Living halfway around the world

You sleep on a rock hard bed. You have to boil the water you drink. There are no pizza shops around to get your favorite food from. You have to wear masks to block out the dust from factory pollution. About 1.379 billion people live here. Brenda Gao ’21 was one of them.

Gao moved to China in the summer of second grade with her mother who had to fulfill her green card. “Once you fulfill your green card, you can go to China and come back to the US without applying for a Visa,” said Gao’s mother, Yinghui Xu. Xu took her kids with her for the experience. They lived in Hebei, a bigger province, and sometimes visited neighboring Beijing.

When Gao first arrived in China, she struggled with Chinese. She didn’t speak much for the first three months, and her classmates thought she was a mute. She had a Chinese tutor from the local university come to her apartment every afternoon. She eventually picked it up, and started to talk more at school. Her classmates were fairly rude and made comments like, “Oh, so you aren’t a mute?”

Despite the negative aspects, Gao said she liked how different China and the US are. In China, she traveled mostly by bike and taxi. There were no school buses, so she biked to school. Amy Liao ’21 can add on to that. “China is not that great, and the streets are so crowded, none of my relatives own that many cars because the streets are so crowded, you take taxis and stuff like that, it’s like New York but everywhere. The bathrooms suck, they just suck, they’re horrible, I hate them. It’s a fricking hole in the ground, nobody takes care of them or cleans them,” Liao said.

Lunan, the school in China that Gao attended, was very different from West. At Lunan, students were separated by grade, then sectioned into one of the five classes of 50 students. You would stay with the same class for the rest of primary school. You could choose to live in the elementary. The restrooms were separated from the school building, and they caused quite a stink. “There were squat toilets with no toilet paper and open stalls. In the center of it all, there was a long hole which contained everyone’s waste and was only dumped out once every hour. It smelled horrible,” Gao said. After a long day of classes, she would find herself at her aunt’s house, where her mother worked. “My mom would pick me up and take to my aunt’s. She would continue working on her laptop while I worked my butt off doing homework right next to her,” Gao said.

When Gao wasn’t busy with school, she went shopping and enjoyed street food. One of her favorites is Tanghulu, a traditional Chinese snack of candied fruit. She also liked the sunflower seed setup on the street market, but she wished there was a pizza shop around where she lived. She remembers making makeshift pizza. “We would make bing [a Chinese flatbread], spread on tomato sauce, and sprinkle packaged cheese on top. It was darn good.” Gao also wishes there was less smog. “The sky was always gray, and there was probably about one day in a year that it was blue,” she said.

Two years later, after Xu’s green card was fulfilled, Gao and her family moved back to the US. She only knew a little English when she came back, so she watched PBS kids throughout the summer to help her improve. She gradually started speaking more English and got back on track. After summer was over, Gao went to the newly opened Borlaug Elementary School. She thinks it’s small compared to Lunan, but is happy to be back in the US. “It was a good experience living in China, but the US is what I’m really about. I’m happy to be back because of the bigger living space, my bed because in China it was as hard as rock, no joke, and the culture.”