Photo: Internet

6. Girls playing soccer

"When children reach their middle year of kindergarten in Japan, they start taking weekly 'jumping' lessons, similar to our Physical Exercise lessons back home; when they get to their senior year, there is a soccer competition. When they're not practicing their drumming all day, they're practicing soccer. And they really play too, they even have competitions with other kindergartens. Tiantian has bruises from playing but her strength and bravery have been brought out.

To tell the truth, when we first came to Japan, Tiantian's performance was really shameful. Japanese kids usually start shooting up at about three or four years old, before that they are a lot shorter than Chinese kids. In Tiantian's class she was a giant, but was in actual fact quite weak.

The Japanese kids would run about outside, but Tiantian? She'd get a grain of sand in her shoe and would have to tiptoe to walk. Once there was an excursion where they went up a mountain, and she could only come down with two short Japanese kids supporting her. These uncomplaining three-year-olds, who didn't have the experience of allowing her to travel on foot up a mountain for an hour. She's better now, last year at Shangrila, in that low oxygen environment she walked for four hours without any problems.

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