Tina

Last July we had a Chinese Exchange Student for 3 weeks. Even though her stay was not all rosy, the balance was a very good experience for Bianca.

I say it was not all rosy maybe because as being an well-behaved ex Exchange Student myself before, I expected nothing but good behavior. Only I forgot three things: she comes from a complete different culture, she is not from the Rotary whose program is highly selective and she is not 17, she is 12 only!

Tina Ding (Yuchen) is a  12 year old from Tangshan, an only child as Bianca. Tina is sweet and treated Bianca as her little sister right away. However, with the honeymoon phase over in week 2, of course, no one is perfect, we could also see the typical teenage rebellious side of hers coming out. The teenager who likes to do as she wishes, who is upset because she wished she had $3,000 to go shopping, who wants to wear sassy stuff inappropriate to her age  and who wanted to be in her bedroom by herself listening to Bieber.

Contrarily, Bianca never acted like a spoiled only daughter. Never had tantrums of any sort, she was glad to share her TV time and in fact was always chasing Tina to play with her. This for me was a huge deal.

She learned with Tina how to count in Mandarin till 5 and she even told us she already knew how to count till 3 thanks to the Ni-Hao Kailan cartoon!

Tina left after three weeks and, frankly, it  was relief in a sense to being back to normality, to our own little family of 3. But we miss her too at times. I will forever remember being asked if she could call me “Mom”, riding in the car with Bianca and her singing ‘Firework’ by Katy Perry from top of our lungs (she mentioned in her email to me today too),  how the three of us together saved a stubborn turtle or the big hug I got after solving her “sexy shirt” malfunction.