Week 2: June 6-June 11

The highlight of last weekend for me was the Museum of the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. The museum is located in the home of one of the original thirteen delegates and where they drew up the first CPC Manifesto. The exhibits were very well done with excellent English signs and not very indoctrinating at all, but very informative and thought-provoking. They had really life-like wax figurines of all the delegates sitting at the table, with young Mao Zedong in the center, clearly in command. I felt as if I learned on a deeper level how the CPC came to be, given the context of the Opium Wards and Capitalist Western countries constantly staking claims on their lands and creating conflicts over trade. Interestingly, some of the earliest proponents of the Communist movement were students; this is eerie considering that it was also students who staged the 1989 protests in Tian’an Men. Also interestingly, of the thirteen original delegates, according to the museum exhibit, at least half later defected or were eventually imprisoned by their own party. I think that the party started out with good intentions given the times. There were a lot of smart and motivated people initially behind the movement who believed it could do really good things for China.

To contrast with the Communism museum in Shanghai, when we were in Tongli, near Suzhou, Griffin and I happened upon a small museum called “The History of Democracy and the CPC”. Unlike the Shanghai museum, this one was extremely indoctrinating. It seemed to assume a lot of knowledge, and provided very few historical facts, but instead had an overwhelming amount of propaganda and also portrayed Chang Kai-Shek, leader of the KMT democratic revolutionaries and founder of modern Taiwan, as an enemy of democracy. This is interesting to me since my parents live in Taiwan, and from the time I have spent there, I have observed that the Taiwanese identify themselves very strongly as a sovereign Democratic nation.

There is one more Communist exhibit that Griffin and I also visited together, called “The Road to Rejuvenation” in the China National Museum in Beijing, which details the history of the CPC. This was not as good as the one in Shanghai but still very impressive in its own right. Scattered throughout the exhibit were these magnificent bronze statues of Chinese peasants either hard at work or engaged in battle. The statues gave the viewer a very powerful sense of motion. Again, I could sympathize with the inspiration that many young people felt at the onset of the CPC. However, in the exhibit there was also a great deal of explicit government propaganda and the recent history of the party was filled with fluffy tails of all the famous world leaders who worked with leaders of the CPC to promote world peace but nothing about important controversial events like the Tian’anmen Massacre. When Chinese people visit this exhibit they certainly have a lot to be proud of in terms of how far their nation has come in the past one hundred years but they are missing an important part of the story about the human cost.

On the research front, I’ve been doing so much hydrothermal synthesis that I’ve been dreaming about it…unfortunately, contrary to what I’ve read in the literature, I’ve had a lot of trouble fabricating the carbon spherical templates that are necessary for my hollow ZnO shells. When it comes out of the oven, I just keep getting brown sugary water over and over again. Progress is slow but at least the stuff I’m making smells like caramels!

On the bright side, I did manage to write up a procedure for my experiment and I have a much better understanding of what I’m doing now. Since hollow structures are a new research topic for my lab, I may enlist the help of the lab next door under Professor Wang Chang-An, Shakked’s research mentor, which uses a very similar fabrication method, but for a different application—photocatalytic water purification instead of thermoelectrics. It’s interesting because I get the sense that a lot of materials science is like that: a bunch of people who use similar equipment and fabrication methods but for totally different applications. It makes sense but at the same time, I’ve always thought that a good research lab should be working as a team towards a common goal. Within my lab there are applications as diverse as dental health, batteries, thermoelectrics, ferroelectrics, dielectrics, and photocatalysis. I wonder during lab meetings how well everyone understands everyone else’s research.

Week 3: June 13-June 19

Last weekend we visited a Confucian temple and museum—for me the most interesting part of the museum was the exhibit about Confucianism’s influence on the rest of the world. They had a glass case of books in all different languages about Confucianism, and a huge map of Confucius Institutes in the US. The way they portrayed Confucius is a lot like the way I imagine Socrates. One of his ideas is “The Doctrine of the Golden Mean”, which is very similar to Aristotle’s “Golden Mean”. As an “everything in moderation” type of person myself, it’s really interesting to me that someone from such a different time and place can arrive at the same thought. One thing I really like to imagine what all these ancient people looked like, since after all, behind all of the history they were a walking, talking person. Confucius himself was apparently very good-looking and about 1.9 meters tall- that’s over six feet, which meant he definitely would have towered over everyone else in 500 BC! By contrast, Socrates was known to be very ugly.

Over the past week I also made friends with a girl from church—her name is Jian Guo, I call her Jen. She is twenty-eight years old and her family is from Anhui, a rural province far from here. I invited her to come along with us to the museum. She is very nice and thoughtful. Her English is really good and articulate. She used to work at a small biotech food company from Denmark but now she is in between jobs. We spoke English for the day but at church she speaks to me slowly in Chinese to help me practice, which is really sweet of her. My Chinese is not very good but I’d really like to improve so I am happy when someone has the patience for me! 

My favorite thing to eat at the Tsinghua dining halls is called “suàn nǎi”, or “sour milk”, but is basically a sour, really liquidy yogurt that they sell in little plastic bags for 1 yuan (<20 cents). I have four or five of them per day…hǎo hē! (delicious)

Research is going better. I have started doing some of my work in Dr. Wang’s lab and I’ve also been asking Lisa, Shakked’s graduate student mentor, for a lot of help. She is a genius. Because of her, things are more smoothly now, although I still feel a bit stuck in the early stages of my project. Chemistry is a lot like cooking and results tend to reflect personal mood, in my experience. So I think it is better if I work hard but also let things play out at their natural pace.

Week 4: June 20 -June 26

Over the weekend we hiked the “Wild Great Wall”! Hiking made me really happy and was a great de-stressor after three weeks of tough, intimidating labwork. The wall was absolutely stunning, we went on the perfect day, hiked just the right amount of time and it felt good to exercise my body in clean, clear air. It was a challenging hike for sure and inspired me to read up on the history a bit. It was built and restored over the course of 2,000 years with millions of lives lots in building it. In the part we hiked, the wall follows the ridgeline of a really mountainous area which seems like it would be extremely difficult for an invading army to pass through, wall or no wall. As I found out, however, the wall served some other important purposes, such as unifying the country, clarifying the borders for immigration, and facilitating trade along the Silk Road. Much of it was also constructed from natural materials in the surrounding environment, such as bricks made from the nearby rock faces or stamped earth.

My new Chinese word of the week: tiantou means “sweet cone” a.k.a. a soft-serve ice cream cone at McDonald’s.  This will be very useful if my little brother ever visits Beijing.

Research has been going alright but I’ve gotten myself into a little bit of trouble lately. I’ve been working a lot in Dr. Wang’s lab and yesterday one of my autoclaves was smoking so the lab manager found Shakked who found me. I was freaked out for a bit because I thought I’d accidentally set the 200 C oven to 720 C (instead of 720 minutes) and had destroyed the oven. Luckily, that did not turn out to be the case, instead the lids on one of my autoclaves had simply come loose—apparently a common rookie mistake—phew! The lab manager described the autoclaves as “little bombs”. I guess I was wrong when I thought that just because I’m working with sugar and water makes my experiment any less dangerous! Anyway it was not my day for hydrothermal because later that day when I went to go and open the smoking autoclaves, one of them did indeed turn out to be loose but no matter what I could NOT get the lid off one of the other ones. It’s still not off. What to do about that?

Happily, though, I have advanced past the hydrothermal fabrication procedure, and have moved on to surface modification and aging in zinc solution—this will coat my spheres with zinc compounds and acts as the precursors for my hollow ZnO shells. And I finally have been collecting some quantitative data. I’ve also been taking some afternoons off experiments to go to a nearby coffee shop and read some more papers. They always play Christmas music there—it has a very calming effect on me as I wade through swaths of chemistry terminology. 

I am very excited to meet up my friend Evan next week, whose family and mine has been friends with since we were two. Evan is studying Chinese for the summer in Chengdu and loving it, from what I hear. Their group is coming down to Beijing for a few days to visit and we will have a couple of days to go exploring together. Also next week, as a group we have been invited by Dr. Ashworth from NSF, our sponsor, to the 4th of July Party at the American Embassy. Can’t wait for that!!!

Week 5: June 27 -July 3

Last weekend, we went to Xian—I guided the trip and had a lot of opportunities to speak Chinese, which is what I have been dreaming about ever since arriving in China! It was my favorite weekend by far. We took the “hard sleeper” to get there and back, about fourteen hours each way, and the bed was way comfier than the one in my dorm! The train was actually my favorite part of the whole trip and of being in China so far. On the way there I met an old man and we spoke in Chinese for a couple of hours. It’s hard to explain but long story made short, I had the wonderful feeling of making a friend that was to be enjoyed just for the moment. Meeting new people and making friends is really important to me when I travel, and I think language is a very important lens for understanding the native people in a foreign country.

Also, I love history, and Xian has a lot of it—eight dynasties’ worth. Qinshihuang, the First Emperor of China, joins Ghengis Khan in my mind in the ranks of absolutely terrible but absolutely incredible people. He unified China by knocking down and fixing different parts of the Great Wall, homogenized the written language, and introduced a national currency…but he also burned thousands of books, killed a lot of scholars, and forced thousands of workers to build his massive Terracotta army and Mausoleum. He ascended the throne at the age of eleven and ruled for forty years. Clearly a brutal man, but what a legacy he left behind!

On to research: so, I finally did calcination and TEM last week, which showed me at long-last that all the treatment procedures I have been doing have worked! The results aren’t perfect but I have managed to make hollow ZnO spheres that are only about 100 nm larger than I want them to be. This is great—it would be really tight, but I might actually be able to finish my project, or at least go through the entire procedure before I leave China. Now I just need to decide the most effective way to use the remaining two weeks.

In my excitement over my research, I had a bit of a misunderstanding with my advisors. For most of the program, I have been seeking advice from Lisa, who is a PhD student in Dr. Wang’s lab. But now her advice, and also Dr. Wang’s advice, contradicts with what my graduate students in Dr. Lin’s lab are telling me to do. I want to finish my procedure, whether or not the results are good, and even if my spheres do not have the desired diameter. But my graduate students want me to go back to square one and perfect hydrothermal synthesis of carbon spheres to get the diameter just right. I have already made a LOT of carbon spheres and done a LOT of hydrothermal so there is not much new to learn there—I want to sinter! The sintering procedure to turn a powder into a bulk metal is my lab’s specialty and I don’t want to leave here without doing it myself. It’s like graduating from chemistry (bleh!) to metallurgy (cool!). I want to make something new! This may be a time when I behave selfishly and try to learn as much as I can rather than make sure I lay down comprehensive scientific groundwork for my labmates. I suppose many people in my position have had to face this choice at one point or another.

Week 6: July 4 -July 10

Over the weekend, Sam, Abby and my friend Evan visited the Sino-Singapore Eco City (中新天津生態城, Zhōng-Xīn Tiānjīn Shēngtài Chéng). There was not much information about it on the internet so when we got in the cab at Tanggu Station, I just told the cab driver to drop us off at some place interesting downtown. She took us to a place called “Dong Ma Yuan”, which turned out to be an animation technology park. There were statues of animation figures all over the place, and a giant building that did not seem to contain anything, and that no one was allowed to enter. Beneath it there was an enormous parking garage that was completely empty except for one abandoned car, and flooded with water. It was an eerie place. We walked away from the Dong Ma Yuan and came upon the Eco City Service Center, the government building where the Eco City was planned. We went in under the premise of using the bathroom and found an enormous exhibit with detailed dioramas of the Eco City and many panels with descriptions of the Eco City’s goals and plans and also all of the notable people who had visited it. They tried to kick us out, but somehow Abby and I managed to sneak around for a little while. Abby took photos of all of the exhibits. Eventually we snuck away unscathed. Later, we finally found the inhabited part of the Eco City, and talked to some of the locals. Most of them had moved there in the past year seeking cleaner air and cheaper apartments. The apartments advertised that the Eco City’s air quality could increase your lifespan by ten years. We also met some students who had moved there to attend university because they had families in Tianjin. Everyone seemed to like it well enough. Currently a few thousand people reside there. The Eco City is five years old and is intended to grow to 350,000 residents in the next five years. We also got a tour of some Eco City apartments, all equipped with various power usage monitoring systems, and very sleek and high-income.

China is a really interesting place in the world for the sustainability movement. I wonder if a place like the Eco City can make it or not. It is strange that they would not let us read the exhibit in the government building—Abby said she read online that until quite recently this exhibit was open to the public. We read all of the panels that Abby took pictures of, and there was nothing really subversive. My one major comment would be that they had a lot of flashy goals but no real concrete means of achieving any of them. Furthermore, some of their goals were blatant green-washing. The Eco-City is built on un-arable land. A close inspection of the dirt shows it is cracked and dry. Yet, one of the goals is to have 50% green space—which they appeared to have achieved—what a lot of water that must take! Still, although there are not that many people living there, they all appeared to have moved for rational economic reasons—cleaner air, cheaper housing, and to attend university. We concluded that maybe The Eco-City can make it as a city, but it may have to lose the Eco.

Is the “Eco-city” a failed idea? On principle, there is not much that is eco-friendly about building a city in the first place and yet, countries all over the world have built them—and most of them are failing. I don’t think it’s necessary to build a whole new city to be more eco-friendly. There are so many things about the buildings we live and work in that could be improved to save a lot of energy—better insulation, more natural heating & shading, and passive solar. We could make our cities more bicycle-friendly, improve public transportation, and do more to encourage car-pooling. I don’t think that laziness is an excuse. By comparison, China has fewer options than we do in the US to promote sustainability because they are still a developing economy heavily dependent on coal power. And yet, China already has many building standards which are better than what we have in the US, such as standards for air conditioning and heating temperatures. I think they are a lot more conscious about it than we are—they have no choice because they have to think about it every time they walk outside and breathe the air! In the US we are very blessed in this regard, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about it any less.

On another topic…so, I have decided to try my best to finish the procedure like I actually want to, and to the extent that I have time, continue to make carbon spheres like my graduate students want me to. So far it’s had its ups and downs but seems to be working. I may indeed run out of time. I also have a lot of data, but not many conclusive results. It is hard to draw conclusions without doing thermoelectric measurements which, if I do, will be very last minute! Writing my report draft made me realize how much I have learned…I pumped out 15 pages without a second glance, and I could still write plenty more about all of the physics, chemistry and metallurgy that my project entails! Now I just need to synthesize all that information by Friday. I hope that even if I don’t have conclusive results, I can at least make my data tell an interesting story.

Program End & Week 7: July 11 -July 21

On Saturday, July 13, my lab had a party to celebrate the graduating PhD and Masters students. This is the first time my lab has gotten together all at once since I’ve been here, apart from group meetings. Apparently they have such parties only twice a year—for graduation and the Spring Festival. It was crazy! In China they drink a type of liquor called 白酒，bái jiŭ, or rice wine. The girl sitting next to me told me that it’s important to drink in order to show your honesty. And drink they did. At one point my graduate student mentors came up and gave me a toast, which meant a lot to me. After so much serious lab work, it was nice to see everyone finally let loose!

On that note, I think just now, in the last week or so, I’ve finally felt assimilated into my lab. This program has come to an end much too quickly! The last week of lab was spent collecting last-minute data (very last-minute, in my case) and scrambling to finish the final report and presentation. I managed to try two different sintering methods like I wanted, even though the results were not very good, but still informative for my project. And I scraped together some good hydrothermal data so I hope that my graduate students were pleased. I really hope someone continues my project in the future because it is far from finished! I thought that the final presentation went well. Everyone did really good work this summer.

The part I will miss most about China is hearing Chinese all the time and having the opportunity to practice speaking it. It is so stimulating. There are also a couple of friends I made who I hope I can stay in touch with. I got one of my labmates to help me make a QQ! I wonder when the next time I come back to China will be.

I learned a lot about having patience this summer and about getting along with different types of people. My graduate student mentors didn’t take to me right away even though at the time I felt like I was trying my best. In retrospect I see that I was too stressed out at the beginning of this program. But I also learned that communicating and having good relationships with people is the most important thing for my personal success. The train ride to Xi’an was a turning point for me because of the conversation I had with that old man. I felt like I had used my language skills to breach some cultural barrier that was clouding my vision before. After that I not only had many more good conversations, but I became less stressed and the research started going better. Furthermore, it was really interesting to interact with students from other universities all summer. We were kind of stuck with each other even though we came from very different backgrounds. I learned a lot from the conversations that I had with them and I hope I can keep in touch with them too.

I’m looking forward to ending this program on a good note with the completion of the website, my final report, and the presentation at Corning. Then home sweet home to see my family!