Week 6: Semantic Switch

For some reason, it feels like a switch inside me has flipped—suddenly, my system settings have been reset to Chinese. For the past five weeks, all my thoughts had been in English. I would often stumble when speaking Chinese with coworkers because I was mentally translating from English, struggling with incompatible grammatical structures.

But this week, everything has reversed. I now find myself naturally thinking in Chinese, and it’s been a surreal experience to catch myself doing so. Even funnier, I’ve started having trouble speaking English with Logan. More than once, I’ve accidentally replied to him in Chinese and only realized when I saw the puzzled look on his face. I now must actively remind myself to switch back to English.

This unexpected shift has been both disorienting and exciting. It’s made me realize how adaptable the human brain and how immersion can reshape not how we speak, but how we think. I feel like that I am no longer just a passively observing as an outsider, but now an active participant absorbing and assimilating into the world around me.

Maybe this shift in mindset is also why I’ve found myself approaching my research on gig economies with renewed focus. I am now seeing familiar issues, such as labor classification and platform regulation, from a new perspective. As I prepare for my upcoming seminar, I’ve been refining my arguments, organizing data, and thinking carefully about how to present the global variations in worker classification systems in an engaging and accessible way. It’s been rewarding to connect the dots between academic inquiry and the real-world structures I’ve been observing here, and I’m excited (if a bit nervous) to share those insights next week.

Outside of the office, I took a trip to the mountainside with a friend, a small getaway from the hustle and bustle of the city. As a child, I would look at traditional Chinese landscape paintings and think they were abstract. However, now, seeing the mountains up-close, I now realize that those paintings were painted in a style more closely resembling realism. The mountains shrouded in fog, tower above you rising and falling creating countless hills and valleys, twisting the horizon into unique shapes. I saw the mountains from The Great Wall, but the small resort style villa we stayed at was nestled at the base of these mountains. It was truly surreal to be surrounded by these silent and ancient giants.

I think that I am finally settling into my life here in China and I cannot wait to see what the rest of my time here will bring.