by Yang Shilong, Vivien Liu
NEW YORK, Sept. 23 (Xinhua) -- Russell Craig Targove can start singing a Chinese song in New York and expect people around him to join in.
Nearly three decades ago and thousands of miles away in Serbia, Sanja Vasic encountered Chinese culture for the first time when a high school teacher wrote Chinese characters on a blackboard.
For both, seemingly casual encounters developed into lasting connections with China.
MUSIC OPENS A DOOR
In the early 1990s, Targove, a New York entertainer, began hosting karaoke nights at a Chinese restaurant owned by a businessman from China's Hong Kong. He soon started learning Chinese pop songs, marking the start of a decades-long connection with New York's Chinese community.
The Chinese songs opened a door beyond music. Through performances at community events and weddings, he became familiar with traditions ranging from tea ceremonies to wedding toasts.
One song that stayed with him was "The Moon Represents My Heart."
"Everybody knows it," he said. "I can start it, and then everybody joins me."
For Targove, music can create connections even when listeners do not share the same language.
"It's a beautiful thing to see people respect each other's culture," he said. "I am always an advocate for bringing those cultures together."
Chinese music has also reached broader audiences at major New York cultural venues, including Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. Performances there have featured traditional instruments such as the erhu, pipa and guzheng.
At an August discussion hosted by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations on the growing visibility of Chinese cultural influence in the United States, Michael Berry, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, said cultural influence does not necessarily follow a single, top-down path.
"The way it manifests is sometimes unpredictable," Berry said.
"When you touch something that maybe reminds you of your parents -- 'Oh, my father used to love this song' -- it has a bridge," Targove said.
FROM LANGUAGE TO LIVED EXPERIENCE
For Vasic, born in Serbia and now a U.S. citizen, language was the doorway.
As a high school student in Serbia, she watched her English teacher write Chinese characters on the blackboard.
"Something clicked in me," she recalled in a recent interview with Xinhua. "I said, although I don't understand it, I'm going to learn it. I'm going to understand it."
Learning the language led her deeper into Chinese history and philosophy, including Confucian thought and Taoism.
"I think it became an integral part of who I am," she said.
Vasic also traveled extensively across China. Looking back, she said one of the most fascinating aspects of the country was "how it balanced between modernization and continuity."
When she first arrived in 1998, she remembers streets filled with bicycles and small private businesses alongside state-run stores. Mobile phones and digital technology had yet to become fixtures of everyday life.
"The most impressive thing is the transformation, and the scale and the speed," she said.
More recent American visitors have encountered that transformation from a different starting point.
Before New York photographer Delaney Masal first traveled to China, she expected the country she had long seen portrayed in American headlines -- crowded, less developed and unwelcoming.
Instead, the experience "floored" her.
Traveling through east China's Zhejiang Province, Masal was surprised by the scale and bustle of Hangzhou and later by the coexistence of advanced technology with centuries-old towns and landscapes.
Joshua Cuppek, another first-time American visitor, arrived with a different expectation.
"I'd always imagined China would be busy and fast-paced, but everything about it -- the culture, the landscapes -- was calming, almost meditative in its own way," he said.
Such firsthand encounters have become more common as China has expanded visa-free travel. In the first half of 2026, foreign nationals made 17.82 million visa-free entries into China, up 30.6 percent year on year, according to China's National Immigration Administration.
For Vasic, such direct exposure matters.
Learning Chinese, she said, "really enriches your life in ways that people cannot imagine" and "really opens your eyes to the rest of the world."
A DIFFERENT IMAGE OF MODERN CHINA
Technology has created another point of contact.
Speaking at the same National Committee discussion, Shaoyu Yuan, a visiting assistant professor at New York University's Center for Global Affairs, said some young Americans are paying attention to aspects of everyday life in China that received relatively little attention in the United States in the past.
"Everything is about how fast the public transport is, how clean it is, and how developed the electric vehicles are, the mobile payments, the robotics. And China in that case becomes a comparison point," Yuan said.
Vasic has watched another part of that transformation over nearly three decades: Chinese companies moving from producing goods designed elsewhere toward developing their own technologies and products.
That change is also registering in American public opinion. Electric vehicles, batteries, drones, robotics, mobile payments and high-speed rail have become not only technology stories but also windows through which some Americans encounter contemporary China.
A 2026 survey by the Committee of 100 and NORC at the University of Chicago found that 59 percent of Americans favored increased cooperation between the United States and China.
For Vasic, the value of encountering another culture is ultimately more personal.
"We may all speak different languages. We may all have different cultures and different backgrounds," she said. "But we all care for the same things, like our family, our children, our meaningful job, health and hope for a better future."
"I fell in love with the language and the culture, and I never regretted the decision," she said. "I'm still learning."
