ALUMNI
Pursuing the American Dream Shixuan Meng ’08 finds success a world away from home.
Meng in his junior year of high school at MMA in 2006
Trailblazing is just part of the package at Missouri Military Academy. For Shixuan Meng, it was the impetus to join the corps of cadets at the age of 16. The experience, he says, allowed him to pursue the American Dream. Meng was the first cadet from China to attend MMA. Born in Hunan, he grew up in Shenzhen, a city that has ridden the technology wave in China, growing from a population of 30,000 to 22 million in the past 40 years. His parents — an educator and an advertising businessman — have enjoyed professional success in Shenzhen and teenage Meng was looking to follow their path. “I was never willing to settle,” Meng says, “always looking for improvements, challenges and more opportunities. My aunt, who lived in the United States, found MMA for me. We all thought this was the perfect school to accelerate my future and help me to achieve my goal.” He recalls his surprise upon arriving in the Midwest; it was not at all as he’d pictured.
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The Eagle
Miguel Hernández ’84, Paul Petit ’85 and Meng on MMA’s campus during summer 2021
“I had the idea that America was made up of huge cities like New York and San Francisco on the coasts with a great expanse of barren desert, like Nevada, in the middle because I’d seen movies about the American West,” he says. “But when I arrived in Nashville, where my aunt lives, I saw this green landscape with trees and mountains and I realized it was very different from what I expected. I’d never been in a rural area such as Mexico, Missouri. I didn’t really know what I was signing up for
before I got to MMA. As we traveled through the country and told people we met that I was on my way to attend a military academy, they were impressed.” He found a welcoming atmosphere at MMA. “The cadets were super friendly, very hospitable,” he recalls. “There was this feeling of belonging to the MMA family.” As a member of the MMA International Color Guard, Meng carried the Chinese
