Grace, de Filipinas: cinco años en China con una beca de la Franja y la Ruta

The decision

Grace is a student at Beijing Jiaotong University studying vehicle engineering as an undergraduate. She was among the first cohort of students from the Philippines to receive a Belt and Road scholarship to study in China, and she describes herself as very fortunate — her motivation was simple: she wanted to see what China was actually like.

In 2018 she and several friends received their scholarship offers. She made the decision in two days, then handled the visa, health examination, document submission and packing quickly and in order. Her parents told her they would support whatever she decided.

The hard first year

The first year was not the smooth experience she had imagined. The pressure of studying Chinese and missing her family got to her, and she admits she once cried privately because she felt she was not doing well enough.

What turned it around was refusing to give up. Her own reasoning was that crying does not solve the problem, and that if one approach does not work you try another — and that her younger sisters were watching her and she wanted to set an example. Within three or four months her everyday communication was largely unproblematic, and she now sits in classrooms and follows lectures delivered entirely in Chinese, including technical vocabulary.

Life and observations

She has built a network of friends and describes small kindnesses from people around her — the dormitory staff who call her over to share food, friends who take her out when she is low. Her observation is that people in China do not need to know the details of your problem to help.

She has also been struck by the pace of infrastructure and technology: automated car-stacking parking, robotic sweepers, delivery robots and facial recognition were all in use years before she saw equivalents at home, and she cites the speed at which China builds major bridges as evidence of capability.

Five years in, she has settled into daily life to the point of being, in her own words, thoroughly used to China — including the etiquette of inviting people to eat, using chopsticks comfortably, and mixing her own hotpot dipping sauce.