Moving into college is a time of great excitement. For me, just gazing at the magnificent architectural marvels of Yale sweeps away most of my worries and arouses a sense of anticipation: I cannot wait to start my studies on such a beautiful campus!
Aside from adapting to a new environment, the first days of college are about meeting new people who happen to have a new presence in my life. Meeting new people is great, but there are also anxieties amid the excitement.
At the Orientation for International Students, I was told that every Yale freshman shook hands 300 times during his/her first few weeks of college, but could remember very few names. Another precaution was that many people would say, “Let’s have lunch”, but what they really mean is “I consider you to be worthy of having lunch with.”
I knew a long time ago that when Americans say “How are you?” they do not expect an answer, for “How are you?” is just a common greeting, and I have grown comfortable to reply with an automatic “Good. How are you?” This auto-reply had never failed me, and it made me sound quite American.
But if thirty people ask me “How are you?” a day, or a dozen times in a span of 15 minutes, my auto-reply mechanism is broken. Such greetings are casual, but somehow I have the mistaken feeling that they have to have a meaning, so I begin to hesitate before I answer, and sometimes I even forget to answer.
In addition to “How are you?” the basic greeting in English 101—“Hello!”—has also become a little problem for me.
For freshmen in college, parties or any other kind of informal meeting usually involve a lot of strangers. After a round of handshaking and “My name is…” I would forget the first guy’s name.
So I began to hesitate a little before saying “Hello!” because people say “Hello!” without really wanting to get to know one another. But there are lots of “Hello!” people out there. The most impressive one was a guy who randomly sat beside me at a show. I turned to him with a semi-automatic smile and he in turn put up his right arm, five fingers parallel to the ground, and shook my hand like a robot. Because of this special handshake, I did remember his name, but unfortunately, I still do not know him well.
While I stood at an informal gathering in a freshmen dorm, I wondered if it was just me who apprehended such meaningless hellos. People were chatting with great enthusiasm while forgetting the name of the person they were talking to.
“I don’t like parties,” a girl suddenly whispered to me. Thank goodness, she is American and she also dislikes “Hello!” and “How are you?” So instead of “partying”, we went out, grabbed cookies, and had a real conversation.