasn’t really alone with 15 dogs,” she says. To ensure she’d wake on schedule, she tucked a small alarm clock inside her parka’s hood. “You take your boots off and sleep fully clothed on the sled. It’s very comfortable.”

The excellent conditioning of her dogs and her own ability to read the dogs’ moods and needs served her well. She came in 32 out of 65 mushers who finished. More than a third of those who started didn’t finish the race. Among rookies who finished, she came in second.

Cali says completing the Iditarod made her more prepared for Willamette. “Mushing teaches you to be serious about what you’re doing and you have to be serious about academics at Willamette,” she says. “In the dog mushing world, you have to be able to go to people for advice and help. It’s one of the great things about Willamette – you can go to your professors and classmates for help.”

It has also made her a true sled dog girl. “I’m more independent,” she says. “And I’m more comfortable being by myself now.”