‘‘Huan Ying Mei Yi Ge Ren Can Jia Bei Shan ... ‘’ Understand?
Of course not, but don’t
worry.
That’s Chinese.
And Jialiang Bai doesn’t
expect you to understand those words any more than she expects you to be able to pronounce
her name if she doesn’t tell you how. (Pronounce it Jay-lee-ong Bye.)
But she did expect to understand
English when she got here last August as one of 23 foreign exchange students in Rowan
County because she’d studied it for five years in China.
But she laughs about that now.
She studied formal English,
‘‘the classical words,’’ and that has little resemblance, she’s
learned, to the ‘‘American English’’ she had to learn before she could
study math and history and religion and all the other subjects she took at North Hills
Christian School during the past year.
‘‘I have to memorize the
words,’’ she says, ‘‘before I learn what it is about. American
students already know the words.’’
Still she made straight A’s,
the highest grades in her class, and was named valedictorian, and that, believe her
American parents, Wesley and Linda Cook of Briggs Road, is nothing less than remarkable.
They couldn’t be prouder if she were their own.
But she has a quick answer to that
one, too.
She *itis their own, she tells
them, and they know it already. And the feeling takes nothing away from her Chinese
parents.
‘‘My Chinese mom give me
my first life,’’ she says. ‘‘My second Mom tells me about Jesus, and
that’s like she give me another life. Mother’s Day this year, they baptize
me’’ at their First Baptist Church.
And Jialiang will tell you quickly
that discovering Jesus is the most incredible part of the most incredible year of her
life.
For the Cooks, it all began one
Sunday last summer. Wesley and Linda’s daughter, Meredith Carl, came home from
Maranatha Bible Church where she’d heard a plea for desperately needed host families.
Students would be on their way to this country within a couple of weeks.
‘‘You guys have been
talking about getting a foreign exchange student,’’ Meredith told her parents.
Now’s the time. She and her two sons, Nathaniel, 4, and Chad, 2, are living with them
again, but her brother, John, and his family are in Cleveland. Her mother is staying at
home. They’ve got space.
Now, she said.
It didn’t take much
persuasion.
‘‘We wanted to help
someone,’’ Wesley says.
They could choose a student from
several European countries, South America or Asia.
‘‘We chose
China,’’ he says. ‘‘We don’t really know why.’’
‘‘She called us twice
before she came,’’ Linda adds. ‘‘We talked quite a long time. Maybe 30
minutes. She asked us then if – when she came here – could she call us Mommy and
Daddy, and we said, ‘Sure.’ It thrilled me. And that’s what she’s
always called us.’’
‘‘It was a last minute
decision,’’ Linda adds. ‘‘We thought about it one weekend, and she
came the next. And it’s been great. We just love her like a daughter. She’s
become part of our family.’’
When she got here the last week of
August, they expected her to go to West Rowan High School.
But school had started. And when
Linda took Jialiang and her transcripts to school, she discovered foreign exchange
students enter the junior class at West, not the senior class.
Besides, classes for seniors were
full, says Beverly McCraw, area representative for the International Cultural Exchange
Services, which sponsored 13 of this year’s students.
But Jialiang had finished 11 years
of school in China.
‘‘She came expecting to
go into a senior class so she could enter the university when she got back
home,’’ says Wesley.
‘‘And her parents
called,’’ Linda says, ‘‘asking us to find a school so she could
graduate, repeating their desire for her to get into a senior class.’’
Her family lives about two hours
from Beijing. Both parents are doctors, and they own a pharmaceutical company in China.
They hope that she, too, will become a doctor.
‘‘She had never made
anything in her life but an A,’’ Wesley says, ‘‘but rules are rules.
So that very day, we checked with North Hills, and after they saw her transcript, they
said, ‘Sure, we’ll put her in the senior class.’|’’
But North Hills is a private
school. The cost: about $300 a month.
‘‘We could have done
it,’’ he says, ‘‘and we paid for two months. We were told when we took
on this project to treat her like our own, and that’s what we did. We were going to
do what was best for her.’’
But after two months, a person
interested in young people getting a good education with a Christian foundation offered
her a full scholarship.
‘‘He’s interested
in planting these seeds throughout the world,’’ Wesley says, ‘‘and we
were happy to get it.’’
Getting her to and from school was
no problem. A neighbor whose children go to North Hills took them in the morning. Linda
brought them home.
But school was different from what
she expected.
‘‘If I know all the
English words,’’ she says, ‘‘then it would be really easy for me. But
I come here and I must study English words first.’’
In China classes began at 7:30.
‘‘Lunch time we have two
hours. Then we have to 5 o’clock Monday to Friday. Sometimes we go after evening
meal. Before exams we have night classes from 5 to 7:30 to get prepared.’’
Here or there, she says,
‘‘I pile my plate high. Like Saturday and Sunday, I usually study a
lot.’’
In China ‘‘my school
very big. Probably 2,000 in high school. At North Hills everybody know each other, like a
family. At public school, you can’t remember every person’s name.’’
But the emphasis at both is on
study and accomplishment.
‘‘She came here as a
senior,’’ says Dr. Teddy Cruse, superintendent, ‘‘so 75 percent of her
grades came from China, and we all know that education in the Orient is very intense and
very rigorous and honored.’’
But he makes no excuses because
her senior class here has only 7 students in it.
Finishing high school with a 4.0
average, he says, proves that she ‘‘can do excellent, excellent’’ work
whether the school has 2,000 students or 50 who score very high on the SAT, qualify for
scholarships and win science awards.
‘‘Just because
we’re small doesn’t mean we don’t finish high in the state,’’ he
says.
The small class allows good,
solid, individualized instruction, he says, including quality courses that students would
have at any public high school – two years of French and Spanish, pre-calculus,
honors and advanced placement in English.
Her year here, Linda says,
‘‘has just been pleasant all around’’ – and life-changing.
She came here knowing only a
country that controls its citizens. Even going through the application process to become
an exchange student meant days of intensive interviews ‘‘with someone sitting to
the side, verifying what the students were saying, if they were telling the
truth,’’ Linda says. If they were caught in a lie, they were rejected
immediately. One girl ahead of her in line was asked if she had relatives in the United
States.
‘‘She said,
‘No,’ and they said, ‘That isn’t true. You have an uncle in the
U.S.’ And her application was thrown away.’’
Life-changing.
She came here with no religion.
She is going home a committed
Christian.
And Linda doesn’t believe any
of it has been accidental – not that Meredith heard the plea at Maranantha Church or
that the door at West Rowan was closed.
‘‘Looking
back,’’ she says, ‘‘I see that it was a closed door for a purpose
– for her to meet God and Jesus Christ. I felt she got a better education at North
Hills – harder, smaller, more disciplined classes. And it was exactly what was
needed. I’m thankful now that the doors were closed.’’
Life-changing.
Tonight she’ll touch on those
changes when she makes the valedictorian’s address at North Hills Christian School.
‘‘Huan Ying Mei Yi ...
‘’ she’ll say.
And then translate it into
English:
‘‘Welcome, everyone ....
‘’
And goodbye.
But it isn’t really goodbye.
‘‘I probably come back
next year,’’ she says. ‘‘Maybe Christmas ... " |
Today's Paper
