Long Beach Poly High student Kelsey Sry is already a massive step ahead of the ever-evolving world of multi-national relations in having taken Chinese for three years. After all, Mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language in the world with nearly 2 billion speakers; English sits at second with 335 million.
Now Sry has scored a scholarship that will submerge her directly in Chinese culture thanks to the U.S. Department of State’s National Security Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y) award, an honor that was given to 634 other students across the nation. Sry, exercising her experience she already has with the language, will leave this Sunday to Xiamen to hone her Chinese skills even further.
“My interest in studying Chinese was first sparked when I was fourteen years old,” Sry said. “At that time, my older brother, Jeremy, was taking Chinese at Poly and I remember being amazed by just watching him doing his Chinese homework. At that moment, I fell in love with the way Chinese characters were written.”
Her love expanded beyond her bedroom and classroom walls as she created the Chinese Calligraphy Club, teaching newbies and veterans alike the art of traditional and simplified Chinese characters. Her prestigious trip to Xiamen is inherently connected with her hopes for the club: given that many of the club members have never been exposed to Mandarin, she will be able to return back to Long Beach to expand her teachings at the club and teach her cohorts how to speak and learn Mandarin Chinese characters with ease and comfort.
Sry’s six week stay—four weeks at Xiamen University and two weeks with a family—will officially begin when she lands in China on July 2. The trip has her excited, though this wasn’t necessarily always true: having learned about the scholarship through a penal, she felt the opportunity was too good to be true. The more she researched, the more tangible her dream became.
“When learning a new language, there comes a point when you can learn only so much from a textbook,” Sry said. “When you submerge yourself in an unfamiliar culture, this forces you learn to more since language is heavily tied to culture. The more you learn about a country’s culture, the more you can understand a country’s language. I strongly encourage for students to apply if he or she is truly interested in language learning. I will hopefully be frequently updating my blog when I go there.”