This summer, 10 students and two faculty members are traveling to China to enhance their Chinese language skills while experiencing the country’s vast and diverse cultural landscape. Please enjoy this next blog post below from Ella ’26 as she shares highlights from presentation day, where students pitched their own Chinese restaurant concepts using language skills and cultural insights, followed by an afternoon of shopping, snacking, and bonding with host families.
你好父母！
Today was the day us students have been anticipating all week: presentation day! The past five class days, each Chinese class section has been working on learning words, sentence structures, and cultural aspects relating to food in China. Although I can’t speak much on the other class (with seven students in it), I can speak about my experience in the section with three students. Our goal for the project was to make a slideshow presentation of a new Chinese restaurant we were, hypothetically, going to open in the United States. In our presentation, we used what we’ve learned in class to talk about 1. What the current problems are in Chinese restaurants in America (understaffed, flavor of dishes aren’t authentic, many use premade meals to save money, prices of dishes are expensive) 2. An introduction to our restaurant (name, location, type of traditional Chinese cuisine we specialize in, and categories of dishes) 3. The distinctive characteristics of our restaurant (what kinds of services we provide or what the ambiance of our restaurant feels like)
I enjoyed this project a lot because even though I have gone through multiple different food and nutrition units in Chinese class at school, I have never really dived into learning specifically about restaurants or the marketing strategies actually used in China. I also thought it was interesting how we applied our knowledge into a real-life situation and added some of our own creativity into the mix when designing a restaurant. I chose an authentic Sichuan-style hotpot restaurant called “火火锅” which translates to: Fire Hotpot (fire used in its slang version of amazingly tasting, of course). My restaurant also has dancing and singing performances done by the waitstaff (for those who don’t know me, let’s just say dancing and singing in my restaurant wasn’t a surprise to any of my classmates).
With this said, I can safely say that one of Ava, Oscar and I’s favorite parts of the project was when we got to pitch our restaurant idea to people and interview them on whether they’d want to go or not. We asked some of our Chinese-speaking friends and a lady in a local Chinese restaurant their opinions on our restaurants. And because I know you’re all dying to know: everyone loved my hotpot idea.
Anyways, back to the presentations. Both classes expressed that they felt the presentations went really well, so it was an overall success for the Deerfield China CSGC group!
Our afternoon activity of the day was going to the Yu Garden （豫园) where we had two hours to shop, eat street food （小吃), and enjoy traditional Eastern architecture. The best purchase of the day was made by Isaac with his knock-off Prada Milano glasses—or should I say Ppaoa Milasses because that’s what it actually says on the side of the sunglasses. When we came back from the Yu Garden Isaac went straight to the classroom to cover the writing with a black sharpie. Mano got a sword which he claimed was plastic. Tamu, Zariah, and Jeanne got beautiful traditional Chinese skirts and scarves. Cam dabbled in the art of bargaining with the local vendors.
After school, I had dinner at home with my host family and then went out for ice cream and milk tea. Meanwhile, Tamu had a massage, which she described as heaven on earth, Oscar had a long walk along the river with his host brother, and Zariah helped her host sister do homework, to which her sister returned the favor by teaching her Chinese dance.
At the end of the night, my host mom played me a popular song in China called “甜蜜蜜” (meaning sweet smile) by Teresa Teng. She said the song reminds her of my smile, which was honestly the perfect way to end my day.
明天见！
