Writing activites on place
Summary Tweet for 3-18 by Tuan
Space is abstract but place is meaningful. In addition to cultural influence, experience is crucial to attach humanistic values with place.
Summary Tweet for 136-148 by Tuan
The sense of home is a comfortable involvement which offers a step for warm encounters and enriches people’s lives.
BW Activity One
I had my breakfast today with the girl who comes from the same high school in Shenzhen. She is one year younger than me and is a freshman. We talked a lot about our high school so that the first thing came to my mind when I started to write was my high school.
I studied in a normal Chinese high school, which means classes taught in my high school are designed for students who are going to take the Chinese college entrance exam—Gao Kao. It is really hard for me to make decision to study abroad because not only my friends but also teachers in high school suggested me to take Gao Kao for Chinese universities. It is believed that Gao Kao is important for Chinese students and everyone should take it. Gao Kao is quite different from SAT since students can only take it one time. Chinese students spend a lot of time preparing for Gao Kao because the score is the only factor that determines which university they are going to enter. SAT is difficult for me, probably because I am not a native speaker; However, Gao Kao is more hard and strict even though my first language is Chinese. Compared to SAT, Gao Kao is more like a competitive test.
I studied in Shenzhen Experimental High School, which is a boarding school. In my high school, four students share a room and everyone has his/her own bed, desk and wardrobe. We don’t have private bathrooms but the floor bathroom is clean and big. There are three public bathrooms in one floor. Each room has an air conditioner. We can regulate the room temperature so that the room is neither too hot nor too cold in summer and winter. Food in our school dinning hall is delicious. We can have variety kinds of food; for example, we can have bread and eggs for breakfast, sushi or Chinese noodles or rice for lunch and pizza or spaghetti or salad for dinner. We can go home after class on Friday and spend weekends with our families. We only need to return in the morning of Monday and stay in school for classes during weekdays.
Activity Two
After reading Space and Place and Intimate Experiences of Place by Yi-Fu Tuan, the humanistic value which place contains has impressed me. The place is seen to be constructed through daily engagement. People have the sense of belonging of a specific place where they grow up in instead of where they were born. Thus place, but not space, has its own identity.
Human beings try to attach meaning to and organize place in mainly three ways: the biological fact, the relations of space and place, and the range of experience and knowledge. Experience is essential for shaping an identity because infants do not know anything but their characteristics are shaped differently based on what they have experienced as well as which environment they have grown up in.
Space is abstract but place is meaningful. In addition to cultural influence, experience is crucial to attach humanistic values with place.
Summary Tweet for 136-148 by Tuan
The sense of home is a comfortable involvement which offers a step for warm encounters and enriches people’s lives.
BW Activity One
I had my breakfast today with the girl who comes from the same high school in Shenzhen. She is one year younger than me and is a freshman. We talked a lot about our high school so that the first thing came to my mind when I started to write was my high school.
I studied in a normal Chinese high school, which means classes taught in my high school are designed for students who are going to take the Chinese college entrance exam—Gao Kao. It is really hard for me to make decision to study abroad because not only my friends but also teachers in high school suggested me to take Gao Kao for Chinese universities. It is believed that Gao Kao is important for Chinese students and everyone should take it. Gao Kao is quite different from SAT since students can only take it one time. Chinese students spend a lot of time preparing for Gao Kao because the score is the only factor that determines which university they are going to enter. SAT is difficult for me, probably because I am not a native speaker; However, Gao Kao is more hard and strict even though my first language is Chinese. Compared to SAT, Gao Kao is more like a competitive test.
I studied in Shenzhen Experimental High School, which is a boarding school. In my high school, four students share a room and everyone has his/her own bed, desk and wardrobe. We don’t have private bathrooms but the floor bathroom is clean and big. There are three public bathrooms in one floor. Each room has an air conditioner. We can regulate the room temperature so that the room is neither too hot nor too cold in summer and winter. Food in our school dinning hall is delicious. We can have variety kinds of food; for example, we can have bread and eggs for breakfast, sushi or Chinese noodles or rice for lunch and pizza or spaghetti or salad for dinner. We can go home after class on Friday and spend weekends with our families. We only need to return in the morning of Monday and stay in school for classes during weekdays.
Activity Two
After reading Space and Place and Intimate Experiences of Place by Yi-Fu Tuan, the humanistic value which place contains has impressed me. The place is seen to be constructed through daily engagement. People have the sense of belonging of a specific place where they grow up in instead of where they were born. Thus place, but not space, has its own identity.
Human beings try to attach meaning to and organize place in mainly three ways: the biological fact, the relations of space and place, and the range of experience and knowledge. Experience is essential for shaping an identity because infants do not know anything but their characteristics are shaped differently based on what they have experienced as well as which environment they have grown up in.
Activity Three
Activity Four
The place has its own definition and meaning. The denotations of a place may vary a lot for different people even if they all live in the same area. What one has endured probably will turn out what one has become. It is believed that people’s experiences have enriched the place and have attached significant characteristics to the place.
Place, in another way, is similar to the word home for human beings. When we talk about the place, what usually comes to our mind first is the word home. Home offers a recovery stage for us from the outside world when we are fragile or when we get injured. Our intimate feelings with the place sometimes make people feel positive and cheer them up when they are not in the mood.
Activity Five
The definition of intimacy is the close familiarity or something of a personal nature, but Tuan believes that “intimacy between persons does not require knowing the details of each other’s life.” He talks about an example from a sociological research to illustrate. Neilson worked for a company. His wife died in childbirth. Since he had to go to work everyday, he did not have enough time taking care of his children. Thus his younger unmarried sister moved in with him after his wife died. His sister helped do the housework and looked after children until they went to bed. She usually slept before Neilson came back home at night. Although Neilson was close to his younger sister, he felt empty when he came back from work. Neilson said, “I feel that I am going to an empty house even though the house is still full with the kids. It is just not the same.” Intimacy here does not mean to know details of one’s life, but refers to consciousness as well as personal interactions with one another.
Activity Six
First thing I came to my mind is the distinction between the place and the space. Space is infinite and inestimable, while place is a restricted and closed area filled with engagement and interactions. People contribute themselves in the place they live in. The culture and the identity of a place is unique since the relationship between a place and its residents is different from the relationship between another place and its locals.
Another thing I thought about is the sense of belonging for a specific place. It is hard for people to express such feeling, but it becomes easy to tell if people are moving to a new place from the one they have lived for a long time. For example, I am an international student from China. During my freshman year, it was my first time to come to and live in the United States, which is far away from my home, for studying such a long time. At the beginning of my freshman year, I was depressed and homesick. The totally new environment made me feel uncomfortable. I never have the deep feeling that I belong to Shenzhen (my home city) until I moved to America. The sense of belonging to a place is an intimate feeling that is deeply buried in one's heart.
Activity Ten (Revise of #4)
When people refer to the word place, home is the one which they always think about. People’s experiences have enriched the place and have attached significant characteristics to the place. The place I was born is not the same city which I grew up in. Although I was born in Hunan, I consider Shenzhen as the place which has shaped my identity and has formed my value.
My family moved to Shenzhen when I was only three-month old and I have lived in the city for almost eighteen years. Compared with other cities in China, Shenzhen is quite young. It was a small fishing town before Deng Xiaoping led the Chinese economic reform in 1978. Since Shenzhen is a coastal city, it was established as one of the four special economic zones which were opened to foreign investment that were relatively free of the bureaucratic interventions. Thanks to the reform policy, Shenzhen has developed rapidly in recent thirty years and become a place full of immigrants from other cities in China.
There is no doubt that Shenzhen has shaped a part of me. Although I could not speak Cantonese fluently like a native speaker, I can understand Cantonese. My parents enjoy having spicy food since their hometown Hunan is a city famous for its spicy dishes. However, I prefer lite food because there is not much piquant seasoning in Shenzhen. People are polite to each other and smiling is always what you can see from me.
Activity 11
My whole blog post for this week is mainly about the distinction of place and space. Place is what I focus on for this post. A lot of people consider these two words are similar and could not distinguish the difference of space and place. I would like to specify the distinction of these two terms by explaining the denotation that the place contains. Daily participation and engagement help to construct a place, but space is more likely to be unlimited and intangible. Here I would like to display the difference as well as state my opinions in this post.
The place has its own definition and meaning. The denotations of a place may vary a lot for different people even if they all live in the same area. What one has endured probably will turn out what one has become. It is believed that people’s experiences have enriched the place and have attached significant characteristics to the place.
Place, in another way, is similar to the word home for human beings. When we talk about the place, what usually comes to our mind first is the word home. Home offers a recovery stage for us from the outside world when we are fragile or when we get injured. Our intimate feelings with the place sometimes make people feel positive and cheer them up when they are not in the mood.
Activity Five
The definition of intimacy is the close familiarity or something of a personal nature, but Tuan believes that “intimacy between persons does not require knowing the details of each other’s life.” He talks about an example from a sociological research to illustrate. Neilson worked for a company. His wife died in childbirth. Since he had to go to work everyday, he did not have enough time taking care of his children. Thus his younger unmarried sister moved in with him after his wife died. His sister helped do the housework and looked after children until they went to bed. She usually slept before Neilson came back home at night. Although Neilson was close to his younger sister, he felt empty when he came back from work. Neilson said, “I feel that I am going to an empty house even though the house is still full with the kids. It is just not the same.” Intimacy here does not mean to know details of one’s life, but refers to consciousness as well as personal interactions with one another.
Activity Six
First thing I came to my mind is the distinction between the place and the space. Space is infinite and inestimable, while place is a restricted and closed area filled with engagement and interactions. People contribute themselves in the place they live in. The culture and the identity of a place is unique since the relationship between a place and its residents is different from the relationship between another place and its locals.
Another thing I thought about is the sense of belonging for a specific place. It is hard for people to express such feeling, but it becomes easy to tell if people are moving to a new place from the one they have lived for a long time. For example, I am an international student from China. During my freshman year, it was my first time to come to and live in the United States, which is far away from my home, for studying such a long time. At the beginning of my freshman year, I was depressed and homesick. The totally new environment made me feel uncomfortable. I never have the deep feeling that I belong to Shenzhen (my home city) until I moved to America. The sense of belonging to a place is an intimate feeling that is deeply buried in one's heart.
Activity Ten (Revise of #4)
When people refer to the word place, home is the one which they always think about. People’s experiences have enriched the place and have attached significant characteristics to the place. The place I was born is not the same city which I grew up in. Although I was born in Hunan, I consider Shenzhen as the place which has shaped my identity and has formed my value.
My family moved to Shenzhen when I was only three-month old and I have lived in the city for almost eighteen years. Compared with other cities in China, Shenzhen is quite young. It was a small fishing town before Deng Xiaoping led the Chinese economic reform in 1978. Since Shenzhen is a coastal city, it was established as one of the four special economic zones which were opened to foreign investment that were relatively free of the bureaucratic interventions. Thanks to the reform policy, Shenzhen has developed rapidly in recent thirty years and become a place full of immigrants from other cities in China.
There is no doubt that Shenzhen has shaped a part of me. Although I could not speak Cantonese fluently like a native speaker, I can understand Cantonese. My parents enjoy having spicy food since their hometown Hunan is a city famous for its spicy dishes. However, I prefer lite food because there is not much piquant seasoning in Shenzhen. People are polite to each other and smiling is always what you can see from me.
Activity 11
My whole blog post for this week is mainly about the distinction of place and space. Place is what I focus on for this post. A lot of people consider these two words are similar and could not distinguish the difference of space and place. I would like to specify the distinction of these two terms by explaining the denotation that the place contains. Daily participation and engagement help to construct a place, but space is more likely to be unlimited and intangible. Here I would like to display the difference as well as state my opinions in this post.