Bittersweet departures

ACC is wrapping up and I am sitting alone in my dorm room being sad because everyone is heading back home to the US or traveling around China. I think I would be happier if I too had some kind of definitive physical change that clearly marked the end of my ACC semester, but right now I feel like I'm left in limbo while everyone else is floating out.

I met some really awesome people this semester, including my good friends Marianne Spencer from George-Washington （also native Mississippian), Lily Kaiser from Georgetown （who introduced me to the company Greentech Initiative that I will hopefully be interning for this summer), and of course, Eric Johnson from Tufts, who I also refer to as 江磊. I also enjoyed made a lot of other awesome friends, but with 40 people in our program, its not possible to mention everyone. We had a lot of good times, and I am sad to know that I will not see them for a while. I believe that this will not be the last time we run into each other, because the world is often smaller than we think.

However, as with any society (no matter how large or small), drama is bound to arise. Someone has got to the be the weird kid, the smart kid, the quiet kid, the popular kid, the wild kid, the goofy kid, etc. I've moved enough many times to know this, no matter where we go, the same story plays out every time. However, at ACC instead of falling into one group of friends, this time I really tried to be friends with everyone.

I think knowing that I will be a FroCo next year really motivated me to act more maturely and view all ACC drama differently. When I ran into a problem, I would think to myself, what would I do if I were FroCo Joy? During the course of our program, some students were very harshly (in relativity to the reasoning behind it), and even unnecessarily, ostracized from the group. Instead of distancing myself from everything, I was one of few people who tried to remain friends with them--but it is very hard when all of your friends are talking badly of them. From the perspective of FroCo Joy, would I console them? Ask them to look at things from a different perspective? Try to get the other students to stop excluding them? What kind of FroCo will I be? The laissez-faire type or the meddler? In terms of FroCo-ship, ACC has been good training grounds.

Anyhoo, today I will be moving out of my luxurious hotel "dorm" and into an apartment down the street. While our hotel dorms are reserved for foreign students studying abroad, my new apartment is the kind rented by Chinese students. Before I post any pictures, let me just say there is 天壤之别（differences as great as sky and earth).