From the world, with love

Jongmay finds herself attached to China, after staying in her adopted country for almost eight years.

This blond American girl was born in Dalian, a coastal city in Northeast China. Then her family moved to Beijing. Since they returned to the US, Jongmay came back to Beijing several times to learn Chinese folk dance.

Jongmay and the "Chinese mother" of her host family at a CCTV talkshow last summer. [Photo from cntv.cn]

She applied to study dance at China Normal University after finishing her high school education in America. The 21-year-old girl now can speak Madarin like a native Beijinger.

Beijing has about 90,000 young people of foreign nationality like Jongmay, according to a report from Beijing Youth Daily.

The Beijing committee of the Communist Youth League did a survey on foreigners aged between 18 to 35 who have lived in Beijing for at least six months.

According to the survey, Korea, America, Japan and Canada contribute the most young immigrants among the 86 surveyed countries and regions, echoing statistics from Beijing Entry and Exit Administration Bureau, showing the four countries have the most foreigners in Beijing.

The survey finds that Chinese culture is the biggest draw. 79.7 percent of respondents said they were interested in Chinese culture, especially Chinese food, folk customs and traditional art.

But some others come here to figure out how China has transformed from a poor agricultural country to the second largest economy in the world within 30 years.

Zhou Aile is one of them. Her father is a politician in Gabon, a small tropical country in Africa, who sent her daughter to China to learn about the country’s development.“My father told me China is developing rapidly and its status in the world is rising,”Aile said.

For most foreigners, learning Chinese may be the biggest barrier to integrate into the country, despite the lure of Chinese culture. The survey shows that although 78.9 percent of foreigners can speak Mandarin, only 43.7 percent of them speak fluently.

Zhou Aile said the first two Chinese sentences she learned are 别（Bie）着（Zhao）急（Ji）, and 慢（Man）慢（Man）来（Lai），which have almost the same meaning — take it easy, and no hurry. Zhou made it, but her brother gave up and left for France after a while.

Jongmay may be proud of herself — she posted a short video of her reading out a tongue twister on Tencent Weibo, a popular social media platform.

Jongmay said she will stay in the city for a few more years. She will showcase the beauty of Chinese folk dance to more people, as“too few people nowadays pay attention to it.”

She love the city, as do more than 60 percent of all the other foreigners in Beijing. The thousand-year-old Chinese capital city now kindly embraces these young people of various colors and nationalities, who in return inject new vitality to it.