College Life

This page is dedicated to my best friends from EE92 in Peking University!

Most people say that the years in college are the most unforgettable years in their life I can't agree more. Those 4 years changed us from teenagers to adults, we strived to grow up, to read ourselves and the outside world, to experience love and friendship.The beauty of college years is the always-changing state, both physically and spiritually.We were so dedicated to pursue our dreams, beautiful, shining dreams. In our dictionary, there was still no such word as Impossible. We are the vanguard, we can create miracles with our hands, we never thought about what to do after the failure, we only knew that we should march straight forward, with our heads up!

Happy 325

325 is not a common number at all, it is our lucky number, it is the home of 6 colleges girls from different parts of China. Here we got to know each other, we became sisters with different family names, we helped each other with problems in study and life as well, we shared our secrets, and we made wild comments about the boys around us:). 325 is our dorm number in building 31 in Peking University.

Building 31 is a very famous building not only within our university. It is the largest female student dorm building in Peking university, it can hold around one thousand girls! I think this is hard to imagine for americans, where is the privacy???:) Yes, there is hardly any privacy here, or you can have public privacy, The most famous scenery around our building can only be seen at around 11pm at night, when the little path in front of our building was lit by the hundreds of lights in the building. Groups or couples of boys and girls started to gather in front of it, talking, laughing, walking though the "crowd", hugging, kissing, everyone is forcusing on his or her own parterners. Another day flew by, and it is a time to relax a little bit for the next busy day. This last minute before the gate will be closed seems to be so precious and short!

Our room is one the third floor, in the middle, the male-female ratio is stunning in our department, 10:1, so we only have one dorm for all the girls in our grade. and I am very proud of our dorm, we worked together to generate this warm space which is really helpful to all of us.

OK, let me introduce our second home, it was really crowded, 3 bunks, each of them had 2 beds, if the 6 girls stand in the room together, we can bearly move. So some of us must sit or lie on her bed. Usually right after the lights were turned off, there will be a brief period of chaos with a lot of crashes:). The thing that happened most is jumping into another girl's or our own basin on the floor.

A-su is the head of 325. Don't misunderstand "head", it doesn't mean that you have a lot of power and priviliges, it only means that you should spend more time cleaning the table, sweep the floor and maintain the tidiness of the room. So we chose the most unselfish girl to this position. A-su is also the youngest among us, she looks cute and gives you the impression of a little rabbit:) She is the kind of girl that will remind you of your elder sister. Caring, warmhearted, always ready to help you with all her efforts. She really has a lot of interestes and she reads extensivelyShe can finish a long novel of 600 pages and then start to tell us the story right away, making comments from time to time. She also worked for the student union of our department and was the modal for students of lower grade! She just had the ability to get on well with everybody.

Yanzi was the second youngest one, but she looked even younger, the most notable feature was her round and very black eyes, clean and clear, as if you can see through her heart from there. We liked to make jokes on her, she always tried to deny at first, but finally decleared her failure under our tense attacks:), she never got angry, though.

Yihong was a slowtempered girl. She walked slowly, ate slowly, talked slowly, but she managed to do everything well, her score was among the highest in our grade. She has natural humor, she often told us the stories from her high school and made us laugh hysterically. She was a star in our "nighttime chatting club":).

Dai and Pei were Beijing girls and they went back home at weekends, so I knew them less and it is a little hard to talk about them here. The most happy time for us was weekends. Because the studying life in our department was very intense and the very competitive, maybe every student was the No. 1 in his high school class, or the whole high school, or the whole city. But the good thing about my roomates was that we didn't just study on our own, we helped each other and at the same time helped ourselves. A lot of our friends who visited our dorm liked the peaceful and warm environment in here.

We had a common character among us, that was being late in the process of getting "mature". None of us had a boy friend until the senior year, which was very rare in all the dorms in our university. THat helped us to focus on ourselves, 'coz the the independency of a self is very important in a relationship. Often when a girl found a boy friend, she tended to spend less time with her female friends. If half of the girls in a dorm have boy friend, then the whole environment will change. In the first 3 years, our topics were high school anecdotes, interesting stories in the day, striking news release, and homework problems, comments of boys in ur class. For some of them , we call their secret nicknames among ourselves, we really spent some time and energy to generate those funny nicknames:).

Then in the fourth year, something magic happened, 5 of us had our boy friends almost at the same time! Epidemic, that was the only explanation!:). So our topics started to change to our boy friends. A lot of our night meetings were spent to find stratergies to deal with our boy friends. From then on, we also started to add colors to the famous scenery in front of our building.

Now 4 of us came to the US, and the other 2 were in the graduate program in Peking University, they are also preparing GRE and TOEFL. I hope in the near future we can have a happy reunion here in the US!

Hilarious Netlab

My Life changed after I got into the Computer Network Lab of our department. At that time, Yong was in that lab for a while, and I just finished my GRE test. The lab needed some new faces to help do research there, so Yong recommended me and some of his best friends to the teachers working in that lab, he might not realize at that time that his recommendation really tied the 6 boys and girls together, not only just for the year we stayed together in that lab, but also the many years ever after, maybe in our whole life!

We really felt sorry in the first semester of our staying in the Netlab, we changed everything there! The only thing we didn't do was probably RESEARCH. I took part in TOEFL and then GRE subject in that semester, Wei, Chengzhou and Yong were preparing for their GRE, so the first thing we brought to the lab was piles of the exercise test problems, and software that helped you to remember GRE words:), and my tapes for the TOEFL listening comprehension. I don't remember what Luo and Daniel were doing, maybe chatting on the internet?:) but I remember that none of us worked on the assigned tasks. There were some graduate students in the lab, they seemed to work harder, and they never joined us in our conversation and laughters, they always kept silence in the corner, not wanting to disturb us from changing the lab into a longe. Then summer came and the air conditioning of our lab attrcted us to go there everyday. We were preparing for our finals then and we changed our lab into a discussion forum about course problems. After a day of hard work, and most importantly, after all the teachers left for home, we would go buy a watermellon and shared it in our lab. We called that "Drink Water Mellon", according to the term from Yong. We were not very efficient studying together, we would read the book for a while, then one person got tired and started to talk about travelling after the finals and then all of us would get together and describe our dreams for a random period of time. Then we felt the urge to go back to study, but of course that wouldn't keep long.

Ever since, the 6 of us became best friends, by then the Netlab looked like a club, we've strengthened our force and absorbed the 2 graduate students Jun and Xinzhong, so we had to buy bigger and bigger water mellons. There were visitors now and then, all the visitors suddenly wanted to join the Netlab for fun:)). At the end of the year 1996, we could watch VCR and sing Kara OK in the lab, the teachers always opened one eye and closed the other one, they were really nice and understanding!!

Don't misunderstand me. Our friendship was not based on watermellons and entertainment. We experienced hard time together, which made our friendship deeper and deeper.I just remembered I didn't see Luo for several days and then I asked Yong why, he told me that Luo was in the school hospital because he vomited bloody things all the time. That was really very scary, 'coz I think vomiting blood can be very serious and even life-threatening. So I went to hospital right away and the nurses were giving Luo a shot at that time, Wei was also there taking care of him, we chatted for some time, to make the air warmer. Then Luo said it was not serious, so I told him to take cae and left. But the next day, none of them came to the lab, and I knew something must be wrong, then I got Yong's call asking me to bring some quilts or blankets to the hospital, Luo might have to move into the hospital that day. I was stunned and very sad and I went to their dorm to get the neccessary things and put them on the rack of my bike, Xue Tao also helped me and we went to the hospital together. Luo was getting a shot in the waiting room, and there were at least 5 coats and some sweaters on him because he was in a fever and always felt cold, so Yong, Wei, Chengzhou and Daniel took off their coats, and shivered in the room themselves. It was in the winter of Beijing!I arrived and put the quilts on Luo and took some coats off and returned them to the shivering owners. Luo's face was very pale and he was sleeping. I talked with Chengzhou a little bit about Luo's condition. Then the doctors came and the boys helped to move Luo around to do all kinds of check. Finally he was admitted to the hospital, and was assigned a bed there. The patients room was much warmer than the waiting room. I rode back to school and got some living neccesities for him and we took turn staying in the hospital to take care of him. The following story became romantic, 'coz Luo got his girl friend in the hospital, I don't have the copyright to disclose this , I hope Luo will do this in the future.

Our friendship experience a lot of hard times like this and also a lot of good time together , it is so pure becasue everyone of us put his or her true heart into building this friendship. Now Yong, Chengzhou, Wei and me are in the US, when we talked about our old friends over the phone, we always sighed that we can never find the innocent and genuine friendship again. That made us treasure our friendship between us more and more. But we are far aprt, so we can only collect our memory about our golden era in Peking University in our dreams! And that really makes a magnificent dream!

I will remember these names forever: Yong Wang, Chengzhou Wang, Wei Lin, Wenyong Luo, Peng Zhang!

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