Fifteen Years in America - Chapter 4: College in America (Part 2)

This is a continuation of my family’s immigration story originally written by my dad in Chinese. For more of my dad’s narrative see the category marked Fifteen Years in America. Enjoy!

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I remember that my first class was titled “Introduction to American Business”. The professor is a Japanese Hawaiian named John. He was about 40 years old, medium build, and spoke English with a distinct Hawaiian accent. For international students , and especially me, the greatest obstacle is really the language. The professor speaks quite fast, and at first I could only understand about 50 to 60%. So I bought a small tape recorder and taped every lecture. After I got home, I would listen to it again. The contents of the lessons are not that difficult to understand, but my vocabulary was lacking, and I needed to look up many things in the dictionary.

My major of accounting belonged to the business school, and the Introduction to American Business was one of the core introductory courses. It didn’t have much depth, but covered many subjects. After completing this course, students are supposed to understand the basics of American economy and the main channels America uses for production and trade. Additionally, the students should have a bit of knowledge about international trade. The textbook was simple to understand and had a lot of pictures. Additionally, John was a very good lecturer and included many examples that applied to everyday life. For example, when he talked about supply and demand, he used Hawaii’s real estate market as an example. At that time, Hawaii’s real estate markets was one of the most expensive markets in the entire country. The main reason is that many Japanese people snatched up real estate in Hawaii. The yen was extremely strong and traded 80 yen to 1 dollar, and the Japanese thought that everything was quite cheap in Hawaii. They bought all things large and small including toothpaste and real estate. Additionally, Hawaii is a chain of islands, and did not have that much land. Building materials and labor also had to be shipped from the mainland and that increased the cost to build. Thus, there was a small supply and a huge demand so the real estate market boomed. When John talked about Hawaii’s pineapple industry, he said that it was a different picture. In the beginning of this story I mentioned that Hawaii used to have three large industries, one is tropical agriculture. The pineapples grown in the volcanic soil of the islands are large and sweet, and they used to be very popular. However, in the beginning of the 90’s, America was in a recession, and the labor in Hawaii was expensive compared to other tropical regions in the world. So the demand for Hawaiian pineapples fell greatly, and they were quite cheap around the islands.

I felt that the most interesting thing about American education is that the professors intentionally create an entertaining and relaxed atmosphere for the student, and doesn’t just lecture monotonically.  It’s not like in China where the professors are supposed to talk, and the students are supposed to listen quietly and believe that whatever the professor said is true.  Students in China learn by memorizing formulas and definitions, and then recite it all during tests.  Here in America, the professors often put students in small groups so that they can debate amongst themselves and students are encouraged to have different opinions.  Additionally, on the written exams students do not necessarily have to agree with a professor’s opinion in essay questions.  As long as you have a great idea and great supporting points you could still score quite well.

At that time, the math classes I had to take were extremely easy.  I think they were at the level of 10th grade math in China so I had no problems.  However, I never expected that there is something in  these math courses that could be extremely difficult for me.

As I said previously, the community colleges are established to provide the community with capable workers.  So the math classes are not extremely difficult, but there are more hands on skills taught.  One particular class required us to learn to use something called a “Ten Key”, which is basically a calculator that prints out a calculation.  It is a pretty common tool used by most accounting departments.  I have never used a calculator such as this in China.  In fact, in China the accounting departments in my college years taught people to use the abacus.  In my department there was a professor famous for teaching the abacus.  He was always cheerful and unkempt and carried a giant abacus on his back.  Then he would hang the abacus on the blackboard and calculate with one hand while he taught.  I don’t know if the students learned anything from that guy or if  they still teach that course, but in Kapiolani the lesson of the ten key was extremely useful to me.

At that time everyone was assigned a ten key calculator.  The teacher told us to touch type and calculate results.  Additionally, the teacher would record everyone’s time and give a score.  Since I’ve never touched such a machine before I was extremely slow in the beginning.  In my first test I only typed about 50 numbers in a minute, and I still had calculation errors.  I was in the bottom three of the entire class even though my math scores were number one in another class.  However, if I couldn’t improve my score in the ten key class, my entire GPA would suffer.  My American classmates grew up with keyboards and they had no problems typing more than 100 numbers per minute, and I was extremely jealous.  In order to catch up, I used any extra time I had and went to the Student Learning Center to borrow a ten key machine and practice.  I practiced so  much that my fingers hurt to touch any object.  However, every bit of plowing brings an extra bit of harvest.  My final score was that I could enter more than 160 numbers per minute and my accuracy was above 98%.   So my final mathematics  score was number one in the class.  Many years later, when I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the world’s largest financial headhunting firms interviewed me and actually tested me on a ten key machine.  At that very moment it was clear to me  that my hard work was not wasted at all.

Stay tuned for more of my dad’s adventure in America! Feel free to subscribe to this feed if you don’t want to miss a single chapter.

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