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| Obio in high school |
Obio’s interview will surprise, inform and encourage you to take
the kinds of educational and career risks that will help prepare you for a life
full of global experiences and successes.
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Can you tell us about your background?
I'm the youngest and
only US-born member of my family. My family came from Nigeria with very
little, so in a sense, we lived the immigrant dream. Work hard for a
better life.
Where did you grow up, go to secondary school?
I call New York City
home. Queens, specifically, because I moved there near the end of middle school
and that's where I "grew up". Interestingly enough, I lived in
Utah for ten years before that. In my elementary school, there were two
black kids. The other one was my brother. My middle school in
Queens probably only had two white kids, and they were probably half black.
A major adjustment, to say the least. I went to Francis Lewis High
School near Flushing, Queens. Its student demographics reflected that of
the city as a whole with students from just about every country.
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| Francis Lewis High Hallway |
You attended a small liberal arts school in the northeast. Why
did you decide to do so?
I had a brother two
years older than I who attended Williams College. I went through all his
college view books as part of my college search. And, though him, I kind
of caught the northeast liberal arts college bug. I did not apply to
anywhere in NYC because I was worried that I may have to live at home and
commute to school. I also was not keen on attending any SUNY school
because those were the default schools to apply to for many of my classmates
and I used to say that going to college with a bunch of my current friends
would just be like "going to 13th grade."
So, I was pretty
serious with my applications to some small liberal arts colleges. A
Hamilton representative visited my high school and spoke with me there early on
during my senior year. She invited me to some of their overnight
recruitment events where they bus in students from NYC. I liked the
place quite a bit and ended up visiting again for their NYC admitted students
overnight event in the spring.
Was it a big adjustment? How would you describe the academic
atmosphere, the social atmosphere?
It was a big
adjustment. During Orientation, I remember thinking that all the other
freshman students already knew each other or at least each other's friends
through an extended and exclusive prep school athletic network. It was
kind of intimidating during my first couple of days on campus when I would
always overhear new acquaintances become instant buddies when one who went to
Choate says: "Oh, you went to Andover? Do you know so-and-so?"
The other invariably replies, "Yea, he was my roommate!"
Then, the first would say be something like: "Oh, sweet, he's a cool
dude. He and I had an old, friendly lacrosse rivalry going on for a
while."
It almost felt
like a parallel universe because I was completely removed from the prep school
world and that conversation played out an astounding number of times during
just one particular Orientation day which involved quite a bit of waiting in
lines and meeting and greeting. Swap out Choate and Andover for Hotchkiss
and Deerfield; swap lacrosse for squash, cross-country, field hockey, ice
hockey and other activities. It was easy for a random kid from an over-crowded
New York City public school to second-guess that you're out of your league in
that environment or that you just don't belong. But that feeling was
dispelled quickly once classes started and we had more things to do than play
the "do you know so-and-so?" game.
When did you get interested in study Mandarin? Did the
language program make you fluent?
At my high school,
there was a very large Asian and Asian American population since it was near
Flushing. I had a bunch of Mandarin-speaking friends, so the interest
developed a bit back then. I also decided that when I finally got to
college, I would study a language with a different writing system and I
narrowed it down to Chinese, Japanese or Arabic. At Hamilton, they had a
major in Chinese. In Japanese, just a minor. For Arabic, not much,
really. So, I enrolled in Chinese 110 and was hooked from the first
class.
It also helped that
my teacher was Professor Hong Gang Jin who does some heavy-hitting research and
publishing in second-language acquisition, pedagogy, and such. And she
created a cool Chinese-learning software program that we had to use.
As far as fluency
goes, the program made me able to speak semi-fluently on topics that I know.
You did a study abroad program. Can you describe it and how
effective it was?
I did Professor Jin's
Associated Colleges in China (ACC) program in Beijing in spring 2003.
That was the spring that SARS struck, so my planned summer ACC session in
Beijing was cancelled. The program was very effective because it was one
with a "language pledge." We all had to pledge to speak no
English there or risk getting expulsed from the program if caught thrice.
The program was based
at Capital University of Economics and Business (CUEB), which was in Beijing's
Central Business District (CBD). It was four hours of language classes
every day starting with the large group class (10+), followed by the small
group class of five students, followed by a two-student class, followed by a
one-on-one. Then we had to do our homework preparing for the next day's
lessons. It was remarkable how this rigorous program just shot our
Mandarin skills to the next level.
There were also some
optional cultural classes like Chinese cooking, Chinese folk songs, Chinese
bamboo flute, and tai chi. I did the folk song class and the bamboo
flute class.
Now the ACC program
is based at Minzu University.
Did you have preconceived notions about China that were affirmed
and some that were changed?
At Hamilton, I
double-majored in Chinese and Religious Studies. I decided on this duo
less than two weeks into my freshman year. In my first two years in
college, I aspired to get really good in Chinese and be able to one day find
old religious texts and treatises that had not been translated into English and
translate them. I suppose one pre-conceived notion at play there was
that enough people in China cared about old religious texts. I had a
romanticized idea that you could just walk into China, find someone to lead you
to some secret scrolls and debate them robustly with experts, adherents, and
laypeople then go on to be a professor and help fill a crucial missing link in
western ideas of Chinese religious thought.
When I arrived in
Beijing to study during my junior year, however, it quickly became obvious that
nobody was interested in interpreting all that ancient stuff. The focus
seemed to just be on building new skyscrapers. I marveled at how quickly
buildings popped up. "That building was not there two weeks ago"
is a sentence I had never uttered until I studied in Beijing.
It's really hard to
think back now and clearly remember what I thought of China before I studied
there. I probably thought that it was a place that I could easily find
some hut in the mountains to retire in and focus on spiritual cultivation and
being one with nature like some noteworthy Chinese sage-philosophers I had
studied. I may have thought that I could easily study kung fu in the
mountains with some master, or maybe just live and study at the Shaolin Temple
for a while.
Reflecting on all
this, now I think I was under the impression that China's "ancient
wisdom", if you will, would be the only draw for me. But that
definitely changed once I arrived as a student in 2003. My China-related
interests were blown wide open after that.
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The idea is the
American dream seems to small to me. Obio’s words underscore what might now be
called the global dream. His journey
from Nigerian roots, to New York, to a small liberal arts school, to study
abroad is, it may be hard to believe, just the beginning. In part 2 of Obio’s
interview, he details how his study abroad became the jumping off point for a
new career path and a new place to live and call home.
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| Obio in China |
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