My International Friends

 Life is always full of uncertainties! I have heard many times that I might be able to go to Australia since I was a toddler. Who could have known that I would actually be able to live with my grandma in Australia more than 20 years after she migrated here? I arrived in Brisbane before Christmas in 2008, and in 2009, I started a master's degree course at QUT. Despite the pressure from almost all aspects of life, I really enjoyed making new friends from different cultures. Throughout the course, I had very few Chinese friends, as most of my friends were from countries other than China and Australia. I think this was because I was tired of Chinese culture and was eager to understand something different, and my English was still not fluent enough to freely discuss many topics with native speakers.

The most challenging subject I took in my first semester was called "Software Development", which covered a lot of software engineering in Java programming. I had never learned Java before, nor had I ever done graphical user interface programming. Therefore, I found it very hard to catch up and got a very poor mark on my first assignment. The second assignment was a group project, and fortunately, I found a student from Thailand to work with me. He was very good at Java. "QUT's courses are always too simple!" he said. "Too simple? I find it hard enough!" I was surprised by what he said.

Later, I understood that he only felt that way because he thought the tuition fees were too expensive. He had graduated with a bachelor's degree in computer science from a university in Thailand. Because the tuition fees in Australia were very expensive for his parents, he had very high expectations, and QUT's resources and the depth of the course could not satisfy him. We worked together and got almost full marks. He was probably the best student I met in my master's degree course, and the only one I felt I couldn't compete with.

I had a number of friends from India, though I have forgotten all of their names. For some unknown reason, I felt more comfortable chatting with them than with my Chinese peers. They spoke English much more fluently than me, despite their accents. The most interesting part about them was their view on marriage. Arranged marriage was still the dominant approach. Unlike in China, where arranged marriages are typically for young people who haven't had the opportunity to find a suitable partner by themselves, in India, it was more dominant among the upper class of society. Since my classmates were all from the upper class, they all got married to someone they didn't know back in India after finishing their degrees in Australia.

One of my best friends was an undergraduate student from Vietnam, whom I met because lectures were shared by both undergraduate and postgraduate students. "People in Vietnam don't like China, as we feel the threat!" he said.

"I understand your feelings," I said. The culture in Vietnam was very similar to that of China, but he liked to highlight the differences. "We have the year of the cat rather than the year of the rabbit," he said proudly.

We grouped together for an assignment in C++. Afterward, we went to the teacher's office to discuss adjusting our marks. "Do either of you want to do a research degree?" Dr. Maolin Tang asked. "You both are suitable for a PhD." After the meeting, my Vietnamese friend said, "How stupid it would be to do a PhD degree!" He added, "You have to spend a few years doing something boring, and then you get a job with a salary much lower than those working at tech giants like Microsoft and Google." I asked him why he felt research was boring. He said he had done a project with Dr. Moe Wynn.

Another of my best friends was a student from Malaysia. He said his grandparents were from China, but he had never been to China himself. Later, I learned his grandparents were from Guangdong Province. However, he couldn't speak Cantonese; instead, he was fluent in Mandarin. Similar to me, he liked to watch Japanese cartoons and animations. Crayon Shin-chan was his favorite. He felt very upset when the author died. "Do you like to watch Crayon Shin-chan?" he asked me. "When I was a child..." I said. "Then you didn't really like it!" he said. "If you like it, you will watch it again and again, even when you've grown up." Unlike others, he was optimistic about his future. That is why I liked to spend time with him.

I also had a couple of Muslim friends, one from Iran and the other from Saudi Arabia. We often have stereotypes about people from certain parts of the world, but if you really make friends with them, you will find that we share more than we differ!