Summer Travel Reflections: Sara Feinstein
My trip to China this past summer through the CACI summer travel fellowship was one of my most memorable experiences as a graduate student to date. My trip began in Beijing, where I met with a group of several of the other summer travel fellows. We travelled together, along with Jen Holdaway, who was an excellent and super knowledgeable guide, for about a week. Then, I spent my remaining week in Shanghai, exploring on my own and continuing to learn about China, and in Hong Kong, exploring the city with a friend.
I found many aspects of the trip surprising and instructive. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the trip, that I would never have been able to replicate had I come to China on my own, was the opportunity to speak with graduate students and Jen’s friends and colleagues. Over lunches and dinners, we had the opportunity to connect and through these conversations learn about daily life, and their perspectives on current and historical events in China. I will never forget the sarcastic humor and recollections about the past that Jen’s friend and village neighbor shared with us. I also especially enjoyed talking and laughing with the graduate students at Beijing Normal University and learning about their research projects. It was interesting to learn about the types of projects that they were pursuing and the similarities and differences between their experiences as graduate students in China and mine in New York City.
While I had some sense of what to expect, such as how different the big cities are from the smaller towns, I found the differences between the three major cities that I visited to be more dramatic than I imagined. I learned that Beijing is the administrative and bureaucratic center of China, and that the city’s history and layout reflects this purpose. Whereas Shanghai and Hong Kong are centers of business, in which the presence of international companies is apparent. I have limited experience traveling on my own, so I was slightly apprehensive to travel solo in Shanghai. However, I found that people I met, such as a helpful group of women traveling on the train, kindly helped me out even while struggling with the language barrier.
Best of all, I learned that I actually like tofu! I tried lots of different dishes, and found that while the tofu dishes I have tried here in New York I have not liked, I had many different tofu dishes in China that I found to be delicious. Through this experience I not only learned about China, lessons I hope to bring into my classroom to share with students this year, but also about myself.
Sara Feinstein is a Ph.D. student in Sociology, a former Seminar Fellow, and a Summer Travel Fellow for 2026.
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