A foreign face with a local soul

Driven by her passion for providing quality healthcare, a Latvian woman has won over the hearts of the elderly residing in the nursing home she oversees, Cao Chen reports in Shanghai.

It is incredibly rare to find a Caucasian woman working as the director of a nursing home in Shanghai. But the fact that Anastasija Puzankova can even converse in Liantang, a Chinese dialect spoken only by residents in a small town in southwestern Shanghai, makes her one of a kind.

As the director of the Jiufeng nursing home in Liantang, Qingpu district, the Latvian's main responsibilities include supervising the nursing staff, attending internal training and overseeing administration.

Seeing as she can communicate fluently with her colleagues in Mandarin, there was no need for her to even pick up the dialect. But driven by the desire to understand her residents better, she spent a year learning the dialect.