“He is almost twenty years old and he is already / Tired of dreaming / But behind the border is his home / His world and his city.” These are the lyrics of the song Libre, by Nino Bravo, who died 50 years ago. The fourteen Chinese students of the Diploma of Hispanic Studies at the University of Lleida (UdL) have started their literature classes with her.
"It's a poem. The character is almost 20 years old, the age they are also. It is not great literature, but it is literary expression, it connects very well with young women. It is a melody that becomes the anthem of the course, sometimes, when we are outside the University, they sing it and in China I know that they do too.” This is Julián Acebron, the teacher of the Literature course in which the young women study works by current authors from the Lazarillo de Tormes.
The University of Lleida (UdL) once again welcomes students from China for this course after three years without doing so due to the Covid-19 pandemic. They come from Tianjin and Soochow universities. In the last promotion, before the pandemic, 47 students arrived from Tianjin Foreign Studies University, Binhai School of Foreign Affairs, Changzhou University and Soochow University.
Silvia Quiling is one of Soochow's students. She is from a very small town, Gini Zhou. She has chosen Lleida "for its good environment and the hospitality of the people" and the name, Silvia, because she feels identified with its meaning in Spanish, woman of the forest. She wants to be an interpreter. She speaks, in addition to Chinese, English, Japanese and a little Korean. And wants to learn Italian.
Her colleague, Valentina Webin Zhu, has also come to the UdL because of “the great academic environment” that students from other years had told her about. She wants to dedicate herself to international trade or teach Spanish.
“They arrive in Lleida with two years of study, they study twelve subjects, and they will have a 'linguistic friend' says the coordinator of the Diploma of Hispanic Studies, Olga Fransi. The UdL also reviews the students' rental contracts to facilitate their stay in the city and formalizes agreements with other entities to expand the activities of Chinese students. The Municipal Theater Classroom is one of them. The fourteen young women study theater there.
His Chinese Spanish translation teacher, Diego, Xu Tian, was a student of the diploma. He arrived ten years ago from China, continued studying in Barcelona and now combines classes with his work as a freelance translator.
The coordinator of the Diploma, Javier Terrado. that the UdL signed an agreement with Tianjin University through which the first students arrived in the 2006/2007 academic year. Since then there are almost 500.
In 2020, in the middle of the Covid pandemic, when it was very difficult to find masks, students from China who had taken the Diploma in Hispanic Studies at the University of Lleida, sent masks to Lleida from their country.
From Changchun, capital of Jilin province, the student of the Territory, Heritage and Culture doctoral program at the Faculty of Letters, Zhao Mo sent the first batch: a thousand masks. Later other young Chinese organized themselves and sent more.
