Changing standards

Last January, in the throes of final exams, about 60 freshmen in Butler College received an email that would change everything. We 60 knew that we would soon be delivered from buildings replete with all the features of an East German bomb shelter to the noticeably better Bloomberg and Cuyler Halls, but the possibility of transferring into Whitman College had always seemed surreal. The email notifying us of our impending move across Elm Drive sent us into a frenzy, and for the rest of the year when we awoke to the sounds of construction, we smiled as the less fortunate cursed.

As pioneers of the four-year college system, we Whitmanites are well supplied. Our pizza oven precludes visits to Frist for late meal, and our Whitman stationery makes any note to the unlucky left-behind that much more poignant. Nonetheless, during one of our first days in our new home, a couple of friends and I couldn't help exercising our instinct to complain, comparing our new conditions not to the grim Butler quad, but to our housing during our summer abroad in Beijing.

China's rapid growth astounds economists and tourists alike, but the millions being spent on building Olympic housing have not trickled down to the rundown dorms that litter university campuses. At the university where our program was held, many undergraduates live six or eight to a room in buildings perpetually dusty from the endless construction. Unlike American college students, who can typically upgrade both their room and roommates each year, Chinese students are usually stuck with the same living arrangement for four years, with the possibility of a one-room quad awaiting them if they decide to go for a graduate degree.

But nothing negative comes to mind when I think of the housing we lived in for two months. I instead have Elysian visions of spotless floors, made beds, fresh towels and an organized desk, all thanks to the maids who came daily to tidy our rooms. The reason for this unequal treatment, as was likely clear to anyone who has been to Asia, was merely that we were foreigners. Beyond the fact that the low value of the Chinese yuan relative to the U.S. dollar secured us benefits few Chinese undergraduates could afford, the mere virtue of being foreign earned respect — though whether it was real or feigned was debatable — worthy of someone with a much higher social position than an undergrad.

Yet no one ever seemed to complain about it. At first, it seemed incredibly odd that our Chinese teachers, who were mostly graduate students at the university, lived in housing far inferior to ours. By the end of the two months, the unfairness seemed almost natural. The undeserved respect and benefits, for me at least, resulted in an ego much more inflated than it had been when I arrived.

Study abroad advocates sometimes say that being abroad allows you to gain a new perspective from which to judge what was already familiar to you, and while that is certainly true, I also found that it wasn't until I came back to the United States that I realized the slight change in the way I treated others and expected to be treated. I can appreciate what Johann Loh '09 meant in his recent column when he wrote, "Elitism, already so easy in Princeton, is even easier [in Asia]," and I can hardly deny that I fit his description of people who go to Asia and quickly learn to behave differently.

Now I'm being spoiled again. In Whitman, we former Butler students are living like the nouveau riche of Princeton. In Butler, we appreciated our up-campus friends' rooms probably more than they could have, but we've already become accustomed to complaining about any trivial issue we have with our new furniture, air conditioning or fresh pizza. If only we could all be more conscious of where we've come from — it's easy to become accustomed to something favorable, but an improvement might have to be taken away for it to be noticed. Michael Medeiros is a sophomore from Bethesda, Md. He may be reached at mmedeiro@princeton.edu.