From legacy to discovery

Samuel Jacob Griffith, 18, said he first chose to study Chinese in eighth grade for what he admitted was "a very teenage reason". When his school asked students to choose between Spanish and Chinese, he remembered thinking: "Everybody learns Spanish. I was like, I gotta be different. I gotta learn Chinese."

Now on his second visit to China, the student from central Iowa said what struck him most was not how foreign the country felt, but how quickly that sense of distance faded. "I came and I found the people are very kind, just like in America," he said. "Everybody is very kind there, everybody is very kind here."

For Griffith, that was the value of exchange. In the US, he said, much of what young people know about other countries comes secondhand — through films, the internet or political narratives. "There's no way to really know what goes on in daily life other than just going to the place and talking to people and seeing what goes on," he said. After visiting Peking University, he said he had even begun thinking about applying to study there for a semester in college.

That same sense of discovery was shared by 15-year-old Mavis Claire Duke, who came to China hoping to experience something entirely new. In Shijiazhuang, she said, the welcome from local students was immediate, while activities such as making Chinese knots and practicing martial arts offered more than cultural performance — they gave her, in her words, "a feel for what China is like".

Yet what stayed with her most was also the simplest realization. "It's cool to see that people are still people, and the relationships between people are still the same," she said. For Duke, that was why such exchanges mattered far beyond a single trip. "Young relationships are the future of our world," she said.

For Ava Grace Courtney, that realization took on a more reflective tone beneath the ginkgo tree, where students tied handwritten wish cards to the branches. On hers, she wrote about gratitude — for the chance to visit a country she described as beautiful, and to meet people whose kindness had left a deep impression. "It has really just opened my eyes," she said.

What moved her, she said, was not the disappearance of difference, but the possibility of connection across it. "Even though our cultures are not the same, at our core we are all people, and there's value and beauty in connecting with people even if they are a little bit different from yourself," she said. After visiting the Forbidden City and the Great Wall, she said she also came away with a stronger awareness of China's long history. "I felt very connected to people from a long time ago," she said.

For some students, the small cards hanging from the ginkgo branches became a place to express hopes that reached beyond the trip itself. For Lincoln Robert Fletchall, 17, a senior from Iowa on his first trip not only to China but also overseas, that meant writing a poem about peace between China and the US.

Fletchall said he hoped that the peace between the two countries would be "everlasting" and that "we can continue to move forward".

The trip, he added, had already widened his sense of the world. Beijing left one of the strongest impressions. "It was insane how large it is, and how much history there is," he said. Coming from a much younger country, he said he was struck by how visibly China's past remained present in everyday life.

Amid the larger discoveries, there were smaller ones too. "As a teenage boy, I like food a lot," he said with a laugh, adding that trying new dishes had become one of the most memorable parts of the visit.

For the Chinese students helping host the exchange, the ginkgo tree was more than part of the day's ceremony. It was a reminder that the friendship being celebrated had a history — and that it was now being carried forward by a new generation.