Ningxia: Where my voice began

Fireworks and classrooms

A few days after we settled in, close to midnight, we heard bursts of crackling outside. I ran to my parents. "Is that shelling?" I asked. "Do we need to hide?" My mother was startled, too.

Then my father opened the door. Fireworks were filling the sky. In the yard, children my age were setting off firecrackers, their faces lit by the sparks. Only later did I understand that it was Chinese New Year's Eve. Where I had grown up, that kind of sound carried one meaning. In Ningxia, it carried another: family, celebration, and safety.

I enrolled at Yongning No 3 Primary School, where the principal allowed me to start in fourth grade on a trial basis.

Chinese was difficult. The characters on the blackboard looked like an unreadable script. During breaks, my classmates would turn their chairs toward me and speak to me in the Yongning dialect. "Where are you from?" "What is your name?" "Can you play soccer?" I understood almost nothing and could answer only with gestures. But I never felt shut out.