New book highlights success stories of Belt and Road lands

Serbian high school student Katrina Stojanovic shares her story in Chinese at an event in Beijing.[Photo/Xinhua]

When 19-year-old Serbian high school student Katrina Stojanovic stood on the stage of the ceremony hall of Xinhua News Agency in Beijing to share her story in Chinese, gasps of amazement spread among the audience when the first word was pronounced - it was hard to tell the voice belonged to a foreigner.

As the champion of the "Chinese Bridge" Chinese Proficiency Competition for foreign secondary school students in 2015, she admitted her Chinese was probably better than her mother tongue.

"I first heard the language when I was in my mother's belly," says Stojanovic, daughter of a Sinologist. "I recall the days when my grandparents said Chinese was my destiny."

In the 1960s and 1970s, Chinese bicycles and cloth shoes were very popular in the former Yugoslavia, but it was not easy to get them. When her grandfather wooed her grandmother, the man saved up for a long time for a pair of Chinese shoes to make himself look different from others. Believing that China would change his life, he bought a Chinese bicycle after marriage.

"He passed the passion to her daughter, and my mother didn't hesitate to choose Chinese as her major in college," Stojanovic says.

Their love for China passed to the third generation and Stojanovic applied to a high school that had Chinese classes in Belgrade. This is among the 100 stories in The Belt and Road: People with Stories, a recently published book jointly compiled by Xinhua News Agency, State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission and the Confucius Institute.