Written by Cara Guglielmon
Tall and lanky with spiky hair and an aura of confidence, freshman Xiang Ru “Mark” Nie motions to his cell phone as it blinks and vibrates on the Heritage lobby table.
“It’s a guy from Africa,” he says as he brings the phone to his ear. “I don’t know if I can understand him.”
A few minutes after the phone call ends, two freshmen — one Asian, the other a blonde American — greet Mark from down the hallway, exchanging pats on the back, “hey man”s and small talk about ice cream and girls. They move on, and soon another freshman recognizes Mark and detours through the lobby to say hi.
“I only talked to him once, but I remember him,” Nie says after the student leaves. “He’s very interested in Chinese history; I was very impressed.
With the constant flux of friends of different ethnicities and origins and his genial interaction with them, Nie seems the epitome of a caring, charismatic individual comfortable in his culture and surroundings.
But he wasn’t always this way.
Only a few days earlier, Nie had sat in a close circle of Chinese Christians and told them about becoming a Christian.
It was this change in beliefs and the physical journey that brought him to it that created the people-oriented Nie, the caring Nie, the cultural boundary-defying Nie. The Nie from three years ago lived much more inside of — and for — himself.
Now a freshman at Harding from Chang Sha, China, Nie began his journey toward love, Christianity and caring interaction as a wayward Chinese high school student whose parents saw sending him to America as the only way to change his life’s direction.
“After I got into high school, I started to make some bad friends, … and my parents were really worried about that,” he said. “Instead of seeing me fail my life, my education, they sent me to America, … and hoped I could get a better education here.”
Despite not participating in the daily drinking, smoking or fighting of his newfound friends, Nie said he lost motivation to study (as he initially came to these friends as an escape from declining grades) and found it difficult to pry himself from this crowd.
Yet, he said he saw the benefit of his parent’s decision.
“I thought it would be a new start,” he said. “I thought there would be a chance I could do well in [the United States].”
And so came the trip to America. At 15 years, 11 months old, Nie flew to Bowling Green, Ky., to live with an American host family: Charlie and Carol Burt. It just happened that Charlie was an alumnus of Harding.
Moving into the Burt house wasn’t only moving into another culture; it was also moving into another worldview. Charlie and Carol Burt were Christians — adherents to a religion and way of thinking Nie said is foreign to most of China. With a population of more than 1.3 billion, about 5 percent profess to be Christians. That leaves 95 percent of the country that profess different religions, including Buddhism, Islam, Taoism and no religion — or Atheism.
Nie said that years ago, the Communist Party was much more strict regarding religions.
“You could not even mention ‘God,’ — this word,” he said. “You could get in trouble, … [or] go to jail.”
With the advent of the Beijing Olympics, Nie said he sees more openness to religion in China. Many missionaries, he said, passed out Bibles and were not stopped by anyone. Some places even printed Bibles with the Olympic symbol on the cover, signifying the union between the Beijing Olympics and the Bible, Nie said.
Though conversation about God may now be more accepted in China, most people do not adhere to Christianity and “some will think you are crazy,” Nie said.
“They think Christianity is stupid, because they don’t believe in God,” he said. “Chinese people think the religion … is nice, because [those people] have faith. They think that faith can guide people in the right direction. They think that at least [Christianity] is good for the nation.”
Yet Nie said many people don’t want to share their religion because they want to avoid trouble.
“It’s better not to talk about [your religion] in the Communist Party, especially if you find a job inside the government,” he said. “What they say is, ‘Be smart.’ … If your boss is an Atheist and he finds out you are a Christian, he could treat you badly.”
Coming from this view of Christianity, Nie said he did not at first understand his host parent’s beliefs.
“After I came here, when people tried to show me there’s a God and He loves me so much, I just thought it was very stupid and I didn’t believe it,” he said.
Nie said much of his unbelief came from the foundational teaching of Darwinism and evolution he had received since kindergarten age in the Chinese school system. He said before the students had mastered their own language, teachers were showing them pictures of humans and monkeys, emphasizing the physical similarities and teaching, “we came from the monkey.”
“I was an atheist, pretty much, before I came here,” he said. “And that’s what most people believe in China.
But with a background in boarding middle school of feeling like he didn’t fit in with the “spoiled kids” who were different ages than him (he skipped a grade), and with residual feelings of failure from his previous years in high school, Nie said he was surprised when good things started happening to him.
Xiang Ru “Mark” Nie
“As I found out, more and more good things happened in my life and I didn’t do anything for [them to happen],” he said. “So that made me start thinking, ‘What is the goal of the real life?'”
With these thoughts, he plunged into research, but from a starting point many Americans would not expect: books written by Christian scientists who presented the evidence for God’s existence.
“They prove that there must be a God,” Nie said. “They prove that truth [in] a scientific way. That evidence is really powerful.”
Nie said armed with this evidence, he was ready to believe in a God and started reading the Bible.
“In the beginning, I accepted God, but I didn’t accept Jesus,” he said. “Because I thought there was still a chance He’s just pretending or He’s a magic person. It takes a while, and at that time it was still pretty confusing.”
Nie did eventually accept Jesus as well as God. At a piano competition with his high school, Nie joined a Bible study with some of the guys that night, and there decided he wanted to get baptized. Upon his return home, his host dad, Charlie Burt, baptized him at 10:30 on a Wednesday night.
“To my surprise, my host mom was so happy, she just started crying,” Nie said. “And she called a lot of people and a lot of people came.”
He said the amount of attendees surprised him, because he thought “that [10:30] was a bad time for Americans.”
Nie’s parents had differing responses to his new beliefs: he says his non-religious dad started reading the Bible, while his Buddhist-believing mom was not “against it and doesn’t encourage it.”
Then came conflict. His parents, who shared values similar to other Chinese parents, wanted him to go to a prestigious American college.
“Chinese parents always expect their kids to get the first place in the class, [to] go to the top school in the nation,” Nie said. “I agreed then, because I thought I could get a really good-paying job so I could get whatever I wanted — a car, a house.”
Nie’s parents had arranged everything — signed papers, chosen a school — for Nie to move from Kentucky to Chicago and attend high school there, eventually attending a prestigious university in the city. All that remained was to buy a plane ticket and make the trip.
But, in the process of looking for a high school more challenging than his seven-student class one in Bowling Green, Carol Burt had driven him to Harding Academy and he set his sites on finishing school there. His parents were not very happy about that.
“[They said], ‘If Arkansas is your choice, you are not our son anymore and at the same time we will stop all financial support,'” Nie said.
Nie and his host parents started to pray about the situation, and four days later, Nie’s parents called him and recanted their earlier words. They would support him whatever his decision, saying he was the only son they had and was old enough to make his own decisions.
“I was surprised,” Nie said. “Good things don’t happen by chance. That’s my opinion. When you are gambling, you can’t win every time unless you cheat.”
Nie said further evidence of a force — not chance — at work in his life surfaced when he was able to renew his visa in record time and with the minimum expense. While one of his friends tried to do this for two and a half years with a lawyer and others yet failed, and another of his friends spent more than $7,000 on a lawyer to secure a visa upgrade, Nie renewed his visa, with his host mom’s help, in only 41 days and for the minimum required fee of $295.
“I didn’t think I could do this part that easy,” he said.
Nie said he sees a difference between his life before and his life after he became a Christian, with his focus shifting from material things to spiritual things, such as helping people.
“I cried twice in two years,” he said. “The one time, I was too stressed. I called my mom and … cried on the phone. And the second time I cried about the earthquake in China. I feel like what I care about more is the people. This would never happen if I [were] not a Christian. I have started loving people more and caring about people’s feelings.”
With his new beliefs, Nie said he views his fellow Chinese with a different perspective than before.
“People in China, most of them, they need somebody to tell them how wrong … evolution is,” he said. “They just don’t have the chance to learn [about] Christianity. I just think there’s nobody [who’s] ever asked them, ‘Do you think [the] Big Bang created everything?’ But if someone would tell them, they will start to think about it.”
Nie said he also hopes someday his family will share his beliefs, but believes his dad “needs time.”
With a Christian life being “a goal set up” to reach and a hope that these beliefs will help him “not … do any wrong things,” Nie said he plans to finish his bachelor’s degree (possibly in engineering) and pursue a master’s degree, scope out the job market in America and someday to return to China. One of his goals is to volunteer as an English teacher in China for poorer children.
To be honest, I [haven’t spent] that much time thinking about how to stay closer to God, so far,” he said. “But what I want to do is help more people know about God. I want to s tart it from the Chinese freshman, because they haven’t heard it. I think it would be good for somebody to tell the Chinese what Christianity looks like in Chinese. I will do my best. I feel pretty confident I can do it.”
