From ten thousand metres to the classroom

I spent fifteen years as cabin crew with airlines including Air China and China Eastern, serving as a senior purser with the latter. Those years, spanning many places and cultures, gave me valuable life experience and a practised ease in meeting and communicating with people.

Since 2019 I have worked in Chinese-language education at Xingzhi in Sweden, mainly teaching intermediate and more advanced courses, and now have seven years of experience teaching Chinese overseas.

As a Chinese teacher I hold to continuous learning and self-improvement. I take part actively in professional development: in 2024 I attended Nanjing Normal University's programme for overseas teachers, and I have joined teacher training programmes run by the China Overseas Chinese Language Education Foundation several times, strengthening both my grounding in history and culture and my language pedagogy.

In practice I teach with reading interest as the guide, leading students to explore the Chinese-speaking world for themselves. I follow the principle of progressing step by step, and encourage each student to develop all four skills — listening, speaking, reading and writing — from their own starting point. Working this way, I have guided three students to strong results in the international Chinese students' writing competition, and have three times been named an "Outstanding Guiding Teacher". I also weave what I saw and learned during my years in the air into my lessons, turning experience of service and cross-cultural communication into vivid teaching material that helps students grasp the breadth and depth of Chinese culture more directly, and stirs their curiosity about the Chinese-speaking world.

I firmly believe that interest is the best teacher and patience the warmest company. By continuing to learn and to turn that learning into something usable, I hope to walk steadily alongside every child of Chinese heritage on the road through Chinese, and help them shine with their own particular light in the wide landscape of Chinese culture.