Day 5 Blog



January 11, 2021


Day 5 blog - Emilio San Vicente


On Monday, we started to read and discuss the book called “Iris Chang The Chinese in America”. The main topic that we dived into was about the labor and the transcontinental railroad Chinese workers. The main point of this interesting topic is about how The Chinese which arrived in California during the “Golden Rush”, was deemed too weak for the dangerous, strenuous job of building the railroad east of California. We also saw how tough and difficult situations that Chinese workers faced during their jobs, for example, racism and safety issues. It was pretty interesting to see this amazing topic and also how my classmates and Mr. Zhou were sharing and giving opinions for complementing the facts of the book which is a rich way of learning for connecting with the work and with people. 


The next thing that we did after discussing this book and also about our ideas, it was time to take a rest and take lunch for moving then to the next activity which was our presentations on different topics that China had or has issues about. The majority of presentations were focused on economics and also in sports which was something interesting to see for our group to not just focus on primary topics but to really dive into an expense category of things that we don’t usually think about. After presenting our presentations to the group and with Mr. Zhou, we started to think and say our ideas of what is the topic about and also about what people know about those topics which it was interesting to see what is the background of people on these ones. 


Last but not least, we watched a documentary about China and the different effects that were caused by the pandemic in 2020. This documentary talked about different stories of people in Wuhan which basically we watched how people were worried about a particular member of their family, how people were affected in their jobs, and also this documentary made people reflect on how the world was before the pandemic. The documentary also added cultural facts which show how people live and also how they relate among them during this tough year that will be remembered for a long time. When the documentary ended it was time to grab our stuff and go home.

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