A KOREAN IN HEFEI
Korean teacher Cho Sung Hye landed in Hefei, capital of east China's Anhui Province, in 1996, and had no idea she would stay for so long. In 2006, she became the first person from the Republic of Korea (ROK) to get China's "green card" for permanent residence.
"None of my friends back home knew where Hefei is in China, and there was not a single foreigner that I could find in the city," Cho said, in fluent Chinese.
She remembered that 1996 was just four years after the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping made a series of landmark speeches marking China's opening up and modernization.
There were only eight students in her Korean language class, which used the smallest classroom in Hefei College. Now the school has four Korean major classes, enrolling 500 students a year.
Over the past 20 years, Cho has seen 3,500 of her students go to the ROK for further studies.
"When I got here, I could not even find a Korean language dictionary. I asked my brother to mail me a dozen dictionaries and asked the consulate people from Shanghai for help to print teaching materials for my Chinese students," Cho said.
She said it was the students' thirst and passion for learning a foreign language and new knowledge that inspired her.
"Even at that time, I could feel China's shining vigor and that it was on the way to rejuvenation into a great international power, and the world needed to establish closer ties with China," she said.
Cho is now more than a teacher. She still routinely has 10 classes a week at school, but in 2016 the 57-year-old woman started a cultural exchange business, which recruits international talent to Anhui.
"China's wheel of development won't stop rolling. Too many foreign people that I know are eager to study, work and live here. I am so lucky that I've made it my home," she said.
Cho said she no longer suffered from homesickness as it takes less than three hours to fly from Hefei to Incheon Airport in Seoul.
