From rural China to laptops and laundromats
(AP)
Updated: 2005-09-13 09:36

Early ambition

Mei arrived in America in the spring of 2003 with a new laptop from the foundation, but she didn't know how to turn it on. She didn't understand credit cards. Her roommate taught her about coin-operated washing machines.

"I encounter so many difficulties," Mei wrote then for her first class, Introduction to Education Leadership. "Sometimes I even do not understand what is the teacher's assignment.

"But I am a little Chinese bamboo, and here, there are a lot of sunlight, rain, breeze and so on," she wrote. "I will grow up quickly."

Three months later, Mei was linking a digital camera to her laptop to send photos to her home's closest cybercafe, two days' travel from her village in southern China's Yunnan Province.

She had joined a conversation group at a local library and was advancing quickly through English. She still trembled when speaking in front of people, but she was no longer so shy.

"As far as I'm concerned, she's the future of the China we'll be growing up with," says her academic adviser, Perry Berkowitz, an assistant education professor at Saint Rose.

Mei thanks her father, Tser, for getting her this far. Years ago, he left the village to join a logging project. Meeting people from other parts of China opened a new world for him. He couldn't even speak Mandarin, the major language that overlaps China's dialects, so his new colleagues taught him to speak it and write.

He decided Mei would have a proper education, so she could go even farther.

Her ambition started early. In fourth grade, the highest class her village offered, she realized she'd have to study harder than her classmates for the rare chance to study on the far side of the mountains. When she left, villagers sent her off with eggs, chickens, pork and other gifts.

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