Things I learned during my time in UIUC (2)

First time in a frat house with a bag of textbooks

I had my first culture shock (?) because of this roommate. It was probably midway through the semester when he knocked on my door, hoping I'd come to his room. I nervously followed him, thinking if I'd offended him in any way. Once inside his room, he pointed to a textbook on his desk, asking if I can help him with a math problem. I looked at the equation, unsure if it was an economics formula, but there was a variable X in the denominator. I moved it to the right side of the equation and solved for X. Then I asked my roommate, "What problem do you need to solve using X?" He said, "Nothing, that's what I was asking." It was then that I realized he had asked a very simple linear equation with one variable, and I had solved it effortlessly, even asking him in a seemingly teasing tone, "So what's the real problem?" I quickly added that I had encountered this type of problem before and just happened to know that when X is in the denominator, it can be moved to the numerator on the right side of the equation. He smiled and thanked me, but he never asked me math questions again after that. To this day, I'm still puzzled why a graduate student at a top university wouldn't know how to solve a linear equation. Perhaps this experience doesn't count as culture shock, but it certainly dealt a significant blow to my idealized vision of American universities. Later, a friend told me that UIUC is a public university, and local students get priority admission, so the academic level of students vary. My experiences in classes at UIUC later confirmed this theory.

Perhaps to thank me for helping with the math problem, or because he felt embarrassed about the “adult websites” incident, he invited me and my Taiwanese friends out for drinks one night. Since you have to be 21 to enter a bar in Illinois, students usually drink at fraternity houses. Fraternity houses are essentially residences where members of the fraternity live. Each house has the fraternity's name printed on it, like Sigma Chi, Alpha Tau Omega, etc., mostly Greek letter abbreviations prominently displayed on the front of the house. Fraternities with the same name can exist at different universities, allowing for inter-collegiate social events. One of the reasons many people choose to join a fraternity is to build connections. Since I really like sleeping, if there were fraternities in Taiwan, unless it was a "good student" fraternity, I probably wouldn't choose to join. There would be too many parties, which would severely disrupt my routine and ruin my sleep quality.

Since I had never been to a fraternity and had no experience, I packed a backpack with a water bottle, notebook, pen, umbrella, etc., my standard travel gear, bringing everything just in case. My roommate led the way to a street full of fraternity houses and knocked on the doors of several of them. When the door opened, someone would peek out, see our group of "tourists," shake their head, and close the door again. Finally, we found a house willing to let us in. We expressed our gratitude, and then we filed in. Soon, my roommate disappeared, leaving just us Taiwanese standing in a row against the wall. If we had been carrying trays, others might have thought we were the servers there. To avoid making people think Taiwanese people are uncool, we decided to walk around, trying to blend in. As I walked, for some reason I felt like everyone's looking at me. I wondered, "Is it the way I am walking?" I felt having fun in a fraternity can be so difficult. Just as I was pondering this, someone, seemingly out of nowhere, asked me, "What's in your backpack?" I waved my hand, brushing him off. Soon after, several others asked me the same question. It was then that I suddenly understood: my backpack was the culprit! After all, most people don't bring backpacks when they go out for drinking; if someone brings a backpack, there must be something good inside.

This first attempt at a fraternity visit, with the wrong gear, ended in failure. I decided to end the mission and head back early. After all, there were a few expensive textbooks in my backpack, and losing them would have been bad. Unfortunately, that fraternity "field trip" was also my last. Three years later, when I went abroad again, I was already a graduate student, too old to be fooling around in fraternities.