Teenager Chosen as Image Ambassador for Tengtou Pavilion at World Expo Shanghai

Tengtou Pavilion， a highly urbanized， extremely wealthy village in Ningbo， a port city in eastern China’s coastal Zhejiang Province， is the only rural show at World Expo Shanghai 2010 whose theme is Better City， Better Life. After the pavilion broadcast to the world its intention to find image ambassadors， the organizers received about 3，000 applications from more than ten countries and regions. Zhou Youxi， a girl from Yongjia City in southern Zhejiang Province， was chosen.

Now a third year student at a junior middle school in Beijing， the 17-year-old polyglot is able to speak greetings in a dozen of foreign languages and she speaks several foreign languages fluently to introduce the pavilion to visitors.

In an interview， she tells her story.

When asked how she decided to compete for the position， she said she first learned about the global mass selection from her father who had read about the image ambassadors for Tengtou Pavilion in the newspaper. Her parents have their ancestral roots in Zhejiang. She grew up in Yongjia， a county under the jurisdiction of Wenzhou City in southern Zhejiang. She did not come to Beijing until when she was about to graduate from primary school. She had long since wanted to do something for her home province. The selection gave her an opportunity. After rounds of preliminary selection， she was lucky enough to be one of the top ten. Netizens voted her into the top five for the final.

Towards the end of April， 2010， she made a trip to Tengtou village. She was astonished by the beauty of the village， the rich life of the villagers， and the clean environment. She stayed in the village for two days and she couldn’t tear herself away it when she had to leave.

In the final， she talked about her advantages: she had been to many places， she had worked as a volunteer， and she was able to speak various languages. She talked about her plans if she would be selected. She came out the third in the final and was selected as an image ambassador. She is the only middle school student ambassador.

After the selection， she and a friend set up a website about Tengtou Pavilion in Chinese， English， and German.

She has been doing pretty well at the pavilion. She is able to speak English， German and Russia， Spanish effectively enough to communicate with foreign visitors.

Zhou Youxi’s father used to work as a factory worker in Yongjia. Her mother is a kindergarten teacher. Her elder brother is now studying in an American university. The 55-years-old father is an enthusiastic self-appointed pedagogue on foreign language learning. In order to expose her daughter to as many languages as possible， the family has moved many times. They stayed for two years in Yanbian， a city in Jinlin Province where a lot of ethnic Korean people live so that the daughter could pick up the essential Korean language. Then they spent a year in Inner Mongolia in order to learn the Mongolian language. They then moved to Beijing where the daughter has been able to study French and Portuguese at Beijing Foreign Studies University which is in close neighborhood where the family lives. She has taught herself to speak Japanese and Spanish. Moreover， she is good at the sign language. Altogether she speaks ten foreign languages to varying degrees. She has an English interpreter’s license at an advanced level.

Zhou Youxi says her parents never pressure her to study. They let her make her own decisions concerning what to learn and how to learn. Their trust gives her great confidence. She has scored 84 points in a recent TOEFL test and her application to the United World Collage of Costa Rica has been accepted. This is a pre-college school where now many international students study. She will be going there later this year. Her dream is to study political science at an American university after graduation from the senior high school in the Central American country.

Her 55-year-old father Zhou Bin is a language buff. He invented a few unique approaches to the learning of the English language and was a media headline figure in Yongjia County. But the father is not the daughter’s idol. Her elder brother is. He had achieved a perfect TOEFL score and was awarded a four-year full scholarship by an American university. He is going on to take a PhD course.