米歇尔在成都七中的演讲

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∙米歇尔在成都七中的演讲

It is truly a pleasure to be here at the Number Seven School. Thank you so much for your warm welcome.

米歇尔·奥巴马

Ni hao. It is truly a pleasure to be here at the Number Seven School. Thank you so much for your warm welcome.

Now, before I get started, on behalf of myself and my husband, I want to say that our hearts go out to all those with loved ones on Malaysia Airlines

Flight 370. As I said this past weekend when I spoke at Peking University, we are very much keeping all of them in our thoughts and our prayers at this tremendously difficult time.

So now, let me start by thanking your Principal, Principal Liu, and your classmate, Ju Chao, for that wonderful introduction. Your English, Ju Chao, is excellent, and you should be very proud. Thank you so

much. (Applause.) And I want to thank all of the students here today, both those of you here in person and those of you joining remotely from across the region. I’m thrilled to be visiting your wonderfu l school.

Now, in preparation for this visit, before I left the U.S. I visited the Yu Ying School. It’s a public school near the White House in Washington, D.C., and all of the students at this school study Chinese. And I met with the sixth-grade class, kids who are 11 and 12 years old. They had recently taken a trip here to China, and they were bursting with excitement. They were eager to tell me about everything about what they had seen.

But they admitted that before their trip, they had all kinds of misconceptions about China. They thought they would see palaces and temples everywhere they went, but instead they found massive cities filled with skyscrapers. They weren’t sure that they’d like the food here in China, but they actually loved it, and they learned how to use chopsticks. And in the end, one of the students told me –- and this is his quote -- he said, “Coming home was really exciting, but was at the same time sad.”

Now, meeting these students reminded me that when we live so far away from each other, it’s easy to develop all kinds of misconceptions and stereotypes. It’s easy to focus on our differences –- how we speak different languages and eat different foods and observe different traditions. But as I travel the world, and I meet young people from so many countries, I’m always struck by how much more we have in common.And that’s been particularly true during my visit here in China.

You see, the truth is that I grew up like many of you. My mom, my dad, my brother and I, we lived in a tiny apartment in Chicago, which is one of the largest cities in America. My father worked at the local water plant. And we didn’t have much money, but our little home was bursting with