Kayla Raden interacts with students from Chengdu Tanghu Foreign Languages School in Sichuan Province during her trip to China in December 2018. [China Daily]

Editor's note: China Daily Global Edition offers the series Friends Afar to tell the stories of people-to-people exchanges between China and other countries. Through the vivid narration of the people in the stories, our readers can get a better understanding of a country that is boosting openness.

Kayla Raden, who is in her mid-30s, now works as a payroll administrator for a company in North Carolina after deciding several months ago to take a break from years of teaching. But memories of her experiences in China are never far away, and her love for the country remains strong.

"All of my colleagues are Chinese, so I get to speak Chinese all day and eat Chinese food more than twice a week," Raden said while describing her current daily life to China Daily.

Learning Chinese is something Kayla does every day. "I log in to all my different apps. First thing in the morning, I practice Chinese."

When talking about China, including when she taught in the country from 2016 to 2017, her trip in 2018 organized by the Confucius Institute, and her online education involving Chinese students, a smile lights up Raden's face.

"I really do hope to return when it is possible," she said.

Raden first went to China in 2016, but her interest in the country can be traced to her childhood.

Because her birthday is on Dec 24, which is Christmas Eve, her parents would want to take her out to celebrate her birthday. But the only restaurants open on that day were Chinese restaurants, according to Raden. "And my parents would always take me shopping and buy me little gifts from the little stores in Chinatown. So I always associate this deep happiness with eating Chinese food and going to Chinatown."

Furthermore, her best friend when growing up was Chinese American, so she always wanted to know more about China.

When Raden went to Epcot Theme Park at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida while in high school, she spent the whole time in the China Garden there, thinking about visiting the country someday.

The opportunity would come a few years later.

After Raden graduated from college and started her career, she saw a job opening for a chemistry teacher in Shanghai. Raden applied for the job and got it. She went to China to teach at an international high school in Fengxian District of Shanghai from 2016 to 2017.

"I just fell in love with the culture," said Raden. That's also when she began to learn Chinese.

"I had made some friends who are native Chinese speakers, so they would always help me and sometimes only speak to me in Chinese, which was frustrating, but definitely like a crash course," she said.

After returning to the US after one year of teaching, Raden felt "very homesick" for China, she said, so she began studying at a Confucius Institute in New York and made fast progress.

She then began to work for the Confucius Institute, now known as the Center for Language Cooperation and Education. Raden said it was "an incredible experience. It was like all my dreams coming true. All I did was engage with the community and encourage Chinese-language learning."

In 2018, Raden received the People-to-People Award from the Confucius Institute US Center and joined the 2018 Confucius Institute alumni trip to China.

During that trip, Raden went to a Peking Opera art school in Sichuan Province. "They took us to their rehearsal room, and they gave us more information about their costumes and how they practice and the historical significance," Raden said.

She volunteered to try on a costume and was taught by a girl how to move her hands with the sleeves. "I enjoyed it so much because they kind of exposed me to things that I don't think I would have found on my own," Raden said.

They also went to see pandas during that trip. "That was the highlight. That was what everyone was completely excited about," she said.

While Raden kept learning Chinese and thinking about returning to China to continue her teaching career, the COVID-19 outbreak occurred.

In 2020 and 2021, she taught students in Suzhou online. She needed to wake up at 4 am because of the time difference, but she felt lucky to teach the students because "they were so motivated".

When talking about her interactions with Chinese students in Suzhou, Raden still feels motivated and touched.

"I remember they sent me a Christmas card, a handwritten Christmas card. They mailed it, and I was just so touched by that gesture," she said. "Just because during COVID it was very isolating, and I felt kind of alone. And then I got this little card in the mail, and I was like, how sweet."

Raden also remembered the girl who helped her savor Peking Opera and the boy who helped her order bubble tea when she went to China for the first time and spoke no Chinese. She said the Chinese people always offered to help when she looked lost.

During her time in China, Raden loved walking around West Lake in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, enjoying teahouses in Suzhou, and visiting the Great Wall in Beijing. But the Chinese people impressed her the most.

"When I think of China, I think of the people. Because you can go to the most beautiful places in the world, but if you don't feel a sense of warmth when you go there, you're not going to have a connection to the place," Raden said.

She said people in the United States and China have many things in common.

"I talk about my experiences in China and how my students in China like the same stuff that my students here like. They like the same movies, they like the same music," Raden said. "We all have the same aspirations and dreams. We want to take care of our families. We want to be safe, we want to be happy. And even though we maybe have different life philosophies, at the end of the day, we want the same things."

Raden said that studying Chinese has transformed how she thinks, solves problems and views the world. "I think that studying Chinese has made me a more empathetic person," she said.

"If more Americans studied Chinese and maybe learned more about Chinese culture, there'd be a lot less misunderstanding," she said.

Raden has a dream of running a tourism company offering educational tours that take students from the US to China, because the impression of such trips is lasting. "You remember those for life."

(Source: China Daily)