If you want to learn about a place, watch its people eat. At Yale, the magical camaraderie said to characterize the residential college system manifests itself best in the college dining halls. At Peking University (PKU), mealtimes are no less illustrative of the quite different dynamic that underlies student life for China’s most elite students.

Consider a “day in the life” of an average student. Here, we’ll consider breakfast: At Yale, you can roll out of bed without consulting a clock and eat breakfast as you please, with only a slight hiccup in the half-hour between breakfast and lunch. Your experience is one of groggy leisure marked by free copies of the New York Times and Cross Campus.

In China? You must bravely arise early and decide what you want to try to eat (and quickly). Your options are many: Unlike those hapless students in New Haven, you have hot breakfasts to choose from without necessarily going to Commons. Unfortunately, only the early bird catches the worm, because many of the dining halls close around 8:30 a.m. and don’t reopen until lunchtime.

Worse, this foreshortened time means that you have to fight swarming crowds of other students for the privilege of ordering food: After the 6 a.m. opening, the tastiest breakfast treats are usually gone by 7:30 at the dining hall nearest the dorms. But, don’t get discouraged just yet—you have so much to choose from! You can have red bean-filled buns, soups, noodles, whatever your heart desires (as long as it’s Chinese and still available, and as long as you don’t need to try to find two seats next to each other to have breakfast with a friend).

Not interested in the shi tang (translation: cafeteria) chaos? Try one of the abundant carts on the streets or a smaller shop. Here you can get a tasty Taiwanese-style breakfast pancake fried to perfection, or fresh-steamed baozi filled with cabbage or meats. Mission accomplished.

Good work. You’ve made it through breakfast, and all for about 75 cents. If you weren’t too stressed by the ordeal, you’re certainly looking smug compared with that Yalie and his 10-dollar swipe for a bagel and tea—even if he does have relative peace and tranquility. You go to class, where—lucky you!—you decide to stop at one of the snackeries conveniently located in your classroom building and buy some bread and candy to make it through lecture. You then fill up your tea bottle from one of the hot water dispensers outside the classroom.

The abundance of choices may dull your mind to the dangers of this system. Busy though we are at Yale, we take for granted that our academic schedules often allot an hour or more to eat. In China, if one has time at all between classes, it’s generally less than 30 minutes.

Asked how to deal with this inconvenient conflict, the Chinese students I polled most frequently suggested “not eating” as their solution.

Because students are forced to keep such eccentric schedules, the dining halls are so painfully unaccommodating to so many, and labor is so extremely cheap, there is a fantastic variety of wonderful options that would make zero economic sense in New Haven. You can get spicy boiled vegetables and noodles on a stick up till about 11 p.m. on the PKU campus; from 6-12, you can get spicy grill-fried meats, tofu, and other delights, or go to the fruit stand and buy oranges, melons, and tomatoes. After those on-campus shops close, you can head outside the gates to get delicious chuan’r, which are kebabs fresh cooked for you. The 24-hour McDonald’s will deliver to the dorm for about a dollar.

What does this story say about the institutional objectives and mores at PKU? The Yale students there were most confused that no one seemed to complain all that much. With tables bolted to the floor and unable to seat more than four people, mealtimes often felt like a return to middle school—without the recess. People do, in fact, complain—in small doses and almost always in mediated, monitored contexts. And even if the uncaring policies of the school created hassles for students, people still tried to eat together, cramming several miniature hot pots onto their tables and catching up.

In the CHNS 140 class at Yale, we’re now learning how important family mealtime is in Chinese culture. University dining differs greatly from home habits anywhere, but the sheer number of people eating alone in a rush offered a vivid demonstration of the ways PKU—intentionally or otherwise—isolated its students within a world constructed of schoolwork and other time obligations. Beida is a source of great scholarship, but where student life is concerned, it remains rigorously managed and controlled just like grade school. Mealtimes manifest a philosophy wherein individual student needs are rendered subordinate to the greater group.