Hello everyone! My name is Xinran 欣然(means “happiness” in Chinese) and I am a junior student. My major is education and I’m minoring in East Asian Studies. I was born in Dalian which is a coast city and is famous for seafood. My home city is only 1 hour and 20 minutes of flight to South Korea and 3 hours to Tokyo. Many Korean people and Japanese people work and live in Dalian. Also, Dalian is a multi-culture city that includes Chinese culture, Japanese culture, and Russian culture because of historical reasons. My grandfather and my dad all can speak fluent Japanese. So, I grew up under the nurture of multi-culture. When I was in middle school and I was attracted by K-pop culture. My favorite band is EXO and I came to its concert in 2016. I think this class is very helpful for me to know more about East Asian culture and it will be very useful for my future career.

Japanese style’s buildings in Dalian

Russian style’s building in Dalian

By the way, I enjoy cooking and baking, especially Chinese dishes and all kind of cakes.

So far, I really enjoy the class. I am looking forward to learning more information about East Asian culture. I think connecting the content of reading with Chinese, Japanese and Korean culture is a better way to understand and learn. My learning approaches are two simple ways: reviewing notes from the reading and the last class and previewing the PowerPoint for the next class. I use that approach in most of my major classes and it is also useful in our class. We have daily read with a quiz before the class and it is a very good way for me to prepare. I feel like this course is very interesting.