|
||
|
||
Why I should be chosen as an Olympic torchbearer?From my home in Shanghai, I have dedicated my life and career to building a better world by increasing cross-cultural understanding and friendship. I am the founder and CEO of WorldFriends.tv, a website with over 1,300,000 members from 200 different countries. I was born and raised in Toronto, Canada and I am ethnically Chinese-Filipino mixed. I have lived in Shanghai, Toronto, Hong Kong, Manila, Sydney, Jakarta, Nanning and Xiamen. If I am given the honor of being an Olympic torchbearer, every step I run will be with passionate Olympic spirit, representing both foreigners and Chinese in China who are internationally-minded and want to ¡°be global¡±. Each step will represent striving for a harmonious society, for international friendship. My story in China I love China. I first arrived in China at the age of 23 in 1993 and lived in Nanning and Xiamen. I did not speak any Chinese when I arrived, and I found that learning Mandarin is like snowboarding. It¡¯s very easy to get started, but difficult to master and easy to have an accident. My most embarrassing moment in China was when I was making a public speech at an inauguration ceremony and I said that the company¡¯s warehouse was full of ´À»õ (ch¨³n hu¨°, idiots), when I was supposed to say´æ»õ£¨c¨²n hu¨°, inventory). This was hardly impressive to the gathered customers, suppliers and family! Everybody in the crowd laughed ¡ except me. My Mandarin rapidly improved and I began making my own flashcards to help me remember my vocabulary. Language exchange became a lot of fun; never in my life had I felt like a rock star until I went to my first ¡®English Corner¡¯. I met many young Chinese people so eager to learn English and ¡°be global¡± especially at the English Corner in Nanning University where every Thursday night we would gather to shyly practice English conversation in the dark. In early 2000, the hunger to learn English that I witnessed in China inspired me to start my own business called HungryForWords.com, enabling Chinese and Japanese speakers to get their own personalized flashcards via email, providing language education free of charge! Seven years later, I am living in Shanghai and still running the same company which has launched WorldFriends.tv to promote international friendship. I am lucky to be supported by WorldFriends¡¯ 45 employees who are all passionately dedicated to the mission of helping people make new international friends, learn languages, and discover new cultutres. Every day , thousands of WorldFriends members are ¡°meeting their neighbors in the global village¡±, for example, Chinese making friends with Canadians, Japanese exchanging travel notes with Koreans, or Spaniards doing language exchange with Chinese. I sincerely wish to be an Olympic torchbearer to represent this spirit of international friendship. We love the Olympic movement and its vision. One World One Dream!
|
