TextBetweentwoworlds.docVIP

Between two worlds: A Chinese student in the?US  HYPERLINK /2011/01/28/between-two-worlds-a-chinese-student-in-the-us/ /2011/01/28/between-two-worlds-a-chinese-student-in-the-us/ Around the world, 3.3 million university-level students? HYPERLINK /sites/eag_highlights-2010-en/01/11/index.html?contentType=/ns/StatisticalPublication,/ns/ChapteritemId=/content/chapter/eag_highlights-2010-13-encontainerItemId=/content/serial/2076264xaccessItemIds=mimeType=text/html \t _blank study abroad. The biggest number come from China, and the most popular destination is the United States. What are their lives like? In this guest posting, Yeran Zhou, an 18-year-old from Shenzhen in southern China, reflects on his first semester in the U.S. Mr. Zhou blogs for the? HYPERLINK /profiles/yeran-zhou \t _blank Daily Illini, a student newspaper at the University of Illinois. ???? O n August 14, 2010, I boarded a 14-hour flight to America, leaving China for the first time. I had never been to America before, but people always said I would fit in, mainly because I argued with my ?teachers and insisted I wanted to be a filmmaker. So when I was 10, my parents sent me to weekend classes taught by foreign tutors. After school I spent all my pocket money on pirated Hollywood DVDs and watched every episode of?Friends. Soon I concluded that America was a rich and cool country with lots of kids like me. In ninth grade, I got a taste of how life would be if I stayed on in Chinese education when I took the?Zhongkao, a two-day exam to determine which high schools we could go to. A year of test cramming exhausted me. Upon graduation, the principal told us a harder, crueler test – the ?Gaokao?– awaited us in three years. And that was when I decided I had to go abroad. My high school in Shenzhen had a tradition of sending students overseas. Every year some would come back and tell their stories. They said that Chinese students in the U.S. were notorious for only hanging out with each other, but “i