Lisa Lin's oversized smile can lift the mood of a room.
"That is one lovely girl," said a grownup passing Lisa in a hallway Tuesday morning at Thrasher Elementary School on Signal Mountain.
Mark KennedyView other columns by Mark Kennedy
On Saturday, Lisa, a fifth-grader at Thrasher, won the Times Free Press-sponsored regional spelling bee. She aced words such as "perestroika" (a period of Russian revival), "shrieval" (relating to a sheriff), "Weimaraner" (a dog breed), and "sarsaparilla" (a carbonated beverage).
Even though English is Lisa's second language, spelling comes easy for her, she says, which was evident as she topped more than 65 competitors at the Roland Hayes Concert Hall at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
"I noticed in third grade that I didn't have to study much for spelling tests," said the 11-year-old, whose parents are Chinese immigrants. "If a word looked right to me, it usually was."
In late May, Lisa will travel to Washington, D.C., to represent Chattanooga in the Scripps National Spelling Bee,
and the city couldn't ask for a more virtuous ambassador.
"I'm kind of excited and kind of nervous," she said during an interview Tuesday. "[Winning] made me happy inside. But I have to remember I am not above anyone. It's just a spelling bee."
Many Signal Mountain residents know Lisa as the little girl at the Fortune House restaurant near Pruett's Market. She and her brother, Jeffery, a 12-year old sixth-grader at Signal Mountain Middle School, have been fixtures at the family operated eatery for years.
They can often be seen there doing homework in one of the restaurant booths or helping out their parents, Wei and Jin Lin, who are originally from the Fujian province in southeastern China.
While Lisa was born in Chattanooga, she spent time in both New York and China as an infant while her parents got their business here established.
Before she started school at Thrasher, one of the then-kindergarten teachers there, Heidi Griswold, volunteered to stop by the restaurant a couple of days a week to help Lisa learn a few English words.
Griswold, who says she teared up Sunday when she saw Lisa's photo in the newspaper, remembers little Lisa would be at the door of the restaurant with her nose pressed against the glass when she drove up.
"She was always smiling and always happy to see me," Griswold says. "She was in my kindergarten class the next year and she always excelled at everything.
"That girl will be whatever she wants to be. ... It's such an inspiring story."
Now, five years later, Lisa says she has read "probably thousands" of books, including every children's book in the Signal Mountain library. She daydreams about one day becoming a doctor - perhaps a surgeon.
Near term, though, she just wants to get to the national bee and spell at least one word correctly. Several hundred children are invited to Washington each year, but only about 50 make it past a pre-test there to actually participate in the stand-up competition.
When Lisa took the stage at UTC on Saturday she said "I was sure I wouldn't win."
Yet, every time she walked to the microphone, she listened carefully to the word and pretended to scribble it on her hand. And every time, she was correct; even when the officials dove randomly into the dictionary to find "moldier" - not the hardest word of the day, perhaps, but the decisive one.
Unfortunately, Lisa's parents could not leave the restaurant to see her compete, but she immediately called them after the bee on her cousin's cellphone.
She wanted to display her huge trophy in the family restaurant, but decided, on the advice of her parents, to instead put it in her bedroom.
So, here's to little Lisa, our hometown spelling hero.
Let's all wish her luck, and lift a glass of sarsaparilla to a successful trip.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.