A typical weekend for senior Kevin Wei includes watching TV shows, shopping, and listening to music, but he also cuts out time to pay utility bills, buy groceries, clean his house, and practice English. Wei, who moved to Piedmont three years ago from China, takes care of himself and lives independently in a four-bedroom house.

“I guess everything is on my own,” said Wei, who once impersonated his father to purchase his cell phone. Wei laughed after he explained that he lived illegally for three years, since he was living alone under-aged.

And no, Wei does not throw dance parties in his house every weekend. Not when he is the only one who will clean up the mess, he said. The inside of Wei’s house is spotless, except for the six-person dinner table he has converted into a full time work station.

Wei’s parents brought him to Piedmont after he graduated middle school in his hometown of Chengdu in southern China. His parents’ wanted to remove Wei from the stress of Chinese high school, where a two day long National College Entrance Exam determines whether or not a student will be accepted into college. Low test scores on the exam have been a cause of suicide for teenagers in China, and Wei himself felt the pressure during his middle school standardized testing.

“It was pretty stressful, and I was just studying for like 3 months, every day just having tests and quizzes over and over again,” Wei said.

Based on a recommendation from an old friend whose daughter graduated from PHS, Wei’s parents moved him into a house located less than ten minutes walking from school. They stayed with Wei for the first week of school and then left him in care of the friend, now acting as Wei’s guardian, who checks in on him twice a week.

Wei has experienced polar opposites between his life in China and his current lifestyle. Back home, he lived with his mom, dad, and a housekeeper who took care of all his needs.

“My job was to study and that’s it,” Wei said. “When I was hungry, I’d ask my housekeeper, ‘can you cook me noodles?’ And she would cook me noodles.”

He was also constantly monitored by his parents and teachers to do his homework.

Now, Wei visits the grocery store once every two to three days. He cannot drive, so he makes the 15 minute trek on foot to the Grand Avenue Safeway, where he buys and lugs back his ingredients for American style dinners. On weekends, his guardian, a family friend who lives in Dublin, takes Wei to the Ranch 99 in Richmond, where he can purchase some of the foods that he is familiar with from home including daikon, a radish-like vegetable that is a key ingredient in Wei’s favorite whole-chicken soup.

On a typical day, Wei will spend two hours preparing, cooking, eating, and cleaning up his dinner. He says his biggest challenge is cooking portions for one person.

“It’s so hard!” Wei exclaimed while mimicking the motion of stir frying on an oversized wok, then pouring the food into a palm-sized rice bowl.

During crunch time for tests, Wei resorts to ordering out.

“Sometimes it takes like 3 hours to cook good Chinese food,” said Wei, who sometimes boils his prized soup for more than 12 hours. “You can’t do that every day, right?”

Wei studies hard, and he spends much of the time looking up words in his translator, or understanding his class notes. Wei came to Piedmont with “Mandarin 3 level speaking”. On his first day of school freshman year, Wei sat through an hour and a half of physical science, but he might as well have been plugged into headphones the entire time.

“I didn’t understand any words, not even single words,” he said. “I got home, and I was pretty upset. I was just like ‘Oh Gosh!’”

Wei struggled especially in modern world history, where he spent 3 hours every night reading the textbook just to stay on pace with the class. When reading, Wei must first translate the English to Mandarin in his head which slows his reading speed.

Still, Wei has never been one to take the easy path, as Coach Humphries would say. Wei worked with a tutor his first two years of school, but told the tutor to stop coming because he felt he was relying too heavily on the tutor’s translations.

“It’s really hard at first, but it gets better,” Wei said. “You push yourself to take notes and read a lot of things.”

Wei’s friend, senior Charlie Newcomb, said Wei has brought his hard working habits from school in China, where Wei would attend school for extended hours.

“They just got so much work done there,” Newcomb said. “It kind of shows—he’s really diligent about his work, and he really works hard.”

Even without the pressure from back home, where teachers would text student’s parents for missing homework, Wei rarely exercises his complete freedom in his studies. The most he will loosen up on is his organization.

“Sometimes, if I don’t feel like organizing my books, I will just scatter them on the ground,” he said.

Piedmont, population 11,000, is also a speck compared to Chengdu’s population of 14 million (almost twice the size of New York City). Wei misses the night life back home, where he would stay out with friends singing karaoke until 2 or 3 am, compared to the Bay Area, where most shops close at six or seven.

However, when he does go shopping with friends, Wei is seen as fashion connoisseur of the group.

“[His style] is preppy underground,” senior friend Matty Specht said. “He goes to a whole bunch of typically preppy stores like Express or Nordstrom, but he takes the stuff that is going to be in style in 3 months.”

Specht met Wei in freshman English, though he did not talk to Wei until they started eating lunch together at the end of the year. Wei told Specht freshman year that he could not write an essay because of all the missing holes in his vocabulary, and though Wei has improved much of his English on his own, Specht has been there to help.

“He’d say something that didn’t sound right and I’d correct him and teach him now and then,” Specht said.

Specht said Wei does not talk much, but is very sarcastic and jokingly blunt when he speaks, which is compatible with Specht’s own sarcastic personality.

“He’s come up to me and said, ‘your shoes don’t match your outfit,” Specht recalled with a chuckle.

Specht responded with, “Kevin, you need to get your hair cut right now.”

Wei’s childhood friends are already in college—high school in China is only 3 years—but he still communicates with them regularly through the Chinese version of Facebook. Making friends in Piedmont is difficult for him. Wei experiences a cultural gap that has not yet been bridged even after his three-year stay in America.

“I don’t think I have the closest friends here,” Wei said. “Because we come from different cultures, maybe sometimes we will talk about the same things, but we don’t have the same habits or think the same way.”

Wei calls it lacking “gong ming” in Chinese, which in English, translates to identifying with others.

Though Wei is alone for the majority of the day, he said he is kept busy and does not feel lonely except for the occasional pang of homesickness.

Wei’s mother encourages him to call home whenever he is lonely, but he said he only feels lonely about once a year, for 10 minutes, he said. He talks to his parents every weekend and they visit him three times a year in Piedmont.

Like any other senior, Kevin is working on college apps and is still finding his way in the admissions process. Wei asked Specht what the Common App was in early September, and Specht had to break down the concept of applying to multiple schools at once.

Wei’s parents want him to attend UC Berkeley but he said there is no chance because of the UC budget cuts. After college, Wei does not know if he will settle down here or make his way back home.

“Can you believe that?” Wei asked. “I’ve already lived in America for three years.”

Next time you see Kevin, you can make him feel a little bit more at home by calling him by his real name, Xing Ran (pronounced Shing Rawn).