MCLC: confusion of being a Chinese student in the US

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: confusion of being a Chinese student in the US
***********************************************************

This was published a while ago, but I think it's interesting in presenting
a Chinese view of what Chinese students experience when they study abroad.

Kirk

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Source: The Atlantic (12/12/11):
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/clash-of-civilizat
ions-the-confusion-of-being-a-chinese-student-in-america/249787/?single_pag
e=true

Clash of Civilizations: The Confusion of Being a Chinese Student in America

The way Americans talk about China can often seem hostile, frustrating, or
altogether irreconcilable with the world as a newcomer from China knows it
By Helen Gao 

Every September, the price of a flight from China to a major American
metropolis like Boston or New York soars. In addition to the usual stream
of business managers and tourists shuffling between the two countries is
the annual inflow of young Chinese, girls in ponytails and boys in
sneakers, headed to their American colleges. Backpacks hiked up on their
shoulders and suitcases rolling behind, they carry transparent plastic
folders with neatly arranged sheets and pamphlets showing their first
destination on the new soil: Yale University, Hamilton College, University
of Wisconsin Madison, University of South Florida, USC School of Cinematic
Arts.

In the past decade, China has witnessed an explosion in the number of
citizens studying abroad, a 21st-century manifestation of a deep-rooted
Confucius value that emphasizes education. Even before they enter high
school, children of middle class families from cities across China start
to see liuxue -- studying abroad -- as the default choice. They devote
hours of their class time to preparing for American standardized exams
from the SAT and GRE to the International English Language Testing System,
often scoring in the top quartile. In 2010, nearly 130,000 Chinese
students studied in the U.S., a 30 percent increase from the year before.
Having surpassed India, China is now America's top source of international
students.

I jumped on the wagon myself in the September of 2005, traveling to
far-away Massachusetts for the last two years of high school. After the
initial elation of reaching my long-strived-for goal cooled and I figured
out my way around the language barrier, I realized that there were bigger
hurdles than language for a Chinese student in America. China and its rise
were receiving more attention and discussion in the U.S. First as
undergraduate in Connecticut and then as a New York Times intern in
Beijing, I plunged into the China-related discussions, hoping to gain an
alternate, more comprehensive perspective on my home country. But I often
find myself wrestling with an instinctive compulsion to take China's side,
a feeling not unfamiliar to many Chinese students in the States.

American political discourse -- and American criticism of China -- can
clash, sometimes painfully so, with the more closed and more uniformly
nationalistic social norms Chinese students are accustomed to. Their
desire to share in American prosperity and their admiration for its fair
social values are often complicated by a defensiveness of their homeland,
instilled in them by a nationalistic atmosphere back home and compounded
by an American tendency to talk about China in ways that can sometimes
sound condescending, even hostile. Reconciling these feelings and gaining
a balanced perspective can turn out to be much more difficult than, for
example, the GRE vocabulary section.

?       ?       ?       ?       ?

On American campuses, Chinese students often steer clear of political
debate, something they likely had few encounters with during their
single-track life path prior to their arrival in America. Students now in
their late teens or early 20s missed their country's brief period of
relative political pluralism in mid-1980s, which was ended by the violent
Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. Instead, they grew up in the
pragmatism-defined 1990s, which propelled citizens to trade political
rights for material affluence. Champions of China's lopsided education
system, they devoted after-class hours to hone their quantitative skills
and memorized verbatim their history and political science textbooks to
pass the humanities exams.

After a lifetime of experiencing conformity as the social norm, Chinese
students are sometimes amazed by the politically charged conversations and
expressions common in America. The night Barack Obama was elected
president, I watched from my dormitory balcony the carnival-like
celebration at my college courtyard, reading the banners and listening to
the chants, fascinated by the burst of energy. The scene felt strange yet
familiar -- I recalled the joyous parades when Hong Kong returned to China
and the cheering crowds when the Olympic committee announced Beijing to be
the host city for the 2008 games. But the differences became clear when
this political energy took other forms in America. "When I started reading
American news, it was incredible to see the two parties throwing rocks at
each other," April Sun, a native of Liaoning province in northeast China
and a graduate student in education at George Mason University, told me.
"I thought, 'How could you have disagreement in front of the public?'"

Amazement aside, the majority of Chinese students, busy adjusting to the
new environment, spare little attention to American political bickering as
long as their homeland is not involved. However, as America's attention
shifts toward China, they often find themselves caught between two more or
less opposing ideological camps.

Chinese students typically choose to withhold their opinions for fear of
remafan ­-- causing trouble. When Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the
Nobel Peace Prize in October 2010, liberal intellectuals in mainland China
held underground celebrations and threw secret banquets (despite the
government's attempt to block them), while Chinese students in America
seemed to remain eerily silent. "We shouldn't talk about it," a Chinese
student at Yale University told me in a private message at the time. "We
should focus on studying and doing things we can do. Truth comes from
practice." The habit of self-censoring, common among China's post-1980s
youth, can feel both frustrating and bewildering, even to some within the
generation. Jiang Fangzhou, a 23-year-old Chinese writer, calls this
phenomenon an "active effort to maintain status quo." These students, she
said in an interview with the Financial Times, "dare not stray from the
orthodoxy for even one millimeter when they are still 10 meters away from
crossing the line."

Though their silence on politics could be mistaken for nonchalance, it's
anything but. When a fellow Chinese student in the U.S. deviates from the
political orthodoxy, the otherwise quiet community can sometimes erupt. In
April 2008, a month after a bloody clash between ethnic Tibetans and Han
Chinese in the Tibetan city of Lhasa, a Duke freshmen named Wang Qianyuan
became a household name
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/16/AR20080416
03579.html> among the Chinese community in America. During a confrontation
between Tibetan and Han Chinese students during a pro-Tibet vigil on
campus, she agreed to write "Free Tibet, Save Tibet" on one Tibetan
student's back. Witnessing the scene, her fellow Chinese schoolmates
lashed out, calling her a traitor and ostracizing her.

"They said that I had mental problems and that I would go to hell," she
writes in a personal accountpublished
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/18/AR20080418
02635.html> by the Washington Post. "There's a strong Chinese view
nowadays that critical thinking and dissidence create problems, so
everyone should just keep quiet and maintain harmony."

Many students shrug off the incongruity of choosing a Western education at
the cost of tens of thousands of dollars a year and resisting the
ideological environment that comes with it. For them, the primary draw of
an American education is the socially recognized prestige that brightens
their job prospects. Serena Zhang, a Georgetown junior from Shanghai, said
she applied to U.S. colleges because she considers herself "qualified for
them" and "they bring more opportunities." She beamed as she recounted
working alongside a senior boss in the American consulting firm that
employed her, something she feels would be "hardly possible in China
without a connection." Although she grumbled about the "arbitrary and
alienating" U.S. media coverage of China, she said it was "unnecessary to
dwell upon the details."

?       ?       ?       ?       ?

As a student in the United States, I yearned for a forum to talk and share
thoughts on events back in China: an earthquake in Sichuan, the Olympic
Games in Beijing, a Uighur uprising in Xinjiang. But the silence of the
campus Chinese community, initially disappointing, became almost
suffocating. So I turned to Western media, hoping its open civil discourse
could help me make sense of my country. The daily headlines on China gave
me feelings of liberation as well as unease: "On Our Radar: China's
Environmental Woes," "In Restive Chinese Area, Cameras Keep Watch,"
"Behind a Military Chill: A More Forceful China."

While it was a relief to finally be able to access direct knowledge on
these sensitive domestic issues, as someone who grew up in a middle-class
family in suburban Beijing, I had difficulty connecting the Orwellian
China described in western media to the one I recognized. Then, working at
the New York Times Beijing bureau, I witnessed a different side of China.
As I picked up phone calls from petitioners who had fallen ill working in
toxic factories and interviewed a Uighur intellectual who was hunted by
the government for his "separatist tendency," their narratives muted the
defense of China I had long muttered to myself. It saddened me that the
powerless in China had to resort to foreign media to find a voice. It
depressed me when I pictured my non-Chinese college friends skimming these
headlines, shaking their heads at my country.

Though many Chinese students come to the United States to absorb ideas
from a society that encourages free exchange of opinions, this
much-admired quality can become thorny when the discourse centers on
China. To make peace with these criticisms, they are learning first to
make peace with themselves.

Joy Zhuang, a graduate student majoring in international relations at
Syracuse University and an intern at American Enterprise Institute, loves
American television dramas. They helped her learn the language as well as
the society before she came here to study, she said. Her favorite was
"Boston Legal," which she explained shows her "the collision of different
values in America."

Zhuang, interested in the development and function of NGOs, maintains a
blog titled "I Study NGO Management in America," where she posts
reflections on this topic and others. In July, after a high-speed train
wreck left 40 people dead in eastern China, she wrote a post pressing the
country's state-controlled media for greater transparency. "I would rather
have rumors than have lies," she wrote. In the fall, as Occupy Wall Street
kindled popular protests across the United States, Zhuang stopped by
Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., to watch the demonstrations. "I always
believe people's grievances should be channeled instead of blocked," she
reflected. "In China, even when the government makes large moves such as
demolishing and relocating rural villages, it never gives the residents a
chance to speak and just settles everything with money."

Zhuang is an unwavering proponent of dialogues and free expression, though
American discourse about China has at times tested her patience. "Foreign
policies toward China only enters mainstream discussion in America in
recent years," she said, "because now it needs help from China." She
added, frustrated, "On the one hand, [America] praises China for the role
it plays on the international stage. On the other hand, it tells its
citizens about China's investment in clean energy and technology and
argues that America needs to do more in order to not fall behind. That's
not the way you speak about a friend [in Chinese social norms] ... it
hurts feelings."

She especially dislikes when Western voices predict China's political
doom. She is still bothered by an American teacher's comment, while
lecturing on China's aging population, that the nation will "get old
before it gets rich." She bristles at mass media speculations on the
possibility of an "Arab Spring" toppling the Communist Party in China. "If
you ask Chinese people, they will tell you all they want now is, for
example, free media. But America always calls for 'the collapse of the
Communist Party' or 'a multi-party system.' It's too radical." Zhuang
believes that gradual change will take place in China through its
burgeoning civil society, which she said Western media tends to overlook.

When Lawrence Guo, a soft-spoken, bespectacled boy from the bustling city
of Tianjin, learned about Liu Xiaobo winning the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize,
he deliberately avoided both Chinese and American media coverage of the
prize. He did not want to "be trapped in one side of opinions," he
explained. He maintains that democratic reform should proceed cautiously.
"I might sound like a Chinese bureaucrat," he chuckled. "Human rights is
indeed a sensitive topic in China, but that doesn't mean no one in the
government wants to improve the situation. Western governments are pushing
it too hard, so it's counterproductive."

Guo, like Zhuang, embraces public debate in America and takes advantage of
the vibrant campus environment. Now a second-year student at Johns Hopkins
School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) with a concentration in
Latin American studies, he is learning Portuguese. ("Democratic reforms in
Latin American countries do not follow a smooth trajectory either," he did
not forget to add.)

"Sometimes I think [discussing political matters] is just the government's
means of living. It's their job." Guo tries not to take the U.S.
government's criticisms of China personally. "America is not only
attacking China, it's also self-criticizing all the time." He also
separates these criticisms from the opinions of the people he interacts
with in daily life, whom he thinks are quite friendly to China. In his
class at SAIS, China mostly comes up in the context of its economic
miracle, which evokes admiring remarks from his classmates. "It makes me
feel proud to be a Chinese," Guo recalled, smiling.

Zhuang, too, tries to reason away the angst she can feel on hearing harsh
American criticisms of China. "I am not a Chauvinist, and I have a strong
sense of morality. If our government does things wrong, it should be
criticized," she said. "But as a Chinese, I cannot disconnect myself with
this identity, and sometimes I still feel upset." Difficult as it is for
her to digest these criticisms, she eagerly swallows them all. She
faithfully attends every roundtable discussion about China her think tank
hosts and tracks the event calendars of other major political institutes
in Washington. She is grateful that such discussions exist for her to roam
into. "Among my peers in China, if you care about anything deeper, they
will say, 'Come on, why are you so idealistic?'" she said, lifting her
tone to imitate their air. "Being in America actually makes you feel
better. People don't judge."

Zhuang's friend Andy Liu, a former Chinese Central Television anchor who
just completed his master's in public diplomacy at Syracuse University,
described his feelings toward China and America in human terms: "China as
my birthplace feels like my parent, whom I can't choose but naturally
love. America is like a girlfriend, with whom I experienced crush,
disappointment, and finally settled into a mature relationship." To
achieve this inner balance, Liu has had to distance himself from his
Chinese perspective. "I can now observe China as a third party, a skill I
have intended to learn. Of course my attachment to China maintains, but
now it's the difference of seeing it inside or outside Lushan."

Liu was referring to a Chinese poem by the 11th century poet Su Shi, who
encapsulated the science of perspective in verses now recited by every
Chinese elementary school student:

Sideways a mountain range, vertically a peak.
Far-near, soaring-crouching, never the same.
No way I can tell the true shape of Mt. Lushan,
Because I am standing in the middle of this mountain.