Week 2: June 6-12

This has been quite a busy and exciting week! Visiting Shanghai was amazing, and even though many of us initially felt that we had not been in Beijing long enough to appreciate the different culture of Shanghai, it turned out to be a new and refreshing experience. Shanghai is much more Westernized, more international, more modern, and more energetic. What it may lack in Chinese culture compared to Beijing, it makes up through its grand architecture and dazzling nightlife.

In terms of my work, I feel that I have fully assimilated into my lab and am working on my own project almost independently of my advisors, whether it is due to the nature of the project or to my own working style. Language barriers slow communication and often make me more inclined to look up solutions to problems I run into rather than ask my advisor, but I still try as much as possible to communicate with my labmates to not only learn more about the research field we are working in, but also to share language and culture with each other.

Week 3: June 13-19

On Tuesday the 18th, I had the opportunity to meet my graduate mentor’s friend, Ye, who is a Master’s student interested in applying for a PhD program at Harvard. He seemed very excited to meet me and my friends, and he took Abby and I to Beihai Park after work, which is a very peaceful and serene lake surrounded by a path. It was nice to see some of the nature in Beijing, without any of the vendors or shops common to other popular walks. Ye was also very interesting to talk to and has excellent English, as we spoke about differences between China and the U.S. in a variety of topics including culture, business and entrepreneurship, technology, politics, and foreign relations. Additionally, as a native of Beijing, Ye offered to show us around anywhere we have not gone so far in Beijing, so I look forward to meeting him again.

I have also had the chance to speak more with some of my labmates as well. Although language barriers often slowed the pace of conversation, they seemed to really enjoy learning new English phrases, and we were still able to discuss very interesting topics with the help of a dictionary every now and then. For example, I had a discussion with a labmate Wu Tianyu about the relation between government, security, and technology, where we contrasted the Chinese government censorship and control over the internet in China with the recent NSA PRISM scandal in the U.S. concerning the U.S. government’s surveillance over the internet. Although he may not agree with certain policies such as blocking Facebook and other social media, he claimed that government control over the internet was necessary to ensure the security of the people and of the country, which is another testament to the Asian Confucian mindset of prioritizing community versus the American individualistic mindset of ensuring the rights and freedom of each person.

I feel that I am assimilating very well with my lab group, as we went to a dinner together last Friday. As for my research, I am also picking up the pace of my work, as I am finally collecting a lot of data from my computations and am constantly having experiments running. Additionally, I have helped a couple times restore the servers to their fully functional state and may suggest some upgrades to the server, which requires the professor to grant me access permissions.

We also had the opportunity to visit a Confucian temple and museum last weekend. I have never studied Confucianism itself, although I was aware of some of its teachings and importance in Asia from my studies in Korean culture. Thus, it was very interesting to be able to learn about Confucius in this museum. It is incredible that one man from a couple thousand years ago could have such a revolutionary and lasting impact that holds such a deep influence in Chinese culture.

Week 4: June 20-26

This past weekend, we decided to tackle the Great Wall. And in no tourist-y way either, with completely packed stairs, limited view of scenery blocked by other tourists, and souvenir vendors yelling at you to buy their toys. We took a long trip up to a rural village up in the mountains to a part of the Great Wall called Jiankou. The next morning, we got up at 3:30 AM, made the 40-minute hike up the mountain to the Wall, and were able to catch the sunrise from one of the towers. And what an incredible sight! There was absolutely nobody else around, the sky was crystal clear, and we were able to see luscious mountainsides all around us. We then hiked for 8 hours through this unreconstructed Great Wall, where clear paths were often lacking, staircases were reduced to rubble that we had to climb, and foliage had taken over much of the surfaces. The entire time, it was not only incredible to see the landscape from the ridge of the mountain, but it also gave me an appreciation for how much work had to be done to build this wall. It was incredibly tall and wide, and the workers had to carry all the brick materials up the mountain, which is definitely no easy task. It would have definitely stopped any invasion. The fact that the wall was even built would have probably been enough of a deterrent to many invaders, since it would take such an incredible force and willpower to build.

My research seems to be going very well, and I am getting some meaningful data. I have been able to calculate the activation energy barriers of various paths of diffusion for hydrogen in both OsO2 and RuO2, and have most of the preliminary data for H interacting with various vacancies in OsO2. However, I am having difficulty with some of the calculations for finding the diffusion attempt frequencies, which is necessary to find the Arrhenius diffusion expression prefactors. To approach this problem, I found several add-ons to the VASP code online, which I just need to incorporate into our VASP code. I made this proposal to my graduate student, Xiaofeng, and from Professor Lai, and they both agreed to allow me to pursue this direction. Professor Lai gave me a copy of the VASP source files to change, but I have been running into numerous technical difficulties with re-compiling, which Xiaofeng is unable to help me with.

Week 5: June 27-July 3

This past weekend was our trip to Xi’an! With me were Abby, Grace, and Griffin. This trip is probably our first trip outside of Beijing that we planned completely ourselves, without the aid of a native Chinese speaker. Additionally, we actually planned our trip, instead of getting there and floundering around! We took an overnight sleeper train, which was an adventure in itself, as I had never taken a sleeper train before. Unfortunately, I got the topmost out of three bunk beds, meaning that I had the least headroom and could not sit upright. But monkeying around and chilling on other people’s beds made it alright.

When we got to Xi’an and checked into our hostel right by the City Wall’s South Gate, we immediately went to the Bell Tower and the Drum Tower. From these two towers, we had a fantastic view of Xi’an, since the towers are in the middle of the city, inside the city walls. Afterwards, we visited the Muslim Mosque, which is notable (on top of the fact that there is a mosque in China!) for its religious buildings that have Chinese-style architecture. We then went to the South Gate, where we were able to catch a performance of the guard-changing ceremony before heading to the top of the wall, where we rented bikes and biked around the entire thing. The circumference of the wall is approximately 13.7 km, a pretty long bike ride! But we managed in ninety-five minutes and were able to see much of Xi’an from the path along the wall which was forty feet off the ground. We wrapped up the evening by heading to the Muslim Quarters, searching out all kinds of food that Xi’an is known for, including dao xiao mian (noodles), rou jia mo (hamburger), and yang rou pao mo (unleavened bread).

On Sunday, we unfortunately woke up an hour and a half later than we intended, but it did not matter anyway since our plan was to visit the Terracotta Warriors that day, and on the way over we found out that the museum was actually closed all morning due to the South Korean President visiting! When we got to the museum, we happened to be there at just the right time that the President was leaving the museum, and saw her. It was quite exciting. She was apparently at Tsinghua University the day before giving a speech in Chinese to the students, and in Xi’an that day visiting a Samsung manufacturing plant nearby. I later found out that the President had quite a controversial background involving her parents and her rise to political power. But now I am glad to hear of her visits as it seems she is working hard on improving Korea-China relations. In any case, we spent much time in the Terracotta Warrior Museum, all the while fascinated that a single emperor had built these thousands of soldiers for himself, and that it was not discovered for almost two millennia. We did get a little confused trying to visit the Qin Shi Huang Mausoleum, but it was time to leave at that point anyway. All in all, our visit to Xi’an was extremely successful, as we had fully planned the trip beforehand, making it not stressful at all.

At this point in my research, I have most of my results and am currently writing up the final report, which will also serve as a draft for the paper that we are planning on submitting for publication. Unfortunately, since the materials are not suitable for the original application we were investigating, hydrogen diffusion barriers for nuclear fusion reactors, due to its poor hydrogen permeation resistance, I am having a difficult time writing up an introduction and motivation for this project. Additionally, I feel that I may be starting to lose some motivation for running even more experiments and collecting more data. But no matter, since I feel that the next few weeks I will be busy with analysis of the data I have already collected and with writing my report.

Week 6: July 4-July 10

Last weekend we visited Tianjin and the Eco-city right outside of Tianjin, which is funded by both China and Singapore. This project just started about five years ago, and the goal is to build a city that is environmentally friendly and sustainable. However, that was not the impression we got when we visited. It seemed that the urban planning was done very poorly, with little attention to environmental initiatives, and simply using the “eco-city” brand to attract people to move there. For example, the roads and intersections were much too wide, as the entire city was built for cars, not walking or biking. There were no bike lanes or bike racks. There were already dozens of apartment complexes being built, but only one shopping center which was a far distance from most of the apartment complexes. There were several solar panels and wind turbines installed here and there. However, HAWTs perform relatively poorly in urban areas, so it seems that these are mostly for show, and there were not nearly enough solar panels to support a sizeable fraction of the city’s energy needs. There was very little public transportation, although apparently there are plans to install a light rail transit in the next few years. All in all, it is a very impressive city. Although the streets were nearly empty when we visited (which was quite eerie), the government is heavily promoting this city and encouraging people to move in.

This seems very reflective of China’s half-hearted move towards environmental initiatives. For example, I heard on the news several weeks ago that China was planning on implementing carbon caps in several major cities, and hopefully extending them to all of China in the next few years in order to cut down on the pollution. However, while China may claim that the intentions were for environmental reasons, a lot of these actions were actually spurred by citizen protests and dissatisfaction with the extreme levels of pollution that are very hazardous for their health. And yet another news article several months ago detailed a man criticizing the local government for the hazardous levels of water pollution in the river and getting arrested. At the moment, it seems that short-term economic gain outweighs the need for environmental controls that may not have an immediate financial output.

On Sunday morning, Abby and I visited the Temple of Heaven. This popular tourist destination had been on our to-do lists for a long time. However, upon entering the Temple, we were quickly distracted by the surprisingly large number of Chinese people that were sitting around, clearly not being tourists. Several were sitting on the side, playing card games, while others were playing hacky-sack. We ventured into the trees just off the track, and found so many elderly Chinese people working out, dancing, doing Chinese yo-yo routines, practicing Tai Chi and another wrestling martial art, playing instruments in small groups, and selling posters. It was incredible how active these people were, especially given the fact that it was mostly middle-aged or elderly men and women. Additionally, we happened to land upon a marriage market, in which people were sitting around with sheets of paper in front of them that apparently detailed their unmarried children’s age, weight, income, and other details. We of course eventually got around to visiting the Temple itself, but it was surprising to see how many locals came here to congregate, meet with their friends, and stay active in interesting hobbies.

Week 7/8: July 11-July 21

Surprise! I spent my Friday night in a meeting with my professor. I had found out on July 11th that my professor would actually be leaving for a conference starting July 14th, and would not be coming back until July 20th, at which point it would be too late for me to meet him. Thus, I had piggy-backed on Luo Xiaofeng’s meeting with Professor Lai on the night of July 12th. It was a 2-hour meeting, and although he had not gotten a chance to read my final paper yet (which I am considering using as the rough draft for the manuscript for publication), we were able to discuss the results. For example, we got into a heated 10-minute discussion on how to model the diffusion rate law based on a random walk model, leading to the conclusion that a simple model would not do and unless I wanted to put the effort into some more complex simulations, I would have to make some big approximations in the diffusion rate. But after this long and productive meeting, we agreed upon the journal and a rough timeline for publication. Additionally, I will be listed as first author on this publication, so I am quite excited!

And now it is time to direct my efforts towards building this website. Since it is the last year of the IRES in China program, the 6 of us wanted to build a website to provide closure for the program, and emphasize it's wonderful impact on dozens of students. We have a big task ahead of ourselves, and perhaps we have set too high goals. But still, it is good that we have something to work towards as a team. Since I am the only one that has experience in web development, I will be building the website and the others will be managing the content for various parts of the site.

Conclusion

It is currently 10AM on July 24th, and as I am writing this last blog post, I am already beginning to miss China and miss my friends. I finished working on the website at 5AM this morning, having stayed up all night to meet the deadline when the program officially ends. It has been an incredible journey this summer, and now is the perfect time to reflect on what I have accomplished, how I have grown, and what I have gained. As I have mentioned in my first blog post, this was my first time outside of the U.S., and so I had very little idea of what to expect, only knowing that I should keep an open mind.

In terms of research, I have undoubtedly learned a huge amount. One of my goals for my research this summer was simply to learn what computational science was even about. I came into the summer afraid and feeling completely underprepared for the research and overwhelmed by the background material I was reading. But I quickly acclimated to the research and the science, thanks to my graduate student. I have a better understanding of computational science and its potential and current limitations. Additionally, I have learned a huge amount of physics. As an unintended side result, I have been able to get enough results to consider publication, and so that is what I will be working on in the next week.

The cultural experience was also quite fascinating. I may not have undergone as much of a culture shock as some of my peers, due to growing up with Asian parents, surrounding myself with Asian-American friends, and having access to Asian-dominated communities in both Orange County and Boston. Nevertheless, immersion in the Chinese culture was still a completely new experience. As we had the opportunity to visit many cultural and historical sites throughout China, I found that China has such a rich and complex history that I hope to learn more about.

There are so many differences in worldly perspectives that are apparent in daily life. I was lucky to find several Chinese graduate students that became very good friends during the summer, spoke English remarkably well, and were very interested in a variety of topics including philosophy, politics, education, and economics. It was through these discussions that I really gained an insight into the Chinese perspective on life, and the deep Confucian roots. Admittedly, these perspectives were often strange and contrary to my own, as I would question my Chinese friends’ points of view. But even then, I saw value in their perspective and tried to keep an open mind.

Overall, I had an amazing 9 weeks and I don’t think that it could have been spent any better way. I will keep in touch with all my friends I made in China, as well as the close friends I made from the U.S. After all, in the end, relationships are one of the few things that matter, and the relationships we have forged across cultural barriers are invaluable. I hope to not only keep this experience with me and change me for the rest of my life, but also share this experience with others. And so I continue the rest of my journey with an open mind.