Students born outside the U.S. must adjust to the living environment and culture of America. Freshman Lingyi Su is one of those students.
“My parents decided to move,” Su said in an interview. “I was like eight or nine, in third grade.”
Su was born in Shenzhen, a city in southeastern China, and then lived in Guangxi, Su said. She thought the trip to America would be a vacation and didn’t realize until fourth grade that she wasn’t going back to China. Overall, it was a pretty smooth transition coming to America, even adjusting to the new culture, Su added. There were only a few major things she needed to get used to.
“There was a really big language barrier. I couldn’t talk to anyone,” Su said. “[People] had to pull up Google Translate, but it made no sense.”
Su also said that she wasn’t used to the food in America because of how dry it was. She was much more accustomed to drinking soup but eventually got used to American-style food. Plus, there were even more differences between the two countries.
“I can’t read Fahrenheit. It’s so weird,” Su said. “My phone has everything adjusted to Celsius.”
Su says that some of the things she misses about living in China include her friends as well as the overall environment, such as China’s tall buildings.
“Where I lived back in China… I lived on the 25th floor,” Su said. “On the streets, you will see a lot of those carts selling food, and you can just go downstairs and you can just buy breakfast right there.”
Su misses China, but she also pointed out that schools are very strict in China, so she would rather stay in America. In China, students must take the Zhongkao, an exam that evaluates a middle school student’s academic performance and helps them get admitted to high school, with high school acceptance rates at about 50%, Su said.
“I feel like there’s a lot of stereotypes toward China, but we can’t just generalize them,” Su said. “It’s just like how it is here. Everyone is different.”