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I come from China, and my hometown is Beijing, which is the capital of China. Beijing is a huge city where the population is around 11,000,000. I was born and grew up in Beijing where I lived for my whole life before I came to the US. I remember my first day of school. My elementary school was very close to my home. I walked there everyday. I was not a good student in elementary school. I didn't do my homework all the time. When it was lunchtime, my teacher told me that I had to finish my homework, then I could go home to have lunch. In fact, I never finished my homework during the lunchtime; therefore, my father had to ask my teacher to take me back for lunch. It was not a good time. I am the youngest kid in my family, and I have two sisters. When I was growing up, my mother was a principal in an elementary school. My father was an engineer. Both of them were extremely busy. They retired several years ago. My sisters have taken care of me a lot, even until right now. I feel I am very lucky. I have the best sisters in the world. When I was twelve, I started to play soccer after school. Actually, I didn't like it when I started it. My parents were too busy to take care of me after school, so they decided to send me to a sports school. When I was chosen for the Women's Soccer Team of Beijing, I really began to like soccer. During that time, it was very hard practicing soccer before big games were coming. We needed to practice six hours every day. Sometimes we went to outside of the city to practice, so we couldn't go home to see our family. That was called intensive training. Everybody on the team was scared of intensive training because it was too hard to enjoy. Sometimes we were too tired and begin to cry, but all of my teammates accepted this kind of training before we went to competition because we knew ,without this, we couldn't win the game. I had a very good time and played for the Beijing team for three years. We got the championship for all of China. After that, I decided to go to college. I felt I should spend much more time studying. I think I need knowledge to make myself better and better; I can do nothing without knowledge. Therefore, I had to quit the Beijing team. I felt very sad. At that time, I discovered that soccer had to be part of my life. Fortunately, I played soccer in college because there was a woman's soccer team in my college. I graduated from the Physical Education University in 1992; I majored in physical education. It was not a good major in China, but I found a job working in a company. I also taught girl's soccer in the sports school that I had gone to before. I really enjoyed working with them; they gave me much more energy. After that, I worked for Fashion Dress Company for five years in China. I felt I should study more things. I decided to come to the US and study English. There are many foreign companies in Beijing. In the future, they will need people who can speak Chinese and English. In addition, I like English very much. My friends introduced me to Lewis and Clark College. They told me it was a very good college. I believed them because they had been living here for ten years, so then I came to Portland. When I came to school the first time, I liked it because there are many trees on the campus; it is very green and fresh. I like to walk in the forest on campus and go to the rose garden, which I visited on the first day of school. I decided to study here. I am glad I chose this school. My dream in the future is to speak English very fluently and write perfect English. Then I will go to undergraduate school to learn about communication. After I finish my studying, I am going to go back to China and find a job. I will talk to my friends in the bar; I will talk about my life in the US. No more loneliness and homesickness. I think this is my goal. I hope it will come true. |
Lincheng Li: The Writer
