I sat down with Xian Lu on a Thursday during lunch in her classroom, where students constantly peeked in to say “ni hao” to her and Liwen Zhou, Jackson-Reed’s Chinese teachers. On the first day of class, Ms. Lu introduced herself to my class’s small group of eight students with a warm, inviting smile and an excitement to teach us her native language. Ms. Lu quickly became one of my favorite teachers. She is kind, patient, and always has positive energy in the classroom.

While Ms. Lu rarely speaks about her personal life in class, every time she shares a tidbit of her story with us, we are all captivated by her incredible life story. Ms. Lu was born in a lumber camp in the mountains of Jilin, China, a small province northeast of Beijing and above the Yellow Sea, a rural town where opportunities were sparse. She looks back fondly on her childhood, where she spent time surrounded by nature in a close-knit community. Lu’s grandparents were immigrants to the region. Her parents faced economic and social disparities growing up, which motivated her father to create a better life for their family.

Conservative views that brought her father and grandfather to believe that boys were superior to girls pushed Ms. Lu. She added, “It can be very depressing sometimes to me, because I know I’m smart, I’m capable, but they don’t see it the same way I see things. That’s another reason that motivated me to do better than boys.” Although she wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer, her father pushed her to choose education as her profession because it was “more suited for women.” Despite her family’s skepticism, she went to the best college in her province and went to Beijing for graduate school. While there, she was mocked by her advisors for her Jilin accent, which reminded her of her parents’ immigrant experience. Following graduate school, Ms. Lu gained teaching experience at an international school in China before moving to the U.S. for a teaching program. 

Her arrival in Hot Springs, Arkansas, was very different from her hometown in China, where, like many immigrants coming to the U.S., she experienced a strong sense of isolation for the first time. Almost everyone she met was white – and for the first time in her life, she was a minority. With this came harsh experiences of racism and xenophobia, which had not been present in China, where there was a lack of diversity. When she moved to DC, her world expanded to different cultures, races, and ethnicities.  It was then that she understood the experiences she had gone through in rural Arkansas. Throughout her life, her identity was always present through shame and discrimination, but now she is proud of who she is. “Not only my identity as Chinese, but my identity as a girl who was born in a lumber camp, who didn’t speak standard Mandarin, went to a bigger city, and sometimes got laughed at because of my accent. So I tried to just be like the people there, you know, hide who I am. But now I feel like I just get to be who I am. I have nothing to hide.”

 Even though it can be terrifying to be an immigrant, mother, and teacher in the state of the country and world right now, Ms. Lu wishes for everyone to have a little more empathy for each other, and emphasizes the importance of representation. “There are only two Chinese teachers in the building. Hopefully, getting more Asian population involved, represented, in a school-wide community like the Beacon, can lift up our voices.” •