Bandido's salsa Isn't so Spicy anymore

Meredith Gilliam

At night, from the 70th floor of the Swiss Hotel, all of downtown Singapore is visible, lit by cars, streetlamps, buildings, and ships at port, flickering and iridescent. Among life's experiences there are few "mountaintop" moments - periods of intense excitement, revelation, or growth. But I think the great elevation from which I looked out over Singapore this particular night helped me realize how significant study abroad has been in my life. Last summer, I joined 24 other freshmen in the Singapore Summer Immersion Program (SSIP), a seven-week odyssey in Southeast Asia that exposed students to unique cultures and politics in an English-based setting. Although we lived in apartments and studied Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore, we took group excursions into Malaysia and Thailand. Generously funded by a private donor, the Singapore Summer Immersion Program gives UNC freshmen the opportunity to spend a summer on the opposite side of the world, cost free.

What's so great about SSIP? How many other opportunities are there to go parasailing on a Malaysian beach one week and ride elephants in Thailand the next? As incredible as these experiences were, however, any tourist with the means could repeat them. What makes this program an unparalleled experience is the ability to not just visit places, but to live and to scrutinize unique Southeast Asian lifestyles, providing the opportunity for enormous personal and intellectual growth.

Some of my greatest revelations involve connections made with ordinary people. One of the first Singaporeans I got to know was Anna, an ethnically Chinese woman who spent an entire weekend showing a friend and me around Singapore. She shared her views on everything from race to politics, in some ways fitting and in other ways breaking the Singaporean stereotypes I had come to expect. She surprised us in her staunch support of President Bush and America's influence in the rest of the world and in her racially motivated views about ethnic mixing in her own country. In sharp ideological contrast were the ladies at Sisters in Islam, a Malaysian-based Islamic women's rights group, who passionately shared their views on civil rights, echoing much of the political debate going on in America today. I also learned to differentiate between the practice of Islam in Southeast Asia (Indonesia being the world's largest Islamic nation) and its practice in other parts of the world.

I remember sitting up one night in a hotel room in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, and being drilled with questions from Thai college students we had gotten to know about movies, socializing, and college life in America. We discovered that not all questions are easy to answer or justify - (why is it that so many teens in America want to move so far away from their families for college?).

Other individuals I came in contact with come back to me merely as snapshots - the Chinese high school student in Malaysia who was applying to colleges for biochemistry like me, or the Middle Eastern woman tourists whom we saw riding jet skis at the beach in full-body covering. Having the opportunity to interact with so many different people taught me that Southeast Asian societies are just as diverse and complicated as we claim that American society is.

As many new perspectives as I gained from my experience, I was perhaps most struck by the similarities and feelings of connection I found between my own culture and those I encountered. I learned to think of America, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand as countries at various stages of modernization rather than limiting myself to the differentiation of "Western" and "Eastern." I recognize now that the ties we share extend deeper than Hollywood movies or the production of American sneakers in Malaysian factories. I was fascinated to discover that the macroinvertebrates we collected on a river tour of Bangkok are the same species I studied in freshwater streams in North Carolina as a member of a high school environmental science team. Through discussion in class, I realized that many of the social and political issues that Singapore faces - how to integrate races without discrimination, how to promote personal freedom while protecting family values, how to build a positive national image regionally and globally - are similar to those faced by America today. One of the greatest senses of connection I felt was standing among the Mandarin-language congregation at St. Andrew's Cathedral in Singapore and discovering that I could sing along in English the same hymn everyone else sang in Mandarin.

The world feels a little bit smaller after going "there and back again," and perhaps this feeling reflects a real smallness that mass communications and international dependencies are creating in the world today. In the weeks following the tsunami disaster last December, I was amazed at how quickly place-names like Phuket and Sumatra became household terms and at how my travel in places affected by the disaster intensified its impact on me. Many former SSIP participants came together at the University to fundraise for tsunami relief, with events ranging from bottled water sales to a benefit concert.

Thomas Wolfe, North Carolina author of UNC freshman application fame, is often quoted for his line "You can never go home again." He's right, I think, because every time individuals change, so do relationships and the basic understandings that govern our behavior, sometimes to the extent that we do not feel the same even in the places where we are most comfortable. College is by itself a growing period when people and relationships change, but sometimes it takes getting away from home entirely - even going to the other side of the world - to really grow. While in Southeast Asia I was exposed to new traditions, assumptions about life, and ways of living. I realized just how ethnocentric my view of the world has been, not through any fault of my own, but mostly because I lacked the means to visualize the world through the eyes of someone like a Singaporean, a Malay, or a Thai. Maybe it's just that August in Chapel Hill doesn't seem quite so sweltering anymore or that the hot salsa at Bandido's on Franklin Street isn't quite so spicy (I'm convinced some of my taste buds died in Thailand), but I have changed. I hope that I have become a better student, citizen, and thinker as a result.

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