A year ago, Hui Wang was living in China and attending school for 12 hours a day in a building with about 2,700 other students. Today she is living in Freedom and going to FHS. The change between her two worlds has been dramatic, to say the least. Moving Hui moved here halfway through her ninth grade year when her mom married a Freedom resident. Before moving to America she had never left China. In December of 2009, she travelled with her mother to the city of Guangzhou for an interview to seek permission to move to the United States. The purpose of the interview was to determine that she and her mother had a legitimate reason for requesting residence in the U.S. They had to show photos, letters and telephone records from her step-dad as proof. School in China Hui grew up in Nanning, a city near Hong Kong. At the middle school she attended, there were about 900 kids in her grade. The average class size was 60 students – about three times the size of a typical FHS class. She went to school from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. all the way through eighth grade. In ninth grade, in order to get extra practice for the upcoming high school entrance examinations, she went back to the school from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. That’s five and a half hours longer than Freedom students go to school – almost double the time spent at FHS. In China, high school starts at grade 10. In the city where she lived, everyone went on to high school. A test is required to determine if you go to a ‘bad’ high school or a ‘good’ high school. Hui defined a bad school as having teachers who are not as good and students who are not as smart or motivated. High schools all have a base score that you must reach in order to gain admittance, and the better high schools have higher requirements. If your grades and entrance exam score are high enough, you can choose what high school to attend. “I was glad that I didn’t have to take the test,” she said. School in America Hui said that her favorite thing about coming to America is FHS. She likes the small class sizes and the opportunity to talk more with the teachers. “I still have to work very hard, but I think that with the language [barrier], if we had to stay in school as long as [I did] in China I would die.” Her favorite classes have basically stayed the same. In China she enjoyed math and English. Hui said that at Freedom she really enjoys math, ESL (English as a Second Language) and Communications. “Communications has helped me a lot, especially learning the vocabulary. In China we don’t make speeches in front of people.” As a sophomore she is taking Honors Pre-Calculus – a class in which junior honors students typically enroll. And though she’s too modest to admit it, she is doing exceptionally well. Mrs. Hastings said that she has the highest grade in the Honors Pre-Calculus class. Unlike Hui’s other classes, which depend on the comprehension of English, math is a universal language. In any country, math is math. “She is really, really good at anything involving numbers. One time right after the test she pointed at the word fraction and asked what it meant. She knew how to use fractions; she just didn’t know what the word meant,” Mrs. Hastings said. “Imagine being in China and everyone around you speaking Chinese when you only understand English. That’s how I think she must feel.” Food Her least favorite thing when she came here was the food. “I hate cheese,” she said. There isn’t much cheese found in Chinese dishes, mostly because the country has a history of fishing and rice cultivation and never relied on dairy cows. Though thanks to her step-dad, Hui is gradually beginning to like the cheese found on pizza. Hui is fond of chicken feet, something many Americans would consider a strange food. She said that they are very good but difficult to eat. Interestingly, she first found peanut butter – a classic American food – to be strange. “Peanut butter was too soft; we usually eat the whole peanut in China,” Hui said. Old Friends Hui said that her friends back home were sad she was moving but, “they said I am very lucky.” When she moved here she kept in touch with friends with Tencent QQ, essentially China’s version of Facebook. The downloadable program, like Facebook, has an instant messaging feature. Though Facebook is banned in China, Hui now has a profile so she can keep in touch with her new American friends. Hui said that her Chinese friends study very hard so they don’t talk as often as she’d like. She will most likely get to see them this summer since her family is planning a trip to go back and visit. One thing she’ll definitely look forward to during her visit is KTV– known in English as karaoke. She and her friends will meet up and have fun singing songs by popular groups like the Taiwanese boy band Fahrenheit. Looking Forward As Hui points out, American universities dominate the list of the top 100 colleges in the world. Had she still been living in China, she would have wanted to go to an American college. As a U.S. resident, she will have a much easier time getting into and adjusting to a university in the U.S. Hui said that competition to get into college in China is incredibly intense. Even those who go to a good college in China still have trouble finding jobs. She said that if a job in America had 100 applicants, in China there would be 1,000 people who wanted that one job.