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Author Rose Lu visits local schools

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Debut author and also software developer, Rose Lu, visited three Hastings schools recently to talk about her new book 'All who live on Islands' and her career in software programming.

'All who live on Islands' is a collection of essays about growing up in New Zealand as a kiwi kid from an immigrant background. Rose came to New Zealand from China at the age of five with her parents, and so began her journey as a Chinese-kiwi caught up between two very different worlds.

Rose shared with Year 11 and Year 13 classes at Karamu High School that her parents wanted her to study something that was more likely to give her a good living, hence her Mechatronics engineering degree, but that english had always been her favourite subject at school. She talked about exploring ideas in essay form and read a segment from her book about shopping with her grandparents and how she used the principal of ‘show, don’t tell’ to describe her grandparents’ characters and physical slowness.

While visiting Havelock North Intermediate School, Rose explained how her interest in language – whether in Chinese, English, or the software programming language 'Ruby', helps her to write programmes for things like commands that work a wheelchair, to software for electricity use on the domestic market. The students asked lots of questions about different programming languages and robotics.

At Hastings Girls’ High School two classes were studying a series of texts on the theme of racism, so Rose talked more about her family’s experiences moving to New Zealand and adjusting to the expectations of a different culture. She talked about the differences between living in a city like Auckland, which has a large Asian community and Whanganui which doesn’t. One of the teachers said, "The girls got so much out of it and Rose's story really struck a nerve with some of our immigrant students in particular".

 

 

 

 

27 February 2020

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