East re-meets West

When one spends more than 6 percent of their total lifetime abroad, a lot can change.

For just less than one of her 16 total years thus far, Joscelyn Stephens lived and learned in Xi’an, China, a foreign exchange student over 7,000 miles away from her Ahwatukee Foothills home.

And after 10 months in Xi’an - during which time Stephens wrote popular, monthly updates to the Ahwatukee Foothills News about her experiences - the most recent author of the Travel Diary series has either just come home or just left it.

“It’s depressing,” Stephens said Saturday of returning to the States. “I really like China; I had kind of started my life there.”

Stephens left last summer, a brown-haired introvert who only knew key Mandarin phrases like “I want to go to the restroom.” She returned a purple-haired extrovert with three tattoos and a firm grasp of the most-spoken language in the world.

“When I first got over to China I wrote a letter to myself saying who I wanted to be,” Stephens said. She continued, saying that 10 months later she didn’t recognize the person who wrote the note.

“I feel like I’ve grown up a lot.”

Stephen’s mother Lizabeth, who received Joscelyn’s letters and transcribed them for AFN, agreed entirely.

“She has grown up a lot,” Lizabeth said. “There’s more confidence about her, more of a determination about what she likes and what she wants.”

The personal growth wasn’t the first change Lizabeth noticed, of course. Mom likes the purple hair, but was surprised by Joscelyn’s tattoos.

“Obviously they don’t have parental consent requirements in China,” Lizabeth laughed.

Xi’an is renowned as one of the most important cities in Chinese history, having served periodically as the capital of 11 imperial dynasties. The city is home to a variety of sights, including the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang and its Terracotta Army, a phalanx of over 8,000 life-size clay soldiers.

The Terracotta Army draws a good deal of tourists each year, but Stephens stayed north of the area, where Westerners are a less common sight. She earned a lot of stares at first, Stephens said, “including a guy who walked into a pole because he was looking at me.

“Eventually they got used to me being a crazy foreigner going back and forth,” she added.

Ten months away from the States gave Stephens a lot of experiences, as detailed in the Travel Diaries. But in a country populated by bicyclists, she did miss out on a few things.

“Next week is driving school,” Lizabeth said. “She’s a little behind.”

The transition back to the American way of doing things has barely begun for Stephens. Despite, at one point, writing that she missed a pepperoni pizza, she has now lost her taste for fast food (“She lost about 20 pounds she didn’t have to lose,” Lizabeth said) and is trying to start speaking in a tongue that hasn’t been native for almost a year.

“I don’t speak English well anymore,” Stephens said. “My grammar died.”

Stephens says she wants to go back, possibly for college, after graduating from Desert Vista next year. Lizabeth said she’s supportive, and sees Joscelyn heading back one way or the other.

“We’ll see what happens at the end of the year and see where she wants to go,” Lizabeth said. “I told her though, for graduation, wherever she ends up going, we’ll take her to Xi’an.”

Jason Ludwig can be reached at (480) 898-7916 or jludwig@aztrib.com.