“Learn with an open mind; Serve a great cause” - this is the motto that guides the Beijing Foreign Studies University in the Chinese capital. The higher education institution, founded in 1941, today teaches 101 foreign languages, including courses in European, Asian and African languages. Since 1961, the university has also offered a bachelor's program Bulgarian Studies at the Faculty of European Languages and Culture and for 13 years now, Lyuba Atanasova from Blagoevgrad has been a lecturer there. How did Dr. Atanasova choose to teach in China? "Actually, I didn't choose China. China chose me," she tells the Bulgarian National Radio correspondent in Veliko Tarnovo, Zdravka Maslyankova. She says that her personal story and experience can serve as an example of how our plans and ideas about the way we would arrange our future very often change completely.

"At the moment I turned 40, I had just defended my doctoral dissertation at the Southwestern University Neofit Rilski in Blagoevgrad and at that time I got divorced and acquired an inner feeling that this was the moment when I absolutely had to make some general change in my life. I had the idea of teaching Bulgarian language, literature and culture abroad at a foreign university. My first wish was for this place to be Belgrade, Serbia. 12 years ago, my colleagues who had indicated as their first wish the lecturership in Belgrade had an advantage over me as I was the youngest of all and with a doctoral degree. When I went to the oral interview, the then chairman of the committee said that they were very impressed with my resume and had two other suggestions for me - to go to Delhi, India or to Beijing, China."

So, the wheel of fate turned and Dr. Lyuba Atanasova had to immediately decide how to continue her story. She shrugged her shoulders and answered without hesitation: "Okay, let it be Beijing!" A few months later she arrived in China and despite the different culture and habits, she felt at home from the very first day she set foot on Chinese soil.

"On the way from the airport in Beijing to the Beijing Foreign Studies University, I said to the student who met me at the airport that Beijing was surprisingly similar to Sofia. To this day I feel that way and I call Beijing my second home city," the Bulgarian scholar says.

Quickly adapting to the way of life and order in Beijing, Dr. Lyuba Atanasova also discovered another positive side to her work. Without hesitation, she says that teaching Chinese students is a much easier task than teaching in her own homeland.

"The Chinese students are extremely motivated, disciplined and purposeful. The teacher here is respected in exactly the same way as in Bulgaria during the National Revival and especially after the 1840s. There is an element of huge respect."

24 students graduated this year from the bachelor's program in Bulgarian language and literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University. There were 16 second-year students last year and four chose Bulgarian as an additional credit in their master's programs. Thus, a total of 44 students are studying reading and writing in Bulgarian thousands of kilometers away from the country. "China has changed me a lot as a person," Lyuba says.

"By nature I am very energetic and I want things to happen very quickly. I am impatient in certain situations,” she says with a smile. “However, here I somehow learned a kind of humility and I have partly absorbed their idea of harmony. I feel great here and my work with Chinese students is extremely satisfying," says a contemporary Bulgarian lecturer in China.

Compiled by: Vesela Krasteva

Publication in English: Al. Markov

Photos: BNR, Zdravka Maslyankova, Facebook/ Ljuba Atanasova