LJWorld.com

Editor's note: Jill Ensley was one of 25 Kansas University students who took a monthlong study abroad trip to China this summer with design professors Pok-Chi Lau and May Tveit. Armed with digital cameras, the students documented their voyage in pictures. Those images, and accompanying commentary by the students, comprise "Made In China," an exhibition on view through Feb. 4 in the North Balcony at the Spencer Museum of Art.

Six months ago, the thought of going to China never would have occurred to me. It just wasn't on my radar. Not only did it seem a monetary impossibility, but unlike many of my friends, I didn't have a burning desire to visit the lands of Asia just yet. I was busy trying to get to Europe first.

In hindsight, in this Year of a Thousand Travels, that Europe trip stands somewhere in the back, still very grateful and ready to be called up randomly with images of London walks, Italian trains, dirty Paris hotel rooms and Swiss paper mills. But in the end, it didn't affect me like China did, still is, and most likely always will.

I'm finally scouring my notes, realizing how much there is, how much still to process and it's hard to know where to begin. Do I start with Hong Kong, town of a million 7-Elevens and the first time we went off on our own? Or with Shenzhen, with the sameness and irony of the Chinese Wal-Mart. Or with Guangzhou, with the factories, the workers, our fellow Chinese students, the blending of capitalism and socialism never more apparent than in that city. Or the traffic, what I thought was chaotic in Guangzhou, after Shanghai became tame.

Should I start with the friends I made or the polite and curious people we encountered, or maybe our run-in with the Chinese military when we were off on our own? Or with the gracious people of the Yao villages, giving of what little they had. How strange and foreign we looked, even as we felt strange and foreign ourselves.

Then there's always the food, an ever-revolving circle of the strange, the delicious, the still moving. And of course, the squat toilets, the massive bugs, the tiny chairs and the sadness of a fallen comrade when we'd only completed a third of our mission.

Or is it more abstract, yellow water and an endless parade of adorable and bright children, pungent dragon/tiger balm for your bites, bell towers and the small but detectable trace of tension in Tiananmen Square.

It certainly isn't the tourist traps, though sometimes necessary. Nor is it the same stores and gimmicks we see every day. It isn't that until near the end, when you've had dim sum every day, are tired of being stuffed with food every three hours and you and your friends find an odd little Italian restaurant and order lasagna in Shanghai, pizza in Xi'an.

But really, after all of that, it's the dumplings you miss.

It's odd, after returning, and still to some extent, I became aware of some sort of internal censorship creeping in. The state-sponsored media, the checked "freedom" of the Internet, the propaganda all becomes second nature. After a while it blends and you tend to forget it's not like that everywhere. Sometimes, here, in the good ol' U.S.A., I'll be writing something on the Internet and there's a click in my head, a little voice asking me if I can really say that? Will I get in trouble? Official trouble, not foot-in-mouth trouble. Goodness knows I ignore THAT voice. But I can, we can, and too often we don't. It's easy to ignore the freedom to change the world when there's a sale going on.

- Jill Ensley is a Kansas University senior.