A journey to China, rooted in friendship and collaboration

By Ana Winston ’21

It was March of 2020 — the thick of the early COVID-19 pandemic — when Mr. Christian Mariano, assistant principal of Regis High School, reached out to Dominican Academy principal Dr. Leslie Poole Petit to make a surprising offer: a chance for D.A. students to go on an exchange trip to China.

That year, Regis had planned on visiting Nanjing Foreign Language School (NFLS), a premier foreign language high school in the Jiangsu Province of China. The idea was proposed by Regis alumnus Tom Moebus (Regis ’65) and his colleague from Beijing, Wei Lin. Since the trip abroad was left in the limbo caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the group was forced to adapt and organize a virtual exchange; in a meeting, a teacher from NFLS proposed inviting a girl’s school from New York to complement NFLS’ coeducational student body. The result? Dominican Academy was invited to join what is now known as the Ricci-Guangqi Young Scholars program.

The Ricci-Guanqi Young Scholars Program, also known simply as the Ricci Program, was named after Matteo Ricci and Xu Guangqi. Ricci was an Italian Jesuit who traveled to China and was the first European allowed into Beijing’s Forbidden City in the seventeenth century. He learned Chinese and adapted to local customs while translating texts from Italian to Chinese. Xu Guangqi was one of the friends Ricci made in China, who translated alongside Ricci and even ended up converting to Catholicism. Their friendship and collaboration amounted to a historic intellectual exchange between China and the West. This sharing of thought and culture is what the Ricci Program is modeled after.

Four years in the making

I had just started out my junior year when the Ricci-Guangqi Program was announced to my Mandarin II class by our Mandarin teacher, Ms. Ling Chen, and Dr. Petit. We were told that the program would be a chance to collaborate with Chinese students more than 7,300 miles away and Regis students no more than 20 blocks away on projects that followed our interests. The offer was very appealing, especially because we were in the midst of Zoom classes. My classmates and I became part of the first Ricci cohort, embarking on an experience that would form us just as much as we formed the program.

The Ricci program’s first three years were entirely on Zoom: every other Saturday, at 8:00 a.m. EST and 8:00 p.m. CST, students from D.A., Regis and NFLS would log on to Zoom meetings facilitated by Dr. Petit, Mr. Mariano, Mr. Moebus and Ms. Wei. During each semester, students split into small groups that were each given a topic such as politics, social media and technology, and arts and culture. Each group was tasked with creating projects which were then presented to our school communities at the end of the semester.

During the first semester of the program, my group focused on social media and technology. We created a survey that garnered almost 600 responses and put together a presentation on our research into the differences in perceptions of privacy on social media between China and the United States. The end-of-semester showcases were a proud moment for the first Ricci scholars – we had successfully defined what the program’s mission was through our hard work and self-determination. Throughout our time in the program, my cohort of scholars continued on to work on preventing food waste at our respective school communities while also researching climate change and pollution in our environments. After we graduated, the program continued to expand and find its focus.

Taking flight

It wasn’t until the summer of 2024 that the program’s original dream of an exchange trip between the three schools was finally accomplished. After a year of biweekly Zoom meetings with their fellow scholars, the current cohort of American students were given the chance to meet their counterparts in China.

On June 22, 2024, three juniors and three seniors from D.A. embarked on the inaugural Ricci exchange trip to Nanjing, China. This fourth cohort, which also included 10 students from Regis High School, were accompanied by Dr. Petit, Mr. Mariano, Mr. Moebus and myself, thanks to a scholarship from the One Fund. After a flight from New York to Hong Kong and another connecting flight from Hong Kong to Shanghai, we were on our way to Nanjing to meet the scholars from NFLS.

Over the next two weeks, the Ricci scholars would experience a meticulously planned itinerary.. The program took place in Nanjing for the first week, where scholars attended prestigious lectures about architecture and art at Southeast University and the Nanjing Museum, led presentations showcasing their research at the Jiangsu Departments of Education and Transportation, raced dragon boats on Xuanwu Lake in the heart of the city and taught elementary school students for a day. After each day’s activities, the students went home to their warm and welcoming homestay families. The scholars performed songs and bonded at the first-ever in-person Ricci Music Night held at NFLS, and eventually said goodbye to Nanjing at the Ricci Family Dinner, where the food was prepared by the Ricci scholars themselves with the generous help and guidance of the Nanjing Institute for Tourism and Hospitality.

The Ricci Forum in Suzhou

The Ricci scholars then left Nanjing for Suzhou, where they had the opportunity to meet the director of the Suzhou Museum, listen to her lecture on the architecture of the museum and explore the museum grounds. Alongside their fellow Ricci scholars, D.A. students Kelly (D.A. ‘25) and Lizzi (D.A. ‘25) presented the museum’s director with their research into the naming of traditional Chinese gardens, which students had learned about in earlier meetings and also had the chance to visit in Suzhou. Later on, the students took a night tour of Suzhou on a river boat.

The scholars also spent a night at Kunshan Duke University (KDU), where the second edition of the Ricci Forum was held. The Ricci Forum, an effort led by Ricci scholars to create a space for unbiased discussion on the United States and China’s relationship, was first held last April at Regis as a debate, and was adapted to be a roundtable discussion featuring students from all three high schools and university students from KDU.

Shanghai and the home stretch

Finally, the scholars departed for Shanghai, where they were able to take a tour of the city and explore its similarities to New York City. In Shanghai, we were lucky to be joined by Ms. Chen, who taught Mandarin at the time that the Ricci program was introduced to D.A. Ms. Chen was involved with the program from its inception during her time at D.A., and was the teacher moderator of my own group when I was a student.

After morning runs on the Bund, scholars enjoyed the city of Shanghai and had the chance to pay homage to Xu Guangqi at his burial site, in front of Shanghai’s Saint Ignatius Cathedral. The students also visited the U.S.-China Business Council (USCBC) at Shanghai Tower, where students gave a presentation of their experiences on the trip and established a common mission with the USCBC of open collaboration and discussion between the scholars’ two countries.

By July 5, the scholars had lived through two action-packed weeks in China and made many lasting connections amongst themselves. Saying goodbye to the NFLS students was a sad moment, but the students comforted themselves knowing that they had built friendships that would span countries and last forever. Clearly, the first Ricci exchange trip had been a resounding success.

Lessons for life

It was a great privilege to be able to travel with the students as a Ricci alumna, especially thanks to the graciousness of the One Fund. The One Fund is a scholarship established by the SUNY-China 150 Students, Chinese students from Sichuan Province who traveled to New York in 2008 as a part of an academic exchange that was offered after a disastrous earthquake in the region. The One Fund repays the kindness offered to those students by helping American students like myself travel to China. It was an honor to have been presented with the scholarship during our trip by two of the SUNY-China 150 Scholars, who met us at the Suzhou Museum. The scholarship is intimately connected to the Ricci Program’s mission of collaboration between the United States and China, and it was life-changing to have been welcomed into the network of friendship and trust established by the One Fund. Even though I’ve graduated from the program, I still very much feel that I am a part of the Ricci community.

As someone who has been a part of the program since its inception, I have been proud to watch it grow from biweekly Zoom meetings to a full-fledged trip. When the program started, my fellow students and I helped the program find its mission and take its shape by expressing what we were interested in and how we wanted to approach creative projects. What we all agreed on was that we each wanted to learn more about each other’s culture. We worked hard at our projects, but also took time to talk to each other about our daily lives and our hopes for the future. Although the program has evolved since then, the desire to connect is the common thread between all of the cohorts. Watching the students in China connect with one another in-person and fulfilling the mission of the program was awe-inspiring, and I was struck by how vital efforts like the Ricci Program are to future generations.

The Ricci-Guangqi Young Scholars Program is only getting better at establishing connections between Nanjing Foreign Language School, Dominican Academy and Regis. It’s been a pleasure to witness the inception of what is sure to be a long-lasting connection between the three schools and the individual people that make up the school communities. It is a blessing that D.A. students are given such a precious opportunity for leadership and collaboration — I greatly look forward to helping the program expand.