I'm sorry that this is so long overdue. And because of the time that has passed, I can't possibly describe everything that has happened since I officially became a freshman at Stanford. So I can only impart with you this.

I realized that when you're in a new place, there's this overwhelming sensation that permeates the air, almost blinding you. It's like walking down a busy street in a new university for the first time. There's literally so much going on around you that you block out the world and focus on little things: the cracks on the pavement beneath your feet, the time on your watch, the classroom number you are looking for. In the course of a day, you go through the same filtering of the world; you can't possibly intake all the energy and opportunity of the world, so you focus on the homework that is due earliest, or your next meal, or staying awake in class for one more minute.

And so your first perspective of a new place is always of little things.

Little things like the cubicle where your shower cap sits. The ring that holds your three keys. The emptiness of your P.O. box. The dimple on your tie. The stress you put on the last words of "Brown Eyed Girl". The spot where you always rack up your bike. The tip of your ebony pencil, which must always be sharp. The plate of cookies you smuggle out of the dining hall after lunch. An hour of sleep. The red cup that you honestly can't finish, so you hand it off to your happy friend. The accent of your math professor. The inner lining of your laptop bag falling apart. The rock step before the underhand swing. Cough pills. The light falling through your windowpane in the late morning.

His handshake. Her smile. Their way of speaking. Last thoughts fading away after a late night talk with your roommate. Your first move. A similar interest, or two. That name neither of you can recall, probably because both of you have had too much to drink. The way he laughs. The way she laughs. An inside joke. Two train tickets. Simple phrases, like "Thank you," or "Me too." How small the stars look as you lay on your backs. Toe touching toe.

Then, one day, you see that street in its entirety, and sail through that day with clarity. Suddenly you get the big picture of things, but you also realize that this awareness is simply the culmination of all the little things you depended on before, loved even. And so with the help of the little things, you slowly but surely become aware of the big things.

Big things like what your major is really going to be.

How you're going to get your first summer job.

Knowledge that fills you with excitement.

Stress which becomes happiness.

How lucky you are to be here.

A world of opportunities.

Enduring principles.

Falling in love.

Diversity.

You.

Out of nowhere, a humongous stack of books drops into my lap. My uncle beckons me to peruse my cousin’s Hong Kong textbooks, to compare his schoolwork with the curriculum in America. I begin to flip through the books, almost all written in English. First up is a grammar book: Common English Mistakes by Hong Kong Students. You’re instead of your, there instead of their, whom instead of who – for a moment I feel like I’m studying for the SATs. Next, science: Chemistry, Biology, and Physics all combined into one book. That’s right, diagrams of the endocrine system, tables of ionic compounds, and formulas for rotational motion all clumped together on the glossy pages. Finally, mathematics. Every single algebraic and geometric concept you can imagine, thousands of exercises, and even pages filled with instructions on how to operate your graphing calculator. I have a feeling that many of my recently graduated friends would find this textbook pretty challenging.

Having finished browsing, I hand the stack back to my uncle. “It’s good,” I tell him in Chinese. “Way harder than what they learn in America. Dennis should be fine.”

Oh, by the way, Dennis is in seventh grade. And he's ten years old.

You know that stereotype that Asians are good at math? Well consider that a fact from now on. Whether you like it or not, almost every Chinese student that transfers to an America school is at the top of his or her class when it comes to science and math. Part of the reason is that the education system in China is built upon year-long, recess-devoid, competition-based, college-minded labor. The classes are from morning to evening, the teachers are deathly strict, the exams are painfully rigorous, and the class atmosphere is tense because everybody knows exactly how few of them will enter the best universities in China, and how exactly many of them will be reduced to a life of poverty and disgrace.

But a lot of the reason is deeper than that, hardwired into Chinese tradition and culture. The gift of intelligence reaches all the way back to ancient times, when farmers in the Pearl River Delta (southern China, where most of the geniuses you know are probably from) depended on the success of their rice paddies for survival. Forget the seasonal leisure of American wheat farmers; these rice pickers had their feet wet almost every day of the year, tending to every aspect of their tiny little plot and sucking every last bit of rice the earth had to offer. Chinese people were by far more hardworking than anybody in the West; just take this ancient proverb: “No one who can riser before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich” (Source: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell). This diligence and dedication shed off on posterity after posterity, and thus today you have to sit next to the little Asian boy who seems to know it all because, quite frankly, he spent the time to learn it all.

Why math, you might ask? Mathematics is all about numbers, visualizing and memorizing amounts and calculations. That happens to be exactly what the typical Chinese farmer did each day when he took his picked rice to the local market – the simplest of business. Then China modernized, and those farmers calculating pounds of rice became businessmen calculating barrels of oil and tons of steel. Whatever their profession, Chinese people are good at math because their parents were good at it, and their parents before that.

Some of it has to do with the language as well. Take the first ten numbers in Chinese: yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, qi, ba, jiu, shi. Every number is exactly one syllable. Take the next ten numbers: shi yi, shi er, shi san, shi si, shi wu, shi liu, shi qi, shi ba, shi jiu, er shi. Quite literally, ten plus one, two, three. And then two tens. The Chinese number system is incredibly logical and quick, unlike the maze of exceptions and irregularities that American students struggle to learn.

So say you have two boys that are about ten years old. One boy is living it up in Southern California, doodling and recessing in fourth grade and vacationing all summer, spoiled by his rich white parents, barely able to do his multiplication tables because he can’t visualize the numbers in his head. The other boy is entering seventh grade in an international school in Hong Kong, eating rice every night, studying every subject every single day without vacation, learning high school level mathematics and already thinking about college in America. That boy is my little cousin, and chances are, he’s smarter than you.

The next stop: Qingyuan! A rural city by beautiful green hills and wide rivers where the chicken is unbeatable and stepping on a girl’s heels means you think she’s attractive. But we’re not eating chicken or looking for girls; we’re headed up to the mountains, a hotspot for hiking and river rafting. At first look this is paradise for the adventurous tourist. But at closer inspection, it’s a recipe for death. The mountain trails are actually broken bridges and tightrope wires hanging over waterfalls and canyons. The rapids are fast, ferocious, and almost completely unsupervised. Qingyuan: your next and potentially last stop.

For a nation burdened with around-the-clock hard labor and trials, it makes sense that China is so bountiful in ecotourism, leisure parks, scenic landmarks, and travel agencies – a sort of recess, if you will. Of course, most of it is simply the beauty of the Middle Kingdom. But a lot of it is smart enterprise for the nation as well. Tourists and natives alike flock into dilapidated buses everyday and migrate into the majestic, untouched regions of their country – well, untouched by everything but vacation companies thirsting for some cash. And sometimes greed leads to neglect and ignorance, and these tourist locations throughout China are definitely not interested in your safety or welfare

This particular trip to Qingyuan was a gift from the local bank to its most valued customers. Our bus held four young, female bankers and about six families, both young and old. After a three hour drive from Guangzhou, we hit the mountains and started with the hiking trail. Hopping off the bus with our backpacks and sandals and smiles, we all expected a relaxing, scenic route with a beautiful view of the city. Instead, we found ourselves standing wide-eyed before a swinging wooden bridge, spanning canyon with rushing rapids beneath where people in rafts were screaming for their lives. Halfway through the trail and over tire chain bridges, net walls, and plank steps, many of us had lost sandals and water bottles to the abyss below us, and all of us had lost our smiles. The elderly were panting for breath and the children were crying. Somebody clearly did not relate to some people what they were in for.

Eventually, we all made it out of the mountain trek unscathed, but definitely not as excited for our next activity: piao liu, or river rafting. We changed into our swimwear and loaded onto a bus which took us up to the top of the mountain where the beginning of the rapids were. Or rather, it would have taken us, except we had overloaded the bus by about twenty people and it broke down. So we flocked onto a stronger bus and proceeded cautiously. At the top, hundreds of naked people were cramming into tight lines trying to get onto the rubber rafts as fast as possible. Other naked men were throwing the rafts from a truck perched high above into the water. The loud crash they made when splattering onto the surface should have been a warning for us not to partake in this death ride, but alas once part of the crowd we couldn’t get out. We threw on our helmets and life jackets, and right before we got to the rafts I was separated from my cousin and uncle. Lost in a sea of clamoring and smelly Chinese people, I felt like I was drowning before I hit the water, until I caught hold of a pretty banker and got in the next available raft with her. At that moment I could say I was pretty excited to be in that boat. Within a few minutes I would be desperately trying to get out.

It wasn’t the first drop, though we both nearly fell out of the rafts, my helmet slipped over my head, and the rocks below us bruised our legs and butts. It wasn’t the second drop, when I yelled at my banker to avoid hitting her head on a jagged rock as we hurtled by. It wasn’t the third drop, which left our raft completely filled with water because we had an outdated version which didn’t have holes in the bottom.

It was a drop sometime after that. With nobody to guide the hundreds of congested rafts safely down the drops, we basically went down the rapids right behind a raft which seated a father and his son. We splashed down the first bend, curved around the second, got water flooding our faces, and suddenly – we were stuck! We had caught up to the raft in front of us, and as the rocks were too narrow we had basically clogged the rapids like the bloodstreams of an American. The water was rushing around us but our two rafts weren’t moving forward – instead, we were slowly rising up, and they were going down under. We were heavier, thanks to our crappy raft full of water, and with our force we suddenly flipped their raft over and began to ride it upside down, with the father and son stuck underneath.

Completely speechless and helpless, the banker and I rode the rest of the drop for about ten seconds, with the two people nowhere to be seen and the bottom raft scraping furiously against the bottom jagged rocks. We saw two pairs of sandals and two helmets burst free and down the falls before us. Finally we hit the deep water at the bottom, slid off the raft under us, and for a moment I feared the worst: that the father and son had been ripped to shreds while trapped under their overturned raft and over the rocks. I expected the water around that raft to suddenly turn red, but then I saw the father break the surface of the water. Then, the son – neither unconscious. A lone watchman standing on the side of the river ran towards the accident and helped the boy up onto higher ground. His knees were completely covered in blood, and so were the father’s. All the while, the pretty banker and I slowly floated away, towards hundreds of other rafts meandering through the stretch of calm water, happily splashing each other with water. Neither of us found it very fun.

The drops after that one, in which we were literally the lucky bloodless half of the accident, were significantly scarier. At some point we retrieved the lost sandals and held onto them for our dear lives. Before each proceeding drop we made sure we were miles away from any other rafts that could flip us over. While we zoomed down the rushing water, we gripped the ropes on our raft so hard that we scratched our arms up. Finally we reached the end of our perilous journey, a strip of rubber trailing behind our beat up raft, and we both swore never to river raft in China again. And for that matter, whatever Chinese tourism has to offer us in the future, we will definitely value our lives more preciously than a quick splash of fun.