Students, professors, and friends, good morning to you all

As Dean of School of Foreign Languages, Shenyang Normal University, I feel so happy and proud to say hello to you, and welcome you back “home” after a long and twilight struggle to know who you are and what you want to do in the years to come. So this is not only a welcoming ceremony, but a family reunion, not a celebration of personal success, but a time to thank our parents, our teachers, and our dreams, and also a ritual to realize our grand mission to cultivate the best young people with advanced knowledge of foreign languages and well-trained abilities to use them, and with a great love for our land, our people, and our nation.

Since the day you came here with your tearful parents and lofty hopes, we have felt that we were part of you before you are part of us, and we have been waiting for you, the new students, so long, almost 58 years, and also we have developed a confidence that you will become our pride in building our School into a leading institution of higher learning with our joint and redoubled efforts. And yet, we fully understand that all this cannot be done without the support of your aging parents who would enjoy bitter hardship in order to sweeten your future, and all this cannot be done without the hard work and professional devotion of your teachers from the primary school to the high school, and all this cannot be done without our academic and ethical encouragement to help you help yourselves in the coming four years. Maybe this grand mission might be too difficult for us to fulfill within the given time, but let us begin today.

Students and teachers, it is getting a little bit noisy outside, but it is quiet, warm, and clean here. As the famous American writer Ernest Hemingway says, everybody in the world is longing for a quiet and clean place for his soul. That is probably the reason why we are all here in Shenyang Normal University, because it is a cradle of dreams and dreamers.

Thank you.