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The Serbian 12-year-old girl spent 10 years learning Chinese, which not only cured her stuttering in the process, but also gave her the opportunity to study in China.
She said after living in China for 6 years: "I must have been a Chinese in my previous life, and I must have settled in China. ”
Who the hell is she? Why is there such a deep fascination with China?
It starts with love
The girl, Yelena, was a native of Serbia. She was born in 1995 to an ordinary rural family.
Yelena is the eldest child in the family, and there are two younger brothers below, and her mother is the only one who goes out to earn money because she has to take care of the three of them at home. Her father was an ordinary worker with a meager income and a tight life for a family of 5.
In Yelena's memory, although her family was very poor when she was a child, she was not bitter at all. Her mother accompanied the three of them at home to read and write, and 4-year-old Yelena had begun to learn to write and make up stories.
After the clever Yelena went to school, she had excellent grades and was always the top of the class, a role model for her two younger brothers to learn.
But things are uncertain, when Yelena was 8 years old, she suddenly had a stutter, and her parents took her to see many doctors, but they couldn't cure it.
Yelena was a child
Yelena's young heart was severely damaged, and her originally cheerful and confident personality was also transformed by the problem of stuttering.
As soon as she speaks, she will cause the laughter of her classmates, she has become the laughing stock of her classmates, and the strange eyes that are always around her make her sensitive, inferior, and introverted.
Since then, she would rather do housework and watch TV at home than go out and play with her friends and close her heart.
Yelena's parents were very distressed about her young age, and even if they took good care of her, they still couldn't make her become like before.
At the age of 12, Yelena watched TV at home after school, bored with the remote control and kept changing stations, she wanted to find a TV that interested her.
The broken waves in "Wind and Clouds"
At this moment, a Chinese costume TV series "Storm And Clouds" appeared in front of Yelena's eyes, she had never seen such a strange and beautiful dress, and the shape of each character made her eyes shine.
She stopped to watch carefully, and was unconsciously attracted by the quaint architecture and beautiful and melodious classical music in the TV series.
Just as she was preoccupied with the drama, her father was off work, and Yelena rushed to her father and pointed to the TV and asked which country's TV series it was. Dad looked at it and told her it should be a Chinese TV series.
The word "China" seems to have opened the door to a new world for Helena, and her life has changed since this day.
Yelena likes the "broken wave" in this drama the most, which makes her feel excited, and in order to understand the subtitles Chinese, she tells her family that she wants to learn Chinese.
Her parents were very supportive of Yelena's decision and immediately enrolled her in a Chinese language study class. Why did it turn out to be full of hope and disappointment?
Yelena
Success is persistence
At that time in 2007, not many people studied Chinese in Serbia, and almost all the Chinese classes they could find were adult classes, and they learned Chinese to do business with China.
As the youngest student to learn Chinese, Yelena was persuaded by the teacher to quit after the first class because she could not keep up with her learning and acceptance ability.
But after this disaster, Yelena not only did not get discouraged, but more determined to learn Chinese, she followed her father to countless bookstores, and finally bought a "Chinese Dictionary", she began to follow the TV series to teach herself Chinese.
Learning a language is undoubtedly a matter that takes a lot of time and effort. Our mother tongue, Chinese, is recognized as one of the most difficult languages in the world to learn, and there are very few foreigners who can speak fluent Chinese.
Chinese CD of Yelena's house
Yelena said that the first Chinese characters she learned were not "hello, thank you, goodbye", but the names of the heroes, helpers, brothers and characters, which she learned one by one with the TV series.
In order to get in touch with more Chinese culture and learn Chinese more widely, she found many local Chinese, borrowed Chinese TV series CDs, music CDs, etc. She copied lyrics, recognized lyrics, and spent all her spare time learning Chinese.
During this time, she learned a lot of Chinese songs, and also met a lot of Chinese singers, such as Jay Chou, Wang Xinling, Jolin Tsai, SHE, etc., almost like our domestic peers, with the same idol.
In particular, SHE, their song "Chinese Dialect" makes Yelena feel the charm of Chinese tongue twisters, although it is difficult to learn, but it is very interesting.
At this time, Yelena was no longer stuck in making cars behind closed doors, studying at home on her own, and began to look for more opportunities to talk to Chinese.
Yelena remembered the lyrics
Yelena found that when she plucked up the courage to communicate with Chinese, the problem of stuttering seemed to be gone, and she made many Chinese friends in her own country.
In 2008, Yelena, who became a Fan of Chinese, came to the Chinese restaurant on the street and began to watch the Beijing Olympic Games with many Chinese, and the song "Beijing Welcomes You" made Yelena unforgettable for a long time.
At this time, although she was young, she already had an endless yearning for China in her heart.
She went home and told her parents that when she grew up, she must go to China, and her parents supported Yelena as always. At the same time, her parents also felt as if the daughter of the former confident sunshine had returned.
Chinese, who had been in contact with Yelena, was very fond of this little girl who was obsessed with Chinese culture and longed for China, and they helped the little girl explain the meaning of the lines or lyrics to the best of their ability, and helped her learn Chinese.
He also told her that there is a saying in China called "friends from afar, happy", and welcomed her to have the opportunity to go to China one day.
Yelena
Serbia's primary school is 8 years old, from the first contact with Chinese at the age of 5, to the graduation of primary school three years later, she has never stopped learning Chinese for 3 years.
Although stuttering made her inferior, but learning Chinese once again made her regain her self-confidence, with the love and efforts of Chinese, after graduating from primary school, she was admitted to the most difficult language high school in the local area, and came to the most sought-after Chinese class.
Most of the people around here are rich people from well-off families, and the educational resources available to her classmates are out of reach to Yelena because she is all self-taught.
Although Yelena's learning environment and theirs are not comparable, her academic performance is far ahead.
In her freshman year of high school, she participated in the Chinese Bridge Competition, stood out among many Chinese scholars, and became a "capable young player" who was vying for media coverage.
Since the ancient hero came out of the youth, Yelena became famous in one battle and became a local "Chinese little star".
Yelena's high school campus
The teachers at the school also knew that Yelena's Chinese proficiency was far superior to everyone in the class, so the teachers tacitly allowed Yelena to continue to study according to her own learning methods and expressed their willingness to help her at any time.
Throughout the 3 years of high school, Yelena naturally won a full scholarship every year and was a proper academic bully.
After graduating from high school, in order to come to China to study at university, 19-year-old Yelena took the Chinese level test, the highest level was level 6, and she passed level 5 in one go.
Therefore, she successfully applied for a place to study abroad at Beijing Language and Culture University, but another realistic problem was in front of her:
Her family was so poor that they couldn't even afford a plane ticket to China.
Yelena
Be loyal to choice
From the time I learned that the application for studying abroad was successful to the beginning of the school year, the period was only two months, and the price of the serbian ticket to China was equivalent to more than 10,000 yuan, and the family did not know where to raise this money for a while.
Yelena had to ask the school teacher for help, and the principal, who learned of the situation, contacted a local Chinese company in Serbia, hoping that they could help with the road fare.
When the Chinese company learned about Yelena, it was very appreciative of this girl who loved China and longed for China, and they felt that it was meaningful to fund such a Chinese culture lover.
When she learned that Chinese companies were willing to fund all the travel expenses, Yelena shed tears of happiness and gratitude, 7 years of hard work, at this moment her wish is about to come true.
Yelena
In September 2014, the family, in a happy and reluctant way, sent Yelena on the road to Beijing to chase her dreams, and Yelena told her family not to worry, she will adapt very well.
When the plane landed, Yelena was dumbfounded, how the scene in front of her was completely different from what she imagined.
Although Yelena has seen China's modernization on TV, in her heart, she still believes that Chinese people should wear costumes like in TV dramas.
Looking at the tall buildings along the way, for a moment she thought she had come to the wrong place.
Yelena, who has a martial arts dream in her heart, has a deep obsession with wearing ancient costumes, and when she learned that the university had a Hanfu Club, she immediately signed up to participate.
Here she finally got her wish, incarnated as a character in the TV series, fantasizing about encountering her own "broken waves", and since then she has been infatuated with Hanfu and has a special love for Hanfu culture.
Yelena costume
The undergraduate program was originally going to study for 4 years, but Yelena, who had already passed the Chinese Level 5 exam, jumped directly to her sophomore year, and the original 4-year course was reduced to 3 years.
And she is still the bully in the class, taking the full scholarship of the school every year. She lives in the school dormitory, eats mostly in the canteen, and saves a lot of money to travel in China.
She has been to Shangguangshen and Luoyang, Xi'an, Kaifeng and other ancient cities, and she likes to walk in the ancient city of Xi'an in Hanfu, which gives her the illusion of dreaming back to Chang'an.
3 years of Chinese environmental impact, so that Yelena's Chinese level to a higher level, whenever someone asked her as a foreigner, why she is so obsessed with Chinese culture, Yelena will firmly tell him:
"I must have been a Chinese in my last life."
At this point, Yelena had the idea of settling in China.
Knot in abundance
In her final year at Beijing Language and Culture University, Yelena made an important decision to apply for the directing department of the Beijing Film Academy.
For Yelena, it is already common to say that Chinese, but to compete with many Chinese candidates, it is not a simple Chinese can be admitted, which requires more professional knowledge and ability.
The first is the written exam, where Yelena needs to understand a lot of obscure professional vocabulary, which is an area she has never covered before.
She stayed up late every day to study until the early hours of the morning, whenever she couldn't learn or was tired, she thought about herself watching "Wind and Clouds" when she was a child, she was so loving and excited, relying on these "spiritual opium", she persevered, and passed the written test in one fell swoop.
If the written test can be tested by hard work and persistence, then the next oral test and interview can also be tested, relying on her talent and luck.
Yelena is making a movie
In the on-site creation, Yelena wrote a transnational love story that touched the hearts of the teachers, and she became the only foreign girl admitted to the Master's Degree of The Northern Film Directing Department.
In 2020, when the epidemic came, Yelena was closed in the Beijing Film Academy and could not go anywhere, in order to pass the time, she began to shoot short videos to share the different customs and cultures of Serbia and China, and she gained the attention of many Chinese netizens.
She was interviewed by the People's Daily, where she told reporters that her dream was to stay in China and become a director.
In 2021, because she missed her family, she returned to Serbia, because she often played Chinese songs at home, and one of her younger brothers also liked Chinese, began to learn Chinese with her, and was later admitted to Fudan University in Shanghai.
In the video posted, Yelena claimed that after a while, she would return to China and return to the place where her dream began to work as a director and make films.
"There's no doubt I'll be settling in China," she said. ”
Yelena graduation photo
brief summary
No one could have imagined that an ancient Chinese TV series could have such a profound impact on a girl that she would come to China even if she crossed tens of millions of miles.
On the one hand, she was able to study for a master's degree in China because of Yelena's hard work, and on the other hand, she benefited from the friendly international relations between China and Serbia.
Some time ago, the Belt and Road Policy allowed China to bring high-speed rail to Serbia, and before that, there was no high-speed rail in Serbia.
This has greatly increased the convenience of local people, and it turns out that countries with friendly relations with China can work together.
Yelena
There are not a few foreign students like Yelena, who are invariably attracted to a certain point in the profound Chinese culture, so they have traveled thousands of miles to China.
After arriving here, I began to truly understand China, found that the reality of China was different from what they remembered, and then fell in love with China deeply after understanding it.
China's vast territory, many ethnic groups, strong cultural inclusiveness, and the people are very hospitable, it is easy for foreigners to find a sense of belonging here, which also makes them willing to live here for a long time.
As Chinese culture continues to export to the outside world, it is also influencing more and more people from other countries to come to China, which also reflects that the soft power of mainland culture is constantly increasing, and our culture itself has a strong attraction.
I believe that in the rapid development of China, everything is possible in the future.