China has fired up the interest of students at Lincoln High School in Tacoma, an industrial port city in the state of Washington, because of a Chinese leader’s upcoming visit.

“The Chinese president will come to our school on Wednesday,” Kameron Smith, a senior at Lincoln, told China Daily in his classroom while talking with classmates during lunch break. “It’s pretty cool. The powerful leader will visit us out of so many schools.”

The students may not know that their city has been connected with China since 1993 when Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Tacoma as the then Communist Party chief of Fuzhou, a coastal city in China’s Fujian province. In the next year, the two cities established their sister-city relationship.

Twenty-two years later, Xi will set foot in the city again, and Lincoln will be one of his stops during his three-day stay in Seattle, about 40 miles north of Tacoma.

Lincoln is one of the city’s most diverse high schools, and more than 13 percent of the students there have some type of Asian heritage.

Located in the quiet south-central section of Tacoma, the school built in 1913 was being spruced up for the president’s visit. Workers were repainting the outside doors of the stadium and others were cleaning the red brick walls of the collegiate Gothic-style building.

Inside, drawings of pandas and Chinese flags decorated a billboard outside the auditorium.

In a nearby classroom, Leena Loredo and her classmates had just finished a class on US government and policies. Xi will join them in an advance placement government class, where their teacher, Nate Bowling, was expected to give a lecture on the differences between Chinese and US presidencies.

Though students attending the class haven’t been selected yet, Leena said, “I hope I can be there. If I get to ask the president a question, I want to know how nerve-raking it can be to be a president of such a big country.”

Leaving the classroom, she rushed to the auditorium for a chorus rehearsal. Dozens of students are going to sing the English song What a Wonderful World and the Chinese song In the Field of Hopes for the visiting president.

Leena and her fellow students have been practicing singing in Chinese for two weeks under the instruction of a Chinese teacher. “The language is fascinating. I’m always interested in the Chinese characters,” said the bi-lingual Leena, who can speak Spanish, too.

“It’s cool to learn a third language that is so different,” she said, adding that she was considering learning Chinese in college.

Among the singers are five Chinese students who came from the Affiliated High School of the Fuzhou Institute of Education.

Their school signed a memorandum of understanding with Lincoln in 2008 to promote faculty, student, cultural and sports exchanges. Since then, professional exchanges have been made by teachers of the Chinese school and Lincoln, as well as officials of the Tacoma school district.

But it will be the first time that Fuzhou students have visited Lincoln. “Each of the five Chinese students is paired with a US counterpart so they can learn from each other,” said Zeng Shuhuang, principal of the Fuzhou school. She said the two sides were confident that exchanges between the schools would be strengthened.

Kameron, who plays right offensive tackle for Lincoln’s football team, was quite excited when learning that his school and the Fuzhou school might step up exchanges in sports.

“The people who don’t know football think the sport is violent, but in fact it can bound people who play and the people you play against,” he said. “In football you don’t fight for yourself, you fight for your brothers.”

Diote Simon, also a football player, agreed that football taught him about life. “It [sports exchanges between the two schools] will be a good experience for our guys and also good for the Chinese guys,” he said.

“If I get to be an exchange student in China, I’d love to learn how to play ping pong,” said Kameron. “It’s fun to watch but I just don’t know how they curve it.”

The two proud youngsters said 50 players of their team will put on a drill for the visiting president. They have also prepared a special gift for their guest. “It’s going to be personal and American,” they said. “And it’s a secret.”

liazhu@chinadailyusa.com lindadeng@chinadailyusa.com