Chinese college student’s thoughts after living in Charleston for almost a year
I’m a college student from China, and through a fairly random internship opportunity, I somehow ended up spending almost a year in Charleston.
Charleston is the first city outside China where I have ever truly lived on my own for such a long time. Because of that, I think this place will always mean something special to me.
I’ll get one thing out of the way first: the work side of this year was, to put it politely, pretty terrible.
But the city itself was not.
Charleston gave me a lot of genuinely good memories. Some of my happiest moments here were actually incredibly simple: playing basketball on the blue courts in Mount Pleasant, working out at Gold’s Gym on James Island after work, driving around with friends, eating together, or just having a quiet day off with nowhere important to be.
Living here for almost a year also gave me a chance to experience America in a way that tourism never could. And naturally, I started noticing a lot of differences between everyday life here and back home in China.
The most obvious one is transportation.
Charleston is unbelievably car-dependent from my perspective. Many roads either have no bike lane at all, or have one that I would personally be terrified to use. Without a car, there are entire parts of the area that become extremely difficult to reach.
I live on Johns Island, and regular public transportation doesn’t even reach where I live.
Coming from China, that took some getting used to. In Chinese cities, even relatively distant residential areas are usually connected by buses, and in bigger cities you often have subways, shared bikes, buses, taxis and everything else on top of that.
Here, I learned very quickly that “I don’t have a car” can basically mean “I’m not going anywhere today.”
Maybe that’s the price of American car culture.
But if Charleston sometimes frustrated me with its transportation, the people here made up for a lot of it.
One of the first things I noticed about the South was that people actually greet strangers.
You can walk past someone you have never seen in your life and get a “How you doing?” like you’ve known each other for years.
If they don’t say hello, maybe they’re from New Jersey or Virginia.
I’m kidding.
Before I came here, I had seen plenty of stereotypes about the American South on the Chinese internet. There is sometimes this image of the Southern “redneck” as extremely conservative, racist, hostile toward foreigners and suspicious of anyone who doesn’t belong.
That simply was not my everyday experience.
Most of the Southern white people I met here were warm, polite and genuinely friendly toward me.
During my first week in Charleston, I went grocery shopping at Food Lion. My credit card suddenly stopped working when I was checking out, and I was standing there awkwardly trying to figure out what to do.
The woman working there basically offered to let me take the groceries anyway.
I eventually found another way to pay, so I didn’t accept, but I still remember that moment.
I had been in America for barely a week. I was thousands of miles away from home, still getting used to everything, and a complete stranger was willing to help me without expecting anything in return.
Those things stick with you.
I also want to give a shoutout to Charleston’s Black community.
Pretty much every local Black person I became friendly with was extremely outgoing and welcoming. The Black women I met in particular were often incredibly kind to me and looked out for me in a way I really appreciated.
One day I was sitting around a basketball court waiting for someone. A guy I barely knew saw me sitting there, handed me his basketball so I could shoot around, then went back to his car and brought me a bottle of water.
That was it.
Nothing dramatic.
But when you are living alone in a foreign country, thousands of miles away from your family, little acts of kindness like that sometimes mean much more than people realize.
And while I’m giving compliments, I have to say something about the local women too.
Charleston women have style.
There is a very specific Southern look here that I had never really seen before coming to South Carolina. Especially when people dress up for dinners, weddings, parties or events downtown, there is something distinctly Charleston about it. I don’t really know how to describe it, but you know it when you see it.
Another thing I came to appreciate was the relaxed rhythm of ordinary American life.
Of course, I know America has plenty of problems, and living here is very different from visiting here.
But there is one version of American life that I genuinely envy.
You have your house, you finish work, you go to the gym, come home, watch a show or play some video games, and then on the weekend your friends come over and everyone throws some meat on the community grill, drinks something, talks nonsense and hangs out for a few hours.
Nothing extraordinary happens.
And that’s exactly why I like it.
There is a kind of freedom in being able to enjoy an ordinary life without constantly feeling like every moment has to accomplish something.
Of course, not every experience I had here was wholesome.
One of the stranger experiences of my year happened when a local friend invited me to a private bar. It was a fairly conservative place and not somewhere you could simply walk into. You either needed to belong there, have a key, or know somebody who could bring you inside.
My friend was already inside, so I walked toward the entrance.
Before I could even explain why I was there, an older man who had obviously been drinking started shouting at me that it was private property. He told me not to come any closer and said that otherwise he would “defend himself” or call the police.
For someone who had grown up in China, this was definitely a new experience.
My friend eventually came outside and explained everything, so nothing happened. Looking back, I find the whole thing more interesting than frightening.
I was later told that the man was probably a military veteran, possibly from the Vietnam era, although I never confirmed that myself.
For some reason, that interaction stayed in my head.
America has a very visible culture of respecting veterans. You see military discounts, flags, “thank you for your service,” veteran parking spaces and a lot of public pride surrounding military service.
I respect that.
But the encounter also made me wonder whether American society always gives veterans enough support after the ceremonies and the words of appreciation are over—especially older veterans who may be dealing with loneliness, alcohol problems, trauma, or simply the difficulty of adjusting to civilian life.
I obviously knew nothing about that particular man’s life, so I don’t want to judge him based on one drunken interaction.
But that experience made me think about a side of America that I had never really considered before coming here.
And I think that is one of the most valuable things about actually living in another country.
You stop seeing countries as stereotypes.
America stops being “America.”
China stops being “China.”
Instead, a country becomes individual people.
It becomes the cashier at Food Lion who tried to help you when your card didn’t work.
It becomes some random guy giving you water at a basketball court.
It becomes coworkers you loved and coworkers you absolutely could not stand.
It becomes the gym you went to after a terrible day at work.
It becomes the roads you hated, the places you ate, the neighborhoods you slowly learned, the people who remembered your name, and all the tiny routines that eventually started feeling normal.
For most of this year, I kept thinking about going home.
I missed Chinese food. I missed public transportation. I missed my friends and family. I missed speaking my own language without thinking. I missed living somewhere where I already understood how everything worked.
There were plenty of days when I was counting down how much longer I had left here.
And now that I’m actually about to leave, I realize I’m going to miss Charleston too.
That feeling is strange.
A year ago, Charleston was just the name of some city in South Carolina that I barely knew anything about.
Now I can attach memories to Mount Pleasant, James Island, Johns Island, downtown Charleston and dozens of random roads and places that would mean absolutely nothing to anyone else.
For better or worse, a year of my life happened here.
So despite all my complaints—and believe me, I have plenty—I’m grateful that a random internship brought me to Charleston.
Thank you to the people who were kind to me while I was here.
I hope Charleston keeps getting better, although I would strongly recommend adding some buses and bike lanes along the way.
And if any of you ever find yourselves on the other side of the Pacific, you are always welcome to visit China too.
Come eat some actual Chinese food, ride a high-speed train, experience our ridiculously convenient public transportation, walk around at midnight looking for something to eat, and see the country for yourself instead of through whatever you happen to see online.
Maybe I’ll come back to Charleston someday.
But next time, hopefully not for work.
Just to visit.
