Source: http://paper.i21st.cn/index_21st_issue_1113.html#Focus
Interview by: Wang Xiaoying

When Sara Jaaksola stepped on an airplane to China in 2010, the then 22-year-old Finn didn’t predict her exchange program with Guangzhou University would change her life.

"I was prepared to stay one semester, but now it’s been more than five years. I just fell in love with learning Chinese in China,” she said.

Five years is a long time for a foreigner to stay in China, long enough that Jaaksola now calls coming back to China returning home. In a sense it is. “I had been in the safety of my mother’s belly when she was expecting me in the late 1980s in Beijing,” she said.

According to Jaaksola, this may have contributed to her passion for Chinese language and culture. In high school, she found her Chinese name online and let everyone know they could call her by that name if they wanted to. She also read massive amounts of books about China and surfed the Finnish version of Taobao.com to find China-related items.

Though Jaaksola started learning Chinese in 2008 at The University of Tampere in Finland, it was not until 2010 that she was closely bonded to China.

"I knew some things about Chinese culture, but actually living here in China is a totally different thing. China is as diverse a country as any other country. It’s huge and has many different people and cultures. I think that vast *diversity is something I didn’t really realize before,” she said.

That encouraged her to stay in China longer. “My Chinese-learning destiny was sealed when I applied for the undergraduate program in 2011 at Sun Yat-sen University. Chinese officially transformed from a hobby to my major,” she said.

Since then, life in China has slowly started to become more ordinary for her and she has even started enjoying life as Chinese people do.

"There are no strict rules. The Chinese don’t mind it if you can’t use chopsticks or eat *dim sum with your fingers. I think the Chinese, perhaps especially the Cantonese, are very relaxed people and there’s no need to worry about making mistakes or embarrassing yourself,” she said.

Now, Jaaksola is pursuing her master’s degree in teaching Chinese as a second language at Sun Yat-sen University, which means she still needs another year to finish her studies.

"For me, it’s never boring in China. Of course it’s the same as living your daily life, but with a twist,” she said.