China scholar Kevin Carrico on being followed in Hong Kong by reporters from pro-Beijing newspaper
The Australia-based American academic, who has researched tensions between Hong Kong and mainland China, as well as the city’s independence movement, speculates why tabloid Wen Wei Po might be interested in his movements
Small-town life I was born in 1980 in Cambridge, Maryland, in the United States. It’s a small town, the sort of place where everyone knows everyone. My dad is an accountant and my mom was in social work. I have two younger sisters. In junior school, I studied French and then Latin – I enjoyed studying languages.
When I was 15, I left to go to boarding school in Pennsylvania. Life in a small town was quite boring and I was excited to get out, even if I was just exchanging one small town for another. When the time came to go to college I thought it would be interesting to try learning a challenging language and Chinese seemed the most challenging option.
Bright lights, big cities In the spring of 1998, I joined a Chinese educational tourist trip to Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou. As well as the cultural experience of new food, new people, new ideas and a new language, it was exciting to spend time in real mega-cities.
For study, I went to Bard College, outside New York City. My degree was in Asian Studies; it combined training in Mandarin and the study of ancient history, modern history and classes on contemporary issues. It was a four-year degree and during that time I studied in Qingdao, Harbin and Nanjing – three fairly different cities and quite distinct from anything I’d experienced before.
Chinese lessons After college I went to the Hopkins-Nanjing Centre for Chinese and American Studies, a joint graduate programme run by Johns Hopkins University and Nanjing University. American students take all their classes in Chinese and the Chinese take their classes in English. I had built up the basic language skills I needed during four years of undergraduate studies, and the Hopkins-Nanjing Centre gave me the opportunity to move beyond studying the language to using it and immersing myself in it.
