Interview Project: Discovering life outside
How Shuang Liu left China for the United States
By Jenny Hudalla | Royal Report
On her first morning in the United States, Shuang Liu woke up to the smell of pancakes. Her brow furrowed as she stared at the electric stove, trying to detect a trace of a flame. She spent the next two months eating exclusively in the Dining Center before she learned how to cook without fire.
Having grown up in the rice fields of Hunan, a rural province in southern China, Liu is the first person from her village to travel abroad and pursue a graduate degree. She spent most of her childhood working in the fields with her parents, who sold pigs and river sand to supplement the earnings from their rice exports.
All that changed when Liu went to college. A rare opportunity for women in Hunan, college introduced Liu to people from Europe and the United States who broadened her conception of the world. Before long, Liu decided to create, organize and produce a talk show featuring foreign students with the hopes of introducing her peers to diverse perspectives.
“Most Chinese people don’t feel a need to travel,” Liu said. “They don’t have a chance to talk with foreigners, but a lot of [the people on my show] had been to more than 40 countries. It was a huge inspiration.”
When the talk show began to attract an audience outside Liu’s college setting, a local television station offered to broadcast it. Although the show enjoyed several years of air time, it was discontinued when Liu moved to the United States a little more than a year ago.
Faced with an entirely new set of challenges, Liu said those first days in America were a struggle to survive. It took her four months to understand the difference between a washer and a dryer, and she spent another month trying to pinpoint the purpose of a dryer sheet. Dissecting complex homework instructions was difficult, and she still has trouble navigating the ins and outs of Moodle.
But Liu doesn’t let the learning curve stop her from making a difference. She’s a soprano for her church choir, a Chinese tutor in the Modern World Languages Department, an office assistant for the Office of International Studies and the leader of Bethel’s Chinese bible study.
She’s also a new Christian cultivating an unlikely faith. In fact, the only person from Hunan who knows about her conversion is Liu’s mother, who begged her not to tell the rest of the family. Liu knows that when she goes home, she’ll be without a church and forced to nurture her relationship with God behind closed doors.
“It’s becoming the biggest hurdle for me to go back,” Li said. “I love and miss my family, and I pray for them all the time. It’s hard to be so homesick, but I know that my relationship with God has to be the most important relationship in my life.”
Still, not a day goes by that Liu doesn’t think of China. Before she left, she started a small library at her home in the countryside to help people cultivate a love for learning. One day, she hopes to realize what she calls her “China dream” to plant churches near her hometown.
“When I go back, I bring a sense of education with me. I tell them stories about the life outside, about different cities and provinces,” Liu said. Then she paused. “I feel really proud of that.”
Want to see an episode of Liu’s talk show? Check out the video below.
