Am I Ready to Embrace the World?

Am I Ready to Embrace the World?

I still remember eating KFC fast food for the first time when I was like six or seven years old. It was a novel experience to me, who was a little girl but already a big foodie at that time. I had heard of KFC and McDonald’s for many times but never had a chance to have a try before, because my hometown was not that kind of international metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai and there were no such restaurants by then. So you can imagine how excited I was when I took the very first bite of that chicken burger and found it was so different from food I had eaten in the first few years of my life. That was the start of my foreign food journey and also my worldview formation.

After that time, I had my second, third and perhaps hundredth KFC meals and a little bit less McDonald’s during these years. Now, there are two KFC restaurants near the community I live. Once a McDonald’s was there during my primary school years but unfortunately it closed down when I entered junior high school. I guess the reason was that people in my hometown preferred chicken to beef. Till this point, my perception of globalization still came from and focused on nothing but food. I did not even realize that these fast food chains are what I called transnational enterprises today. Gradually it just became commonplace for me and my family to have ramen from Japan, Kimchi from Korea, spaghetti from Italy and many other kinds of foreign food.

As time went by, I entered senior high school and built up the concept of globalization in my mind. At this stage, most of my experiences about globalization came from the field of education. In Grade One, we had a teacher, Ms. Knapp, who is from Canada, to teach us English. Then came Mr. Todd, a native of North Carolina, in Grade Two. Communicating with teachers from foreign countries did open up my eyes and enrich my knowledge of the world. Words and phrases like WTO, UN and integration of world economy were not simple combinations of letters in the textbook any longer. Instead, they became my keys to the world I live in, the same planet with a brand new outlook to me. Not even meeting one foreigner until getting into high school, I had never imagined myself talking with an American guy in English as what I did in real life.