A Long March

The daughter of our Chinese friends was about three or four years old when I got to know her. She had arrived a week earlier from a far away borderland of China, where she had been guarded by her grandmother while her parents were working here in Hungary. She did not quite look like a little child. Instead, she looked as if she were a figure in a hundred years old photo. I at once felt love for her.

She was an extremely talented child. Within some months she fluently spoke Hungarian. One could have thought that she was just like all the other little Hungarian schoolgirls if one did not know that in certain respects she really lived like a figure in a hundred years old photo, spending all the summer with her grandmother in China, and learning with her Chinese language, literature and history from morning till night, ten hours a day, only having some minutes of a break in an hour.

In the second class of the high school she found an international high school network founded for preparing talented children from all over the world for admission to the best British and American universities. We helped her to write the application. She was admitted. Two years ago she began the third year of the high school more than ten thousand kilometers away from us. She quickly grew fond of the school, and they also loved her.

This spring she made her exams of admission to the university. I've rooted for her very much. I've prayed a lot, and we’ve also offered Mass for her. Yesterday I got to know the results. Six American elite universities sent notification that they welcome her among their students – the little Chinese girl who still some years ago looked like a figure in a hundred years old photo.