Jackson He's adventure as a foreign exchange student started ordinarily enough.
A native of Shaoguan, China, a city in the Guangdong Province about 175 miles north of Hong Kong in the south of China, he was sent by his parents to San Diego, where the plan was to have him spend a year finishing high school and then attend an American university. It likely would have worked out like that, too, if not for a chance encounter with a parent on campus shortly after his arrival.
"They just came up to me, like, 'Hey, you're pretty big, man, you look like a football player,'" He recalled.