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Senior to Watch: Rowena Paz
Ioana Patringenaru | May 21, 2007
Rowena Paz says she feels her life has split in two. There’s life before her one-year study abroad stint in China. And then there’s life after. Paz, who went to China through UCSD’s Education Abroad Program, said the experience changed her life. “It opened up my eyes to a larger world,” she said.
She now is a staunch supporter of study-abroad programs. Her experience also helped her appreciate her parents’ sacrifices and their decision to immigrate to the United States from the Philippines, she said. She added she realizes her opportunities come with responsibilities and she intends to fulfill them.
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| Rowena Paz, first from the left, with students at the migrant school, where she volunteered. |
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The U.S. government financed Paz’s year abroad through a $20,000 scholarship. In exchange, she agreed to one year of government service within three years of graduation. For now, Paz has accepted a position with Google, but she also interviewed with the CIA and other government agencies. She said she would like to become Secretary of State one day.
Paz will be a good leader of people, said Professor Richard Madsen, a cultural sociologist, who specializes in the religions of East Asia and especially China. He taught her at UCSD and kept in touch with her when she was abroad. “Rowena is a very, very good student, one that we can be proud of at UCSD,” the professor said. “She shows that we provide an environment where students can really grow in a well-rounded way.” Paz was a good student, but her ability to take initiatives set her apart, he added. It might be what took her to China in the first place.
Paz said she’s always been interested in international relations. She’s convinced China will play an important role on the world stage. “It’s the country to know, to be aware of, to understand,” she said. She felt she needed to be on the ground to do just that.
She studied at the Joint Center for International Studies at Beijing University for six months. Half of her classmates were American, the other half Chinese. They talked about the war in Iraq and Tiananmen Square. Paz found out her Chinese classmates don’t want to shake things up. “They learned that if you protest, the government will crack down,” she said. Many of her classmates were members of the communist party, because they knew it guaranteed them a good future, she said.
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| Paz in an empress costume at the Summer Palace in Beijing. |
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Field projects were the most interesting part of these first six months, she added. In one course, Paz and her classmates interviewed migrant workers who come from rural China to Beijing, hoping for a better life. One day, her group got lost and stumbled upon a sweatshop. They were able to talk to workers, who said they made less than $1 a day sewing jeans and worked 14 to 15 hours daily. The workers didn’t have official permits to work and live in Beijing, so their children didn’t have access to health care or education. Still, they said life in Beijing was better than back home.
The encounter made a lasting impression. At the time, Paz lived with a wealthy family in a three-story house. Her hosts owned two cars and their children went to a prestigious elementary school affiliated with Beijing University. The migrant workers she had just met were living in a different world.
Paz wasn’t just a passive observer. She also took action. Every Friday, she volunteered at a school for migrant workers’ children, about 90 minutes outside Beijing. She tried to teach English. She sang songs and played games in a dusty, dirty classroom. A Chinese TV crew filmed her doing the hokey-pokey for her students. “That’s my claim to fame,” she joked. She added she believes the students appreciated her efforts. Even though they were poor, they gave her a good luck charm at the end of her stint.
Paz also spent three weeks teaching English to about 50 middle schoolers in rural Western China. Her Chinese improved. She’s not sure her pupils’ English did. At least, they were exposed to the outside world, she said. “They saw that you don’t have to be blond and blue-eyed to be a Californian,” she explained.
In turn, Paz said she felt she finally experienced the real China, outside of big cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai. She visited families and gave away books, notebooks, pens and cookies. She talked to her students about Tiananmen Square. They told her it was an internal issue and the United States had no business interfering. She was also surprised that the children believed their government and the communist party were good to them and worked to improve their lives. “They loved the communist party, but they hated the local leaders,” who were corrupt, Paz said.
She also ran into some of the stricter aspects of Chinese education. She wanted to answer her students’ questions about the American point of view on Tiananmen Square. But her Chinese colleagues hesitated. Middle school students shouldn’t worry about such things; they should memorize facts for their high school entrance exams, they said.
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| Paz poses with local children during a trip to Cambodia. |
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Paz made sure some of her Beijing University classmates got to experience the free exchange of ideas that takes place in an American university. They got to sit in on a class at UCSD when they visited the campus last year. It was a typical warm and sunny San Diego winter, so Paz also took them to the beach. Meanwhile, a blizzard was raging back in Beijing. “They were, like, ‘your school is wonderful’,” she recalls.
She planned to stay in China for just six months. But she decided to sign up for six more and study Chinese more in-depth. She also worked for a nonprofit organization that tries to raise awareness of HIV and AIDS in China. She and two other UCSD students designed a survey to gauge the severity of the epidemic. It was sent to many nonprofits all over the country. The students then analyzed the data, which were alarming, and produced a report. Their results were presented to the United Nations. “I had never done work that could impact people’s lives before,” Paz said.
She also found a subject for her senior thesis, titled “Google Me Freedom,” in China. She decided to look at the impact of the Internet on Southeast Asia. She quickly realized that her classmates, and most Chinese, knew better than to mention Tiananmen Square online. “There is a lot of self-censorship going on,” she said.
After graduation, Paz will have the opportunity to apply some of that newfound knowledge when she goes to work for Google. She will work on the sponsored links that show up on each Google search. She hopes to work on ads for the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics and the 2008 presidential race. Some of her classmates are worried about leaving school and starting a real job. She’s not. “For me, it’s not a real job,” she said. “I just get to have fun.”
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