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Personal Narrative: Moving To China

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My life changed when I moved to China. Stepping into China at the age of four was like stepping into a 3-round fight, because I wasn’t familiar with the language, people or culture. I moved from a comfort zone, to a foreign land where streets were buzzling with people, factories were pumping out black smoke, and the people were friendly and curious.
As I entered round one of the fight, I had to get over the language barrier because when I first moved to a bilingual school in the first grade, I could only speak a few words of Mandarin. So even though I had no one to practice with at home, I had to teach myself how to be comfortable in situations where I couldn’t understand others. Sometimes as I was practicing, my classmates would laugh at my pronunciation, and some days I even wanted to quit the fight, but I learned that this was just another hurdle to overcome and develop my resilience from. Learning 800 Mandarin characters per year allowed me to cross this language divide and make friends with my Chinese classmates. These types of experiences are what make me able to communicate effectively with …show more content…
This is epitomized in my experiences from my second school, Western Academy of Beijing (WAB), where I made new friendships through my values of open-mindedness and good communication. Shortly after moving, I witnessed a girl I didn’t know being bullied for her skin color. I courageously went up to them to defuse the situation by asking the bully how she would feel if the roles were reversed, and after standing up for the girl we became good friends. Therefore being in an International community has shaped who I am today; it has allowed me to be open-minded to new cultures and races, and has changed my way of thinking about risk-taking in unfamiliar

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