When Sean Cena (CC ‘29) learned about Columbia College’s four-semester foreign language requirement, he felt stuck.
“I wanted to actually learn something,” Cena told The Fed. It was the end of the first day of classes when he decided to get dinner at the Panda Express on Broadway & 111th Street. “I was biting into my delicious orange chicken, and then it hit me. Maybe the Chinese aren’t just people I can make ‘bing chilling’ and social credit jokes about. Maybe they actually have a culture I can study.”
Cena decided to enroll in First Year Chinese, and was immediately blown away by the depth of information that lay beneath his surface-level understanding of the Far East.
“Chinese culture is much more than Panda Express and TikTok,” Cena proudly explained, demonstrating how his perspective on China has significantly changed. “Learning the language is difficult, but it’s rewarding. Instead of a regular alphabet, they read and write with thousands of little shapes — I love learning how to draw them for homework. Chinese is a really beautiful language.”
Cena expressed his hopes to eventually become fluent in Chinese, as he believes it will strengthen his professional skills in a future career in politics. He is already working on his language skills by interacting with international students.
“This one kid in the Chinese Students Club taught me a few useful phrases — Tsao-knee-mah means ‘your family is beautiful.’ It’s a common phrase the Chinese say. That’s a lot more polite than us Westerners, eh? Hey dah-jee-ah, tsao-knee-mah!” Cena hollered to a group of passing students speaking Korean.
After his interview with The Fed, Cena was seen at Junzi ordering food in broken Chinese to a confused (not Chinese) cashier.
