Editor’s note: David Pinck is currently a Sac State graduate student in Criminal Justice, and has been since Spring 2004. He is studying Mandarin and Chinese culture at Beijing University for one year, and is conducting research for his thesis which concerns the Chinese Police system.

He grew up in Tracy, Calif., and earned his Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

There are many subtle differences between Sacramento State and Beijing University. One example is class registration. Whether you use Casper by phone or by Internet, the entire process is expected to take not much longer than maybe 20 minutes.

Beijing University, perhaps the best university in all of China, uses a different system.

I came to China to learn Chinese, but what I discovered is that the difficulty in learning the language lies not with any intrinsic characteristic of the language itself, but with the registration system by which you obtain your Chinese classes. This observation was amassed over hundreds of hours of field research, numerous meetings with officials at every level, college professors, gardeners, construction workers, even fast food vendors (because God knows it took a colossal group effort).

The process began with the kind of symphonic futility that can only exist around the truly patient. There were queues like you’ve never before seen them. They wove and they curved and they jostled. They even sometimes crossed. We, each of us, shuffled along at an infinitesimal rate, each just two more legs on a giant centipede. My breathing slowed, as did my pulse. I had become part of a much larger organism, one with an incomprehensibly slow metabolism. Time slowed to a jog and, finally, a crawl. I had been cryogenically frozen at room temperature.

Some time later I’d be concluding for the fourth or fifth time that Kafka must have really been Chinese when I’d be pulled out of my trance, usually by the rapid barking of some Chinese command. I’d be standing there, finally at the front of the line, finding myself scrutinized by several officials like a fleet of doctors would an exotic deformity.

This, incidentally, is a feeling to which you quickly adapt here: in China you will always remain the prized two-headed George Washington stamp to some eccentric philatelist; the infamous, atonal Bach manuscript to some music historian. Foreigners, and Americans especially, are seen as almost mythological here. And yet, for some inextricable reason, my unsought notoriety would each time fail to help me in even the tiniest of possible ways.

There proceeded to be fantastic amounts of paperwork at this point, all written in languages unintelligible to me ?” each and every one absolutely critical to the success of the entire process.

Remember, I’m still registering for classes even though about 20 hours have passed.

Documents of every sort would exchange hands, some in duplicate, many in triplicate. Sent between foreign dignitaries in exotic, unpronounceable countries, barged across the Pacific in boats both large and small, and hiked through the Himalayas by the most faithful of possible Sherpas, my paperwork must have traveled. They say that I’m close to being registered, even though my classes began two weeks ago.

While the paperwork here is not, one thing about China is absolutely certain: China is a vast country with an intriguing, complex, and oftentimes incomprehensible culture (they actually value education, as an example). Some of their younger traditions are thousands of years old, and some of their philosophies take a lifetime to internalize. I really am looking forward to deciphering it all ?” that is, if I ever get registered.

Look for David’s journal entry every Friday on www.statehornet.com