On mother's orders

Career quest puts young angolan on plane for China

"You're going to study in China and get a better job back home after you graduate," Angelina Dodissea Alberto Gomes, an Angolan, says in Chinese. The words represent the great expectations her mother had of her before Gomes traveled to China.

"A person with a diploma from a Chinese university is most welcome in the Angolan labor market," she says in halting Chinese.

A year ago, Gomes, 27, traveled to Guangzhou in South China to learn Chinese, hoping that that would help her job prospects back home.

Now a student of the College of Chinese Language and Culture of Jinan University, she plans to stay in the country for five years.

Angola has enjoyed double-digit economic growth in recent years and has attracted a great deal of foreign investment, including from China, which goes mainly into building infrastructure such as roads, railways and bridges.

"Angolan employers sometimes ask job candidates whether they speak good Chinese, Gomes says. "That's why I'm here."

She worked in her brother's company for six years after she graduated from a vocational high school at which she studied mechanical engineering.

Her life in China was financed by her widowed mother, a doctor, who raised her nine children on her own.

"Studying and living in China are relatively cheap, except for taxi fares," Gomes says.

She spends about 2,000 yuan ($320) a month in Guangdong, she says.

In addition to her living costs, Gomes, who failed to get a government scholarship, for which there is fierce competition, has to pay 9,000 yuan in tuition fees each academic year.

At Jinan University there are about 3,800 foreign students from 92 countries, of whom 73 from Africa and three from Angola. Scores of Angolans are studying in other Chinese cities, too.

Gomes says she feels at home in China. She uses WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, to communicate with teachers and classmates, and she has a Cantonese friend named Zhang Xin.

"I teach her Portuguese and she teaches me Chinese," she says, in a Cantonese accent.

In her spare time she reads books, surfs on the Internet, chats with friends and goes shopping like many Chinese youngsters.

She usually has her hair and nails done in a community in an area that is home to many Africans living in Guangzhou.

Almost 70 percent or 80 percent of the residents are from Africa, says Chen Xiaobing, a local.

African shops, beauty salons and restaurants are packed in rows around Xiaobei Road, Yuexiu district, and African nationals, some in traditional attire and some in T-shirts and jeans, are seen everywhere in the neighborhood.

According to unofficial estimates, about 50,000 Africans lived temporarily or permanently at any given time in Guangzhou.

Despite being homesick sometimes, Gomes says she has got used to living in China. In Guangzhou, summer is hot and it rains a lot, climate similar to that of Angola, she says.

(China Daily Africa Weekly 05/09/2014 page28)