Tales from the Chinese Diaspora

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CHINESE DIASPORA tales from the

December 2014 Graduate Honors Project The University of Iowa

LU SHEN | 沈璐 Supervised by JUDY POLUMBAUM Paintings by MOHAN LIU

Contents Introduction 4

World Citizen: Where is Home?

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Invisible Wives 30

Iowa Chinese Students Struggle To Adjust, Feel Lack Of Support 7

World Citizen: Freedom 20

Times Changing for Chinese Women 36

World Citizen:

Bibliography 40

Getting somewhere 26

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留学生

Introducing Tales from the Chinese Diaspora

The theme of 留学—liuxue, or study abroad—was central to many of the stories I consumed while growing up in China in the 1990s. Fanciful tales of fiction, feature films and TV series and ostensibly true accounts in documentaries and memoirs alike planted in my mind all sorts of ideas about going to university in some peculiar foreign place. Thus, study abroad was an oddly familiar yet strange and exciting term to me, and not a reality until I came to experience it myself.

When I was younger, I saw study abroad as a mysterious privilege. This honored status went back to the 1870s, when the Qing Court sent 120 ordinary Chinese teen boys to the U.S. to learn Western skills; upon return, they were supposed to shoulder the responsibility of bringing the dying empire back to life. In the early 20th century, others subsidized by the government or by their affluent families carried on the tradition of going abroad and returning; many later became important figures in every field of modern Chinese life. Much later, in the early 1980s, those from well-connected families in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai began to find means to go abroad in a different sort of effort–to escape China’s seeming backwardness; and by the 1990s, the brightest students from top Chinese universities were leaving for graduate programs at prestigious Ivy League universities.

By the time I was preparing to go abroad for a college exchange year in 2011, study abroad was no longer a big deal. Pretty much everybody knew somebody studying in a foreign country. Now Chinese undergraduates, supported by parents of a rising middle class, were flooding into U.S. colleges, typically to burnish their credentials for a future career in business.

After one term in the U.S., I decided to stay with the flood, and transferred from Arkansas to Iowa to complete my bachelor’s degree.

My project examines the varied results and repercussions of this influx of Chinese students to America, focusing mainly on the burgeoning population of Chinese undergraduates on the University of Iowa campus.

Through a series of in-depth reports, I address issues of identity, freedom, the future plans of international students, the experiences of female students, the situation of wives of international students, and the misconceptions, misunderstandings, and structural and habitual barriers that tend to divide Chinese and U.S. students.

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My TOEFL instructor back in Hangzhou, China, once commented that Chinese students going abroad these days are not as qualified as their predecessors. It used to be that only the brightest and best could study abroad—and only some of the best and brightest got the chance. Nowadays, it seems, anyone can manage to study abroad as long as family finances allow. Indeed, my generation of liuxuesheng – students studying abroad – has a somewhat shabby reputation. We are often seen as a spoiled group of fuerdai—rich baby boomers—living decadently off our newly affluent parents’ money.

In truth, the stereotype is just that – a gross and unfair overgeneralization. Today’s Chinese students abroad are far more diverse – economically, intellectually, geographically and personally – than those who have come before.

Over the course of a year of interviewing my fellow Chinese students across majors and classes, I’ve found that many are conscientious and high achieving. Most care a great deal about getting a good education and doing well. And while some have conventional outlooks and ambitions, among others there is no lack of idealism, curiosity and critical thinking. Motivations for coming to the U.S. are varied: some are seeking personal freedom, some a better quality of education and hopes for more mobility, many a combination, and some don’t know. A lot come just because their parents want them to. Some are academically ill prepared; some are brilliant in all respects. Certainly, there is that minority who drive BMWs or Maseratis, those who collect Louis Vuitton satchels or Roger Vivier flats, some spoiled ones who can’t cook or do their own laundry and have no idea what they are in school for; but most are modest strivers struggling to grow up in an unfamiliar environment, and each one is an individual.

Being at Iowa and reporting on my peers has impressed upon me anew that people are complex. A gal with a collection of luxury designer bags worth a year of tuition at the same time may be intelligent and even profound. A Chinese who never talks to Americans isn’t necessarily a loner or a dolt. An ultra-Americanized Chinese can still be friendly and compassionate toward compatriots. And for all our stereotypes about U.S. students, they are no less complicated. Domestic students may ignore international students out of fear or ignorance rather than snobbery. Some academically successful students are socially awkward. Some who seem stupid or lazy may just be insecure. Some who party and drink hard may study a lot, too.

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Such human complexity compelled me to continue writing about people and doings on the Iowa campus. And I felt it was meaningful to record the experiences of Chinese students at this stage—with the prestige and economy of China clearly on the rise and the U.S. seemingly on the decline.

We are the generation who grew up as coastal metropolitans when Chinese economic growth was skyrocketing. Unlike our parents and grandparents, we haven’t experienced traumatic political and social movements nor suffered painful dislocations that lodge in our memories. We don’t have the strong sense of national and cultural identity that motivated our forbears, and our feelings of obligation and patriotism are far more subdued. We don’t have to worry about feeding ourselves; we take studying abroad, and much else, for granted. Our attitudes, ambitions, intentions and experiences are far different than those of our predecessors.

Still, we face some of the same issues that Chinese abroad always have: language hurdles, cultural differences, the difficulty of developing meaningful connections with the locals.. We struggle between the push of wanting to leave China and the pull of wishing to return; the U.S. is not home, yet our sentiments for China are receding.

Doing this project has enriched my college experience. It has enabled me to meet new people, to understand more about both Chinese and Americans, and to think through issues that I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. Most importantly, the more I wrote about Chinese students, the stronger my sense of mission grew. By the time I was working on the last article, my purpose wasn’t simply to tell a good story; I want to be a good journalist, brutally honest and self-critical, while also expressing the needs and defend the interests of the misunderstood, often neglected and sometimes mistreated Chinese student community.

The challenges and quandaries facing Chinese students at Iowa have many causes, of course, and solutions lie with all involved. I hope Chinese students in the future will arrive better prepared both mentally and academically to engage and enjoy college life and gain an education worth the money their parents pay. I hope U.S. students can become more curious and open-minded, taking advantage of the proliferating international resources and global connections all around them.

I hope this university—and others facing similar circumstances—will come to practice and exhibit genuine concern for its international students that goes far beyond the revenue they generate. I hope the institution can develop and provide many more meaningful opportunities for conscious cross-cultural interaction and growth among all students.

And I hope that a century or so hence – presuming climate change does not preclude descendants – our successors will find much to learn, enjoy and cherish in reading our stories.

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爱荷华大学 中国留学生之困 Iowa Chinese Students Struggle To Adjust, Feel Lack Of Support

This story was originally published on IowaWatch.org on June 24, 2014.

The University of Iowa has intensely recruited Chinese students since 2007, but has made little progress helping them assimilate to campus life.

Chang Ling” at her on campus and she has seen derogatory remarks on Twitter about Chinese students at the UI.

In some respects, an IowaWatch investigation has found, the university’s practices make interactions with domestic students more difficult and increase isolation.

“The things you see on Twitter, you can hear them in the dorms, in the streets and when you hang out with friends,” she said.

Chinese undergraduates, who pay tuition twice that of in-state students, made up the overwhelming majority of the roughly 4,000 international students at the UI. Top university officials acknowledged in interviews their responsibility to integrate international students into campus life. The university’s official manual lists diversity as a “core value,” obligating it to foster inclusiveness and educate students for success in a “diverse and global environment.”

Nevertheless, many students begin to feel alienation from the moment they arrive in Iowa City.

Yifei Li, a UI senior, said people have yelled “Ching

Among the difficulties Chinese students face: Racist insults in social media and in person, with the UI failing to publicly denounce such incidents as other universities have done in similar cases.

Separate university orientations upon arrival on campus, reducing the opportunity for interactions and relationships with domestic students from the outset.

Events and programs designed by the university especially for international students that seldom attract domestic students.

The UI and other universities go to great lengths to recruit international students, who enhance a university’s international reputation. But top UI officials admitted this year that an influx of

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international students left them unprepared to help the students integrate with domestic students and improve campus life for them.

“I won’t say it’s perfect,” UI President Sally Mason responded when asked about campus life for international students. “I think we have lots more to do.”

Tom Rocklin, UI vice president for student life, said the university went recruiting without being prepared for the sudden influx of Chinese undergraduates and the need to help them integrate. The students succeed academically, but improving interactions with the community is another matter, he said.

“It’s a tricky business. But we had not tested whether our programs would be effective for students from China,” Rocklin said, adding that “when we say international, we really mean China.”

Many higher education experts say the patterns and behaviors seen at Iowa exist nationwide and some describe a growth of neo-racism, a discrimination based on culture and nationality besides biological characteristics.

Much of the discussion about the international-domestic separation devolves into inconclusive debate over who is more to blame: Chinese students for forming cliques and not trying to get involved or domestic students for lacking curiosity and

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empathy in building international friendships.

Jeffrey Ding, the incoming University of Iowa Student Government vice president, said the division between international and domestic students is subtle.

“International students usually sit by each other. Domestic students sit by each other,” Ding said of his classes at the Tippie College of Business, where nearly 20 percent of the students are from

China. “It’s not like explicit, like racism, like segregation, but there is that separation.”

Mary Knorr, who graduated in May, said many of her fellow American students are “disinterested and not curious and almost arrogant toward other cultures.” That leads to negative assumptions and stereotypes, like Chinese students drive luxury cars, dress differently and don’t socialize, she said.

Sam Van Horne, assessment coordinator in Office of the Provost, called the differences “troubling findings.”

The university had 2,266 Chinese students -- 1,673 of them undergraduates -- in the fall 2013 semester; almost double the number six years ago, when only a few dozen Chinese undergraduates were enrolled. Now, undergraduates from China account for 74 percent of the UI international undergraduate population, nearly triple the national trend of 28 percent reported by the 2013 Open Doors Report.

Studies attribute the increase to the rise of middle class in China, the financial problems of U.S. universities and colleges and higher education’s need for diversity.

Ninety-seven percent of the UI foreign undergraduates pay their own way, according to the University of Iowa International Students and Scholars Statistics. They contributed more than $110 million to the local economy, and the overall international students contribute $24 billion to the national economy in 2012-13, a report by the NAFSA: Association of International Educators said.

Chris Glass, an assistant professor of education foundations and leadership at Old Dominion University, said if universities treat international students just as a source of revenue, the students don’t develop a sense of connection to their university and the university is losing future alumni.

Tom Rocklin, UI Vice President for Student Services UI leaders are concerned for international students beyond the revenue they generate, Rocklin said in a March 13 interview.

“There are just so many things that separate us that are visible. When the language barrier is there, and you don’t feel like you can communicate 100 percent, you go off what you see,” she said.

SEPARATION AT THE UI A UI survey last year, Student Experience in the Research University, showed that international students feel significantly less respected and less belonging than domestic students, including domestic minorities.

“We could say, ‘Hey, they come, they graduate. What’s to worry about?’” he said. “And they pay tuition, frankly. But we don’t really feel that way. We feel like there’s more to our promise to students… I think we’re implicitly telling them, ‘Come to Iowa, get an education and learn a lot about American culture.’”

Rocklin said that although integration depends on individuals to form connections, he agrees the university has a responsibility to help integrate international students into campus life.

This responsibility is written out in the UI operations manual, which says diversity advances the university’s teaching, research and service missions. The university, the manual

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states, is “dedicated to an inclusive community in which people of different cultural, national, individual, and academic backgrounds encounter one another in a spirit of cooperation, openness, and shared appreciation.”

But creating conditions for cross-boundary interaction is challenging.

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Nationally, about 40 percent of international students reported they don’t have close American friends, according to a study published in the June 2012 Journal of International and Intercultural Communication.

Getting domestic students to engage with international students is challenging, Vice President Rocklin said.

“I don’t know that anyone has figured that out anywhere,” Rocklin said.

“If you’re the other, then you have a strong motivation to learn about the dominant,” he said. “If you’re the dominant, where’s your motivation to learn about the other?

Curiosity. But not survival.”

Cultural differences, language barrier, and unwillingness to step outside of comfort zones contribute to the separation, said Ding, who moved to Iowa City from Shanghai when he was 3 and who has become an activist for international students.

Douglas Lee, assistant provost for UI International Programs, said the separation might not be an issue for all students. Some international students come to the United States just for a degree and have little interest in mingling with others, as do some domestic students, he said.

Can Zhang, former vice president of the UI Chinese Students and Scholars Association who graduated in May, said many Chinese came to Iowa eager to make friends with Americans but had difficulty getting involved in their activities because of language hurdles and cultural differences.

“And that’s fine... If you don’t want to have this interaction, we shouldn’t try to force that on you.”

Zhang said he makes casual friendships easily, because Americans are usually nice. But to truly be friends with them is difficult.

Chris Glass, Assistant Professor, Old Dominion University Glass, the Old Dominion University professor, said universities should change every aspect of university

Although experts say similar segregation between Chinese and domestic students exists on campuses across the country, they also say good solutions exist and that universities can do things well short of force.

service, from food services to academic advising, housing, teaching, event programming, orientation, career services and teaching.

Glass is a lead researcher of the Global Perspective Inventory, which examines student experiences based on survey responses from 70,000 undergraduates, including 5,000 international students, at 135 U.S. colleges and universities.

He said universities should provide co-curricular activities and “a significant amount” of multicultural coursework and leadership programs that involve discussion on multicultural and multiracial issues. They also should try to make sure U.S. students engage in multicultural classes.

The UI doesn’t require a diversity course. Students need to take one course in the general education area of Values, Society and Diversity, which doesn’t have to be cross-cultural. A course about jazz music, for example, would fulfill the requirement.

OVERT PREJUDICE AND DISCRIMINATION Last fall a surge of prejudiced remarks against Asian students – mainly those from China – appeared on Twitter.

The Twitter account UIasianprobz had been reposting photos and negative and hateful remarks about Asian students based on how they dress and act. “Meant for comedy only. No racism intended,” said the account profile.

A September column in The Daily Iowan, the UI campus newspaper, denounced this, but the university didn’t respond.

Joelle Brown, governmental relations liaison at the University of Iowa Student Government, said she raised the Twitter issue at a monthly student leaders meeting with President Mason 20 days after The Daily Iowan article was published, but did not show the tweets to Mason. Mason said she cared about international students, and referred Brown to other central officials involved in international student life.

Student leaders started meeting then with administrators at different levels regarding issues facing international students, Brown said.

Mason said she learned that there were issues facing international students at the meeting, but had not been aware of the derogatory tweets until interviewed. If she had been aware of them, she said in an April interview for this story, she might have publicly denounced them. She said seeing the tweets is sad and that she felt sorry that international students are experiencing racism.

“I’m not tolerant of racist or bigoted behavior,” she said. “I just think that’s inappropriate especially in a college setting where we need to be accepting and learning about different cultures and learning what tolerance means.”

Vice President Rocklin, who labeled himself a huge advocate of free speech, said he felt helpless while dealing with the issue because the university has little power to deal with intolerance or ignorance and could not stop the racist remarks on the Internet. He said university officials had talked to students, encouraging them to speak up.

“What we can do when the context is right is send a message first to international students that this isn’t the university’s position; we don’t approve,” Rocklin said. “And empower people to help teach their fellow students. We can give them encouragement.”

But did the UI send that message?

“I’m sorry, I don’t remember,” Rocklin said. “I just don’t remember what we did, to tell you the truth.”

Downing Thomas, associate provost and dean of UI International Programs, acknowledged his awareness of the hurtful language but said the university shouldn’t respond.

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“If you respond directly, you encourage people to continue whatever they are doing,” Thomas said. He said the campus climate for international students is “pretty good.”

“And so sometimes it’s better just to leave that alone, and to work on other areas.”

Glass, the Old Dominion University professor and researcher leading a national study of international student experiences, said stopping racist behavior isn’t a realistic goal because of its deep origin, but a university can change its culture.

“You can change the curriculum. You can convene different people in student affairs to talk about this issue.

You can make this topic as your annual retreat for your different offices,” he said. “And if this isn’t a topic on the agenda, then they’re not exercising the leadership that they could on this issue.”

When things like the Twitter incident at Iowa happen, intervention by the institution is important, said Jenny Lee, associate professor at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona. Lee, along with her research team, has interviewed and surveyed more than 1,000 international students. She said the university needed to send a clear message to its foreign students, conveying its appreciation and help them combat the horrible feeling.

“Yes, there could be 99 very nice (U.S.) students,” she said. “But it’s that one out of 100 who can really make your experience so much worse and make you feel unwelcome.”

The UIasianprobz Twitter account eventually disap-

peared. The university didn’t take it down, according to Rocklin. But another Twitter account, UIHawkeyeProbz, which is active, reposts similar derogatory statements on international students.

Li, the UI senior, said screenshots of the tweets were posted on Renren, a Chinese social media website, which had received thousands of hits and aroused controversy.

Some Chinese students thought it was not a problem and blamed the targeted students for not knowing local culture, and some thought the students should “keep calm and carry on,” although they acknowledged it was hurtful language, she said.

“But I don’t think that’s right. If you don’t speak up to defend yourself, even though discrimination doesn’t happen to you today, it will happen to you some day.”

“It arouses my anger whenever it occurs to me that that thousands of Chinese students are coming in the future,” she added. “No one deserves that experience.”

HOW OTHER UNIVERSITIES COUNTER RACISM Hate speech, spoken or tweeted, takes place on other campuses; and sometimes, university officials respond directly.

In 2011, a former student at the University of California, Los Angeles, Alexandra Wallace, made an anti-Asian YouTube rant.

UCLA Chancellor Gene Block issued a public statement, saying, “I am appalled by the thoughtless and hurtful comments of a UCLA student posted on YouTube. Like many of you, I recoil when someone invokes the right of free expression to demean other individuals or groups. … I believe that speech that expresses intolerance toward any group of people on the basis of race or gender, or sexual, religious or cultural identity is indefensible and has no place at UCLA.”

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UCLA Chancellor Gene Block delivered a video message denouncing an anti-Asian YouTube rant by a former UCLA student.

Block echoed his statement in a video message.

Two years ago, Michigan State University’s student newspaper reported a similar social media racism against Chinese students.

The university organized a photo campaign called, “OUR MSU: Our Voices. Our Struggles” to denounce discrimination and intolerance on campus. Glass, the Old Dominion professor, called it courageous academic leadership.

Glass said senior administrators need to organize a task force to gather faculty and administrators across the university to name the problems and discuss ways to restructure the institution.

These incidents, including the twitter comments at the UI, reflect a prevailing but often understated problem.

Jenny Lee, the Arizona professor who has studied international students for nearly a decade, said students suffer in silence from discrimination. Some abuse is physical, some is verbal and sometimes it is in more subtle forms and in thoughts people don’t state or recognize. Most foreign students don’t speak

up because of visa concerns or fear of being dismissed, she said.

Lee, the daughter of Korean immigrants, co-authored an article in Higher Education in 2007, describing the phenomenon as neo-racism, discrimination based on culture and nationality besides biological characteristics.

Neo-racism justifies racism by appealing to the tendencies to maintain the dominant group’s cultural or national identity.

Seven years after the article’s publication, the situation has gotten worse on college campuses, Lee said. The sudden growth in the number of Chinese students results in far more tensions. They get a lot more attention, resistance, and discrimination from local communities, students and professors, she said.

Lee said neo-racism affects international students academically, socially and mentally and will prevent them from getting the full benefits of the education.

Students who feel discrimination return to their home countries and share their unpleasant experiences, which could affect university enrollments and revenues, since international students pay twice or three times more tuition than local students. Lee said this is one reason university administrators are hesitant to discuss the problem.

INTERNATIONAL STUDENT EVENTS Some of the University of Iowa’s standard programs, such as special events for international students, orientation,

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and the housing program often contribute to the separation of foreign and domestic students.

International students receive e-mails from the university about events designed for them, such as pumpkin carvings, egg coloring and trips to Amanas. Few U.S. students attend.

Brown, the student government member, said she was one of two U.S. students at last year’s pumpkin carving event, and she wouldn’t have known about it if her international friends had not told her.

“U.S. students are not in short supply,” Brown said. “There are people who want to get involved.

You just need to let them know.”

Some UI programs have had successful experiences working with domestic students but the successes required extra efforts beyond sending mass e-mails.

Jennifer Blair, assistant director of Global Community Engagement at Tippie College of Business, piloted the “International Buddies” program last spring, where 112 international and U.S. business and pre-business undergraduates paired up for a semester-long partnership. She said the Global Engagement Student Advisory Board at Tippie, which she oversees, is a good vehicle for event programming.

Another initiative, Global Leadership Starts Here, brought in 50 participants — half U.S., half international. Faculty, academic advisors and students organized the initiative in February to foster connections between domestic and international students. The workshop had an ICON class site,

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an online class support system at the UI that allows users to access documents and participate in online discussions. Organizers also sent hand-addressed invitations and reminders to specific participants (Disclosure: the author of this article was involved in planning this event).

ORIENTATION AND HOUSING Sara Wom of Des Moines said she was surprised when four years ago she participated in her orientation program in late July.

International students were not participating.

“You would think that it’s a diverse school; you would see other people who are not from the U.S.,” Wom said International Students and Scholars Services, under International Programs, holds international student orientation the week before school starts. During the first few days or weeks in Iowa, new students have few chances to interact with Americans.

Lee Seedorf, senior associate director of International Students and Scholars Services, said international students usually arrive at the end of the summer because visa regulations do not let them enter the United States more than 30 days before the start of school. Meanwhile, domestic students have orientation throughout the summer.

Because of the divide, Seedorf said, domestic students aren’t taught to be culturally sensitive or respectful of international students. “I see this tying into things like racial and ethnic harassments that’s going on, and the twitters,

or people harassing people verbally on the street,” she said.

Seedorf said getting U.S. students involved in international student orientation was challenging. In the past, only a few applied to be volunteers and some didn’t show up. She would like to require participation in international student orientations for certain majors or funds to pay domestic students to get involved, which would require the approval of various academic programs and administrators.

The same constraints affecting orientation sometimes affect housing choices. A lengthy visa process and other travel uncertainties mean many Chinese students cannot commit to the university and cannot apply for campus housing until late in the game, when dormitories often are full. The university squeezes the overflow into temporary quarters such as a dormitory floor lounge with as many as seven others.

Two years ago, 78 of the 189 students in temporary housing were international students. The university is making progress. Last year only 16 of the 46 students assigned to temporary housing were international students.

Von Stange, UI senior director of university housing, said reserving residence hall space for international students would be unfair to students who applied early. He also said forcing American and international students to room together when they may not want to do so would cause problems for both.

“I don’t think our domestic 18-yearolds are mature enough to live with an international student, to be quite honest,” he said.

World Citizen:

家在哪里?

Where is home?

The story was originally published in The Daily Iowan on October 8, 2013.

I like going to New York City, because I don’t feel like a foreigner there; I think I’m no different from anybody hurrying by me on the street. When the subway arrives on a station, passengers take their phones out of their pockets, and you can hear “Hello” in seven languages. However, the feeling of being a foreigner floods back when I return to Iowa City. I’m not saying I am excluded or alienated by natives; I’m just different. I think I don’t really mind being a foreigner, or an outsider — though it certainly contributes to an often overwhelming sense of loneliness, even when I’m surrounded by people.

In the meanwhile, however, I have also felt much less connected to home and to my country since I journeyed to the United States two years ago. So I began wondering if my predecessors who are now U.S. citizens feel at home in this country, or if they have ever felt alienated from their home country. I want to know if being ethnically Chinese while holding American passports means that they have to compromise or to struggle with their national identity.

The people I spoke with while pursuing this project all told me that they are world citizens, that after years of obtaining U.S. citizenship, they have taken their national identity less seriously, because only in this way can they survive without any inner conflicts and struggles.

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Photo by Wanyi Tao/The Daily Iowan

Before I had a chance to talk with Professor Wenfang Tang, the University of Iowa Stanley Hua Hsia professor of political science and international studies, I learned a lot about him from Hualing Nieh Engle, the cofounder of the International Writing Program. She likes telling me that Tang only had $50 with him the first time he came to the United States in 1982, when studying abroad was barely on anybody’s radar in China.

“It was actually $40,” Tang corrected and laughed.

Tang, then 26, took the life-changing step in a gray Dacron Mao suit, leaving the just opened-up poor China for its exact polar opposite — the United States — to pursue a master’s degree in political science at the University of Kansas.

“I wanted to go back home every day while I was working [at my first job],” Tang said, now 57, who has lived in the States for 31

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years. “When I got my first paycheck, I thought, ‘Now, I [have] money to buy a plane ticket. I’m going back to Beijing tomorrow.’ ” Of course, he did not do that. He took the risk of losing everything in Beijing to study in America.

It would have been seen as a failure if he had gone back home with nothing to bring back with him.

“I didn’t have the option to fail,” said Tang, who says he studied “crazy hard” in the ’80s. “So I couldn’t look back; I had to force myself to move forward.”

Tang encountered problems that many study-abroad students confront.

“In the first three years, I had no idea what my professors were talking about in class,” Tang said.

“I suddenly came to understand their conversations one day, and I was like, ‘Is that what they’ve been bullshitting? I can do that,

too.’ After that, nothing could hold me back anymore.”

For solving what he calls his “social problems,” his trick was to date American women.

“Don’t tell my wife,” he said, joking, referring to American-born wife Lisa Weaver, who teaches in the UI School of Journalism and Mass Communications.

After finishing a master’s degree, Tang thought about pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.

Yet his loyalty to Kansas made him hesitant.

“My professor told me, ‘There is no such thing as institutional loyalty in America,’” Tang said. “I remember his words still today. It was my first step in Americanization.”

Given that he has lived in the United States for more than 30 years, I asked him whether he had been completely Americanized.

“Not entirely,” he said. “Professionally and academically speaking, yes, I have been Americanized, because academically, I grew up here.”

Tang said that it took him 11 years to get used to the American way of life. Only when you can be an individual in the diverse society can you be one of them, he noted.

“It occurred to me all of a sudden that if you want to get involved in the American society, you got to be yourself,” Tang said. It was 1993. “I started realizing that I [have] to hold my own ground instead of solely seeking Americanization. I have something commendable and likable to offer; why do I have to learn everything in an American way?”

Today, Tang still has nostalgia for the bustling life in China. He cited the closeness of people in China and their relationships in comparison with those in the United States.

He was doing a research project in Singapore this past summer, and he felt delighted to get together with his coworkers every day, talking and laughing at lunchtime.

“This is rare back in the States,” Tang said.

“You [have] to set up a time two weeks before the lunch and mark the time on your calendar. It’s OK — I’m used to that while I’m there, but whenever I go back to China or Singapore, I would think, ‘Isn’t this great?’ ” While he misses the Chinese lifestyle, three decades of living away from his family alienated Tang from them in Beijing.

“I failed every time I tried to share my happiness and bitterness with them,” he sighed.

“They are not able to emotionally relate to my experiences here at all, and they don’t care, either.

“My connections now with my dad, sister and brother seem to be really superficial and abstract. In their eyes, I’m too Americanized.”

Tang thought about moving back to Beijing around 2000, when he was greatly inspired by flourishing China. But more recently, he

has believed that he would trouble with readjusting to the life there, and the instability in China has worried him, too.

Having been an American citizen for two decades, he said, he had not realized how much he appreciates the country where he has lived most of his life until he was thousands miles away from it.

“When I was in the U.S., I felt like I was the only person who’s qualified to criticize my home country, China, and at the same time, I also liked criticizing America,” said the political-science professor, who noted that he has roots in both countries. “But here I am in Singapore; I’m not happy with anyone’s criticism of America.”

Having experienced both Chinese and American cultures, he pointed out that national identity has often a narrow vision, which people such as him better not take too seriously. Otherwise, conflicted feelings will easily flare.

“I’ve felt more and more strongly about one thing — national identity is actually not that important to everybody,” he said. We’re all world citizens.”

••• I was surprised when I first spoke with Ramon and Victoria Lim — they speak Mandarin with a distinctive Southern China accent, a native dialect of Fujian Province, China.

“Fujian dialect is our first language, Mandarin is the second, and English places in third,” said the Lims, the Philippine-grown couple who had not been back to their ancestral home of Fujian until they were in their 40s — and decades after moving to the States.

UI neurology Professor Emeritus Ramon Lim, who is 80 years old, was born in the Philippines. UI internal-medicine Professor Emeritus Victoria Lim, is the same age. She moved to the Philippines with her family from Fujian at the age of 3. Growing up in Chinatown in the Philippines, they both went to Chinese schools, where they received traditional Chinese educations.

They moved to the United States in 1959 and 1961, respectively, after receiving M.D.s in the Philippines. For more than 10 years, there was no country for them to go back to.

Although he was born in and she was raised in the Philippines, the Lims were not citizens there, because their

17

parents were Chinese nationals.

But at that time, the United States did not maintain diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, so the passports they held to enter the United States had been issued in Taiwan.

“There was a time when we were like people who had no nationality,” Ramon Lim said.

“We were Chinese, but we hadn’t set our foot in mainland China,” Victoria Lim said. “We had not been to Taiwan, but we got our passports issued there.”

Although the Lims were legally Chinese, in the days of martial law — 1949 to 1987 — they were not allowed to enter Taiwan without a special permit. But they could not go back to the Philippines, either; their re-entry permits to that country had expired three years after they left the country.

It was not until in the 1970s, when they became U.S. citizens, that the couple were able to travel outside American borders.

They sit in their home close to downtown Iowa City, talking matter-of-factly about their past — a tough time they went through that was hard for me to imagine.

Being unequally treated, working long hours, financially struggling, these days, they shrug all the hardships off, laughing when mentioning them.

I had tons of questions for them, but I was mostly curious about their identity after hearing their history of being “homeless.”

“Am I Chinese? Of course I am — my roots are in China,” said Victoria Lim, proud of her Chinese heritage. “But at the same time, I’m a U.S. citizen. I’ve been

18

Americanized, and I feel like I belong to this country.”

She said she likes Chinese first lady Peng Liyuan.

“I don’t know how Xi Jinping is doing, but I’m really glad that we finally got a first lady who is presentable and elegant,” she said. “Her predecessors were not good.”

She is also passionate about presidential elections in the United States. The Obama supporter said she was “torn between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama” in 2008, and she always feels guilty for not voting for Rodham Clinton.

Since 1983, the two have taken their three children and six grandchildren to China four times so they could discover their roots. They have traveled to more places in China than I have been.

But did they feel like they were strangers when going to Fujian?

General Dynamics Information Technology in Coralville.

“I was upset as I realized what was waiting for me in America was a rough time.”

Unlike most of his predecessors, Lv arrived in the United States with less financial and mental stress. Unlike his descendants, either, he did not have as much exposure to the world at the age of 21.

He said he was lucky enough to have a smooth adaptive phase during his initial years in Iowa City. One of the few Chinese undergraduates, he quickly became friends with international students from Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, and Indonesia.

“We liked gathering together,” he said, recalling his eventful college life. “It was just there weren’t many Chinese undergraduates as there are now.”

But he had not thought that he would settle down here, seeing off groups of fellow Chinese undergraduate students every four years. To Lv, it was logical to obtain the U.S. citizenship after he got a job offer in America, because it was unpopular to be a Haigui — an overseas returnee — in the 1990s.

“Now I consider Iowa City home, although emotionally I have a deeper connection to Qingdao,” said Lv, who said he goes back to China almost every year. “Qingdao is where my memories are.

However, it’s not the city that I was familiar with anymore.

It’s been changed too much, just like any other places in China.”

“No,” Ramon Lim said, who was not born in his parent’s hometown. “We were there shortly, plus, we speak the same language as my folks do. So I don’t think there was a gap between us.”

Ramon and Victoria Lim see themselves as world citizens. They said that their ethnic and national identities never conflict.

••• Zhang Lv reluctantly left home for Iowa City in the spring of 1992, graduating from high school in his home city Qingdao, China.

“I felt really lost after getting my F-1 visa approved,” said Lv, a computer science graduate of the UI who is now working at

The big Hawkeye fan said he has never painstakingly tried getting involved in the American culture, and he has not felt like an outsider, either; his embracing nature allows him to feel comfortable with wherever he has been. However, his America-born Chinese friends’ bitter experiences with identity recognition and their painful feeling of being excluded made him think of his own children.

“I guess my children might also be confronted with those issues as they grow up,” said the 42-year-old, now raising a first-generation of Chinese Americans in his family in Iowa City. “So I take every opportunity to take them to travel around, wishing they will be open-minded and embrace differences as often as they can.”

After 20 years of living abroad, Lv said, he has blurred the national boundaries. As he likes to tell his two boys, wherever they go and whatever they do in the future, they are world citizens.

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The story was originally published in The Daily Iowan on October 10, 2013.

自由 World Citizen:

Freedom

The first time I left China for the U.S. was in the summer of 2011. My destination was Conway, Ark., to spend four months in an exchange program organized by my university in Hangzhou, China. A sense of elation washed over me the moment I landed on the new foreign soil. I remember that the first word out of my mouth, when people asked why I liked it here, was “FREEDOM..”

20

Being simple and naïve, the then20-year-old girl thought her host country — known for being a civil and democratic society — would offer all the freedom she had always yearned for. But after my “honeymoon phase” with America cooled off, I started to realize that it was the social pressures in China that mostly contributed to my feeling restricted back home rather than the lack of civil and political rights. I mean, politics had been too far away from my everyday life.

As simple as it was, my definition of freedom meant feeling comfortable not fitting into social norms

and having more choices.

If you open up the China page on the Freedom House website, you will see an evil China: This is not a Western-style democracy; it does not have a comprehensive legal system. Chinese people do not have the freedom to vote, the freedom of press, the freedom of speech; they do not enjoy lots of civil liberties that Americans think everybody should be born with … But guess what? The lack of political freedom and civil liberties is not the sole cause of people feeling restricted in China. Moreover, there are people who say they enjoy the freedom they have in China.

••• Runxin Sun, 19, a sophomore majoring in philosophy and finance, said the Chinese are tied by too many tangible and intangible conventions, and that is exactly why he feels freer in America than in China.

“I can be unique and different here, expressing my opinions freely without worrying how people will judge me,” the 19-yearold said.

He pointed out that culturally, Chinese exclude outcasts, while America embraces many of those who are different.

“No matter how ridiculous my thoughts are, Americans will ask

why and discuss with me calmly,” he said. “But if it were in China, people would bash me without discussion.”

Social norms, the tradition that makes some people outcasts, and the social ethics — all form a pressure that limits Chinese in every aspect, Sun contended.

Being exposed to an open information environment in the States, Sun said, he has experienced clashes of ideas that have changed him tremendously.

“I became a bystander from an angry youth, a tolerant person from a cynic,” Sun wrote in his diary. “I suddenly woke up and realized the bondages in my mind that I had never noticed; thus, I was closer to a person who can think normally.”

Zhuoyun Feng, a 21-year-old woman, said she was given the freedom of learning something she loves without family and social pressure in the United States.

Feng came to the UI as a sociology major in the spring of 2011; she later switched her major to graphic design and minored in sociology. Her parents were not happy with that at first but could only let it happen, because they did not have the control over her — they are half a world away.

She studied painting in high school, she said, and her father had thought of sending her to study with a well-established Chinese artist but later dropped the idea.

“You know that there’s a perception that leaning fine arts is inferior to leaning some serious subjects,” Feng said.

The Chinese place a high value on education, a heritage of Confucius. Yet those learning fine arts are often considered to be ignoramuses compared with those educated in other fields, for example, science. There is a perception that most art students do not study hard and have poor academic performances.

Statistics junior Yize Huang agreed with friend Sun. Huang transferred to the UI two years ago from China Agricultural University, where, he said, he had experienced a rat race. Huang acknowledged that he has gained a freedom that he did not have in China: peace of mind.

More specifically, he said, with more opportunities in sight and less pressure from the outside world, he felt that he could chase his dream in America without anything holding him back.

“I felt like I was restricted to too many things — competitions,

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comparisons, peer pressure, intermediate relationships with classmates and instructors … while I was in China,” Huang said.

He possesses the typical American dream — get married, have a solid career, have two children, a dog, a nice house, and two cars.

“But here at Iowa, everyone is caught up in her or his own business, so no one interferes with my stuff,” he said. “I feel that I can focus on my studies and have the opportunity to be what I want to be.”

Huang — who would like to stay in America after graduation — said that he thinks Chinese people are not free for historical reasons.

“Historically and culturally, Chinese people are not free — we live for too many people, such as parents and families; it is difficult to change,” he said.

22

He acknowledged that filial piety has been rooted in his mind, and he said it is understandable this tradition is still prevalent among Chinese — China’s social-security system is not so good as it is in the United States.

I asked him what he would do, given the choice to remain in the States after graduation.

“I’ll bring my parents to the U.S. and take care of them,” Huang said.

University of Iowa political-science Professor Wenfang Tang pointed out that besides the straitjackets from social and cultural pressure and the traditional conventions, the freedom that Chinese lack is more the result of an economically underdeveloped country than of an undemocratic one.

“It’s not a problem that can simply be solved by overthrowing the Communist Party,” Tang said.

Unlike America, he said, China’s social-security and

medical systems are not so well developed, thus, “Yang er fang lao” — “raising children for old age” — has been a deeply rooted idea among the Chinese, which has nothing to do with whether China is a democracy or not.

“People are still worrying about their later lives,” Tang said.

“Things such as democratic election are hardly on their radar.”

••• However, not all Chinese think they breathe the air with more freedom in America; some people say, “I enjoy enough freedom in China.”

Shuqi Li, a fourth-year psychology student, is one of them.

“Everything has a limit,” Li said.

“As long as you don’t break the law or leak top-secret government information, you get enough freedom in China.

“You get into trouble when you leak top-secret documents — it’s the same in America.”

American-based social-media platforms Facebook and Twitter remain blocked in China — except for the recently opened Shanghai Free-trade Zone, in which banned foreign websites

will be accessible. Li said she does not share the sentiment of people in China about not being able to access those websites.

“The government does that for a reason, and why do you have to be able to see stuff on those two sites?” the 21-year-old asked.

“If the access to Facebook and Twitter were to open now, I don’t think Chinese would be likely to move from Renren [the Chinese version of Facebook] and Weibo [the Chinese version of Twitter] to those two sites.”

A survey report released by China Internet Network Information Center shows that China has more than 331 million microbloggers as of June. Weibo has grown into an outlet for public opinion on issues from politics to celebrities, on which netizens are able to share uncensored information with a level of freedom not available elsewhere in the country.

Li sees Chinese jumping the firewall to access American social networking sites as a psychological reaction. “It’s just the same as the underage drinking problem in America,” she said.

“Maximizing the utility of the things you have got to improve yourself is more important than

coveting things that other people or other countries have,” Li said.

Interestingly, UI senior Jingtong Du pointed out that there is a kind of intangible freedom in China thanks to an incomplete legal system and a rule-of-man society.

“For example, you would not worry about being chased by the police if you over-speed in China,” Du said. “Further, even if you are troubled by the police, you lock the car doors [from the police] and call someone for help, and then you are out of trouble.”

Rong Chen, 28, spoke to me in the summer while she was here with her husband, Chao Zheng, who got his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the UI. The couple have since returned to China. But at the time, Chen said she thought it is arrogant to perceive the United States as a free country while China is not.

“The U.S. only looks at the limitations of other countries and the freedom its people have, so it considers itself a free land,” Chen said, who majored in journalism in college. “The American impression of China may not have changed since decades ago, because American society hasn’t

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changed too much over the last several decades, while China has changed with each passing day.”

Zheng said that while America has a legal system that offers liberties to its citizenry, he has sensed that there is an invisible constraint and that Americans are accustomed to it.

“In a developed country like America, its system and society has been stabilized,” he said. “I feel some of the laws and regulations tend to serve the current set-up, the monopoly, and the business monopolies have hung over people’s lives.”

So here comes the trade-off between personal freedom and academic performance.

Sun is not alone. Lacking guidance, many Chinese students I have talked to said they had the similar experience of living a “cage-free” life during their initial semesters at Iowa. It was not until they saw their first semester GPA they realized that they had had “abused” the freedom.

•••

Taking the example of pharmacy, Zheng said, it would be easier to open up a pharmacy in China, because in America, a small pharmacy is unlikely to survive because of the existence of CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart.

Rao Fu transferred from Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist University United International College to the UI in 2011. After coming to the United States, she told me, she was glad to be gone from the concept of collectivity in Chinese culture.

“Respectively speaking, things are more flexible in China, although there are lots of irregular phenomena there,” Zheng said. “Our market is not as mature as it is in America after all.”

While in China, Fu said, she had adapted herself to the communal life. She never felt lonely because her self-awareness was weakened by a dominant ideology, which made her swim with the tide without feeling being controlled.

••• During his first year at the UI, Runxin Sun, the 19-year-old sophomore, partied every weekend, skipped school as much as he possibly could, and dropped classes whenever he felt he was not able to complete them. He ended up being placed on academic probation during his second semester at the UI. Being forced to study in high school, Sun said, he had followed the notion that study had been imposed on him by parents, school, and the society, but he did not see it as his own responsibility.

He acknowledged that he believed this when he came to the United States. In a place in which no one forced him to do anything, he was too free.

“Here in America, nobody required me to be

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obedient, nobody gave me guidance, nobody disciplined me,” he said. “I was surrounded by a sense of crisis while on the academic probation; I didn’t want to be dismissed.”

“In America, I don’t like being in any circle, no matter if it’s American or Chinese, and so I feel like I’m living on the margin,” Fu said.

Because of the marginalization, she said, she has gained much more space and time to think, to make choices, and to deal with herself.

“I feel like I’m a grain of sand in America, meaning that I have become an entire individual,” the 23-year-old said.

Enjoying the spiritual state of being free and independent, she acknowledged that she has experienced the loneliness that accompanies that.

“But I’ve become more and more accustomed to the loneliness,” Fu said. “I think it’s a growth process, and I’ve found the balance point within the loneliness I have.”

For Fu, her precious personal freedom is almost like a privilege gained at a high cost; it is not an inherited natural right, such as the freedom of speech.

Here in the United States, I do have a lot of freedom that I once longed for in China, and choices are everywhere, including the whole table of “uglies” (at one of the tomato tables) for me to choose from at the Farmers’ Market. I have also realized that freedom is not everything.

Had I not spent my summer back in China, where I hung around in restaurants, coffee shops, and pubs with two of my professor friends, talking, joking, and trading gossip, I would have forgotten how much I had desired such deep, meaningful conversations with no worries about being politically incorrect or about crossing any boundaries.

One night, when we were about to say goodbye at a coffee shop in my home city of Hangzhou, my friend Yinjie noticed I was wearing a pair of red-brown vintage jelly sandals. She said, “They are just like the ones Mi Lan wears.” (Mi Lan is one of the main characters in a 1994 Chinese movie In the Heat of the Sun, set during the Cultural Revolution in Beijing, who symbolized a mentality of breaking free from social straitjackets at the time.) Then my friend laughed, seeming to realize something. “Americans wouldn’t talk about Mi Lan with you, huh?”

I was so struck by the sense of belonging in the moment she said that.

I thought what an important moment it was. And I came to the conclusion that ultimately I’d rather have that sense of belonging – of familiarity and comfort – than having all the freedom that comes with living in the United States – as well as all the loneliness. My friend was right.

Americans would never talk about Mi Lan with me.

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World Citizen:

Getting Somewhere

毕业去哪儿

The story was originally published in The Daily Iowan on October 9, 2013.

Like every international student, I have been asked a million times: do you want to stay in the States or do you want to return to your home country after graduation?

It’s a difficult question for me — and, as it turns out, for a lot of other Chinese students as well. From my perspective, I would love to stay in the United States. But at the same time it’s difficult for tens of thousands of international students such as me to secure jobs and working visas.

Since my arrival in the United States, the conventional wisdom is that for foreign nationals, the likelihood of getting a job in this country with a degree in journalism is slim. And yet, the idea of going back to China and working as a journalist there had terrified me so much that I didn’t want to think about it.

So the answer simply became: “I want to go to graduate school here.” But truthfully, I was never sure how much I really wanted to continue studying right after college. And so despite the tough decisions ahead, I simply chose avoidance.

Until now – because I’m a senior and will finally have to make the choice: do I look for a job, or do I prepare for the GRE? 26

engineering, 63 percent in computer science, and 60 percent in industrial engineering. A pending Congress action would grant international students in STEM more visas to remain in the States, according to the report.

So job pictures look bleak in both countries — where do you want to be? I asked my fellow Chinese students.

••• I’m not the only person worrying about securing a job in the United States and, more importantly, obtaining a working visa.

A 2009 national study titled “Losing the World’s Best and Brightest” found that 54 percent of Chinese students would like to stay in the United States for a few years after graduation “if given a choice.” But for most foreigners, there was no choice given. The research shows that 85 percent of the Chinese worried about obtaining H-1B visas. Roughly 76 percent of Chinese worried about getting jobs.

Garry Klein, the director of program assessment and research at the University of Iowa Pomerantz Career Center, said roughly 15 percent of U.S. employers hire foreign nationals, including international students, meaning these organizations are willing to sponsor H-1B working visas for those people they value.

But there are far more people who would like to work in the States than the H-1B visas granted.

Around 764,495 international students were enrolled at American universities during the 2011-12 academic year.

Roughly 40 percent of the 194,029 Chinese students were undergraduate students, according to a recent report by the Institute of International Education.

There are certain fields in which Chinese students are more qualified than U.S. residents, and thus, it is easier for them to stay on in the United States because the country needs them badly, Klein said, referring to the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields.

“The employers are hiring the best their money can buy,” he said.

The National Foundation for American Policy reported in July that international graduate students account for 70 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical

Coincidentally, Chinese students are seeking master’s degrees in both China and the United States. to avoid being jobless. Here in Iowa City, Chinese students expect to gain more experiences in their fields if they hold a graduate degree. They are also hesitant to go back to China, concerned about the social instability, connection-driven society reality, and environmental problems that they cannot control yet can affect their livelihood in every way — which are opportunities in some people’s eyes.

Rao Fu and I were in the same natural-science class first semester of freshman year — later we dropped the class because it was a “disaster” for us.” She is the first person I talked to about job prospects after my arrival at Iowa, and later I found her again for this interview.

The senior’s plan after graduation is to attend graduate school for more in-depth knowledge to get closer to her job prospect — becoming a chartered financial analyst in America.

“It’s almost impossible [for an international student] to get a job in the U.S. with an undergraduate degree today,” said the finance and risk management & insurance major. “From what I’ve heard, none of the Chinese students who majored in finance in the College of Business got a job in the U.S. this year.”

Knowing that job prospects are also slim for us back home, Fu said, “You have to have some connections to get somewhere.”

The New York Times recently reported that the unemployment rate of people age 21

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to 25 with college degrees was 16 percent, while only 4 percent of those who only get an elementary-school level education are unemployed, because China’s manufacturing-driven economy has a persistent demand for blue-collar workers.

Whether overseas students with degrees from recognized American universities have brighter job prospects in China is unknown, but are those who have invested significant amount of money and time in their education willing to be blue-collar workers if they cannot secure white-collar jobs?

Fu, who calls herself “a feminist and a cynic,” said the reason she does not want to go return home in at least the next five years is that she is “in the opposite direction of the social development in China.”

A more direct reason, she said, is “life is easier here.” She would like to earn more money to pay her mom back for the cost of her studies in the United States.

“The employment system is incomplete in China,” Fu said, a daughter of local government officials in Henan Province. “Further, I’ve heard enough about political struggles and bureaucratic chaos in Chinese companies.

Those would irritate me to death if I were there.”

However, Fu, whose 22nd birthday wish was that China will become more democratic, said eventually, she will return home, and she hopes to do something for her country when she has the ability to do so.

Wang, who possesses the goal of working with a nongovernmental organization in America to help poor people with their finances, said she is preparing to seek a master’s degree in finance. She hopes that she can equip herself little by little in the next few years of graduate study for landing a job in the United States – and admitted she didn’t think she could adjust to a life in China.

“I love my culture, and I think Chinese people are lovely,” Fu said. “I believe China will become a democracy some day. As long as I am not starving to death, I sure will do something for China, even if it’s a tiniest bit.”

“I’m too idealistic and not sophisticated enough to know how things work in China,” she said.

•••

Wang said if she saw the poor people’s situations in China, she would feel helpless, because she does not think she will be able to help them without government guarantees. But in America, she said, she might be able to help the poor with her skills and abilities due to a healthier social-security system.

Bo Wang, a finance and art major and Henan native, the same province Fu comes from, has a different plan — she hopes to live in the United States and eventually become an American citizen.

“I never want to return to China after gradu-

28

ation; I didn’t leave myself a way out the moment I [left] for the U.S. three years ago,” Wang said unhesitatingly.

That said, she claims not to mind if she were to lead a tough life with no prospects in America.

Her father supports Wang’s hopes of staying in the States and eventually getting a U.S. passport.

“My dad had wanted me to become an American citizen before he sent me to study abroad,” Wang said, who noted she does not have the sense of national boundaries. “He knew that I’m too idealistic to live in China. He thought that if one day I got into trouble while my parents were not in the world, the American government might protect me.”

She said if she were not able to stay in the United States on her own, her father would by all means help her. But she does not want to rely on his support.

“I don’t want to get to the point where I have to stay on in the States with his help,” said Wang, who this past summer made about 300 cups of smoothies every shift at the Tropical Smoothies in the Recreation & Wellness Center.

••• Another student I met during this project is Yue Lei, who would one day like to work in the United States. I stopped him outside the Bread Garden Market while having lunch there.

The psychology and economics major has two years left in college, and he has decided to pursue a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology after graduation, knowing that getting an H1-B work visa is almost mission-impossible for an international college graduate.

The concern of finding work right away back in China is one of the factors that contributed to his decision to pursue a Ph.D. here, Lei said.

However, he said, he is open to any option that will suit his future seven years later after he gets a Ph.D. “I used to have a strong desire for staying in America,” said Lei, who said he is not worried about his job prospects in either country after he gets a Ph.D. “But later, I started to realize that it’s not about if I want to be somewhere, it’s about which place suits my personal and career development, which is a result of multiple factors working together.”

UI junior Di Liu will not graduate from the UI until 2015, but he is preparing for the GMAT. He said that he would give himself three years to gain some work experience in the United States after finishing graduate study in finance if it would be possible.

And he will move back home afterward.

“I’m the only child in my family,” said Liu, who said he still holds some feudalistic thoughts. “I would be an undutiful son if I were not going back home, since my parents won’t move to America.”

The 21-year-old also said he thinks it will be difficult for him to

fit in society if he stayed in America, because he has lived in China for 18 years, where everything is familiar to him. In addition, he feels that working in America as a non-native speaker is disadvantageous and will limit his job opportunities.

Interestingly, the harsh realities that worry other people mean an opportunity for Liu. “On one hand, I may help complete the Chinese financial system with my expertise,” said Liu, who said his goal is to eventually work at an investment bank. “On the other, if your parents are capable of supporting your study abroad, they must have some connections in China. Even if you can’t find a job, they might be able to get you one, allowing you to start at a higher level, as opposed to starting from scratch in the U.S.” ••• A thousand people can give a thousand reasons whether they want to stay or to return home after graduation. Life is not easy anywhere. The hope is, the global economy will recover soon and China will become a better country, so that staying or returning will no longer be a tough question with so many factors that we cannot control to consider but purely a personal choice.

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This story was originally published on Dec. 2, 2013 with the help of IowaWatch in The Des Moines Register, The Gazette (Cedar Rapids, IA) and Mason City Globe Gazette.

Invisible Wives Of Students And Scholars In Iowa Without Work, Friends, Purpose

隐形太太

Anna Kolpakova stands by her kitchen counter in Iowa City, dumping flour from a coffee mug into a mixing bowl. She turns to consult a laptop atop the microwave oven where the cake recipe passed down from her mother – in Slovak – is displayed, then refills the mug, this time with sugar, which goes into the bowl as well.

Kolpakova is making a cup cake, with a cup of flour, a cup of sugar and a cup of vegetable oil. In Slovakia, her home country, flour is measured in grams instead of ounces and cups. A physicist, she doesn’t like converting measurement units, so she measures with her eyes and experience.

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Kolpakova, 28, has turned baking into a hobby since she moved to Iowa City in June with her Czech husband David Pisa, who is completing postdoctoral research in physics at the University of Iowa. She spends at least one afternoon a week making cakes, having started baking “just for fun” and to alleviate boredom, she said.

The boredom comes with her status as the dependent of a visiting scholar, and others among these temporary Iowans at the state’s public universities are dealing the same problem. They either cannot work or have to apply for government permission to work, which costs money to work. Some put advanced studies on hold to follow a spouse to Iowa. Many do not have connections that result in meaningful relationships with others.

Dependent wives of international students and scholars generally lack a support system and feel marginalized, with economic strains often accentuating the tensions, Yalem Teshome, an Iowa State University adjunct assistant professor of anthropology, said.

“You don’t have the cultural capital, social capital, social connections and you don’t have the income if you don’t have a wealthy family who can potentially support you,” Teshome said.

“I think that’s just something that no one knows at this point of time why it was created like that,” Lee Seedorff, a senior associate director of the UI’s International Student and Scholar Services, said.

The primary federal statute dealing with immigration is the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. But finding the origin of the restrictions is not as easy as reading the law.

For example, the J and F programs are administered by two different parts of the U.S. government.

Teshome herself is originally from Ethiopia.

She began studying the experiences of wives of international students in the United States as a dissertation topic at ISU.

The J visa classification for visiting foreign students and scholars is administered by the Department of State, while the Department of Homeland Security deals with students and their dependents in the F visa classification.

VISA REGULATIONS DICTATE SPOUSE OPTIONS

“It could just be the simple thought that F-2s are just more individuals who could potentially be taking jobs that Americans would be completing for,” Seedorff said.

As an exchange scholar, Pisa has a J-1 visa, and as his dependent Kolpakova holds a J-2 visa, which requires that she have a work permit from the U.S. government in order to seek employment.

The situation is even more restrictive for spouses of students enrolled in degree programs – international students have F-1 visas and their dependents, holding F-2 visas, are prohibited from either working or pursuing academic degrees, according to the Title 8 of the Code of Federal Regulations.

Teshome said laws restricting spouses of international students might arise from the assumption that wives not only would have children to take care of but that these women were uneducated and did not aspiring to have outside job opportunities.

Michael Bortscheller, a senior advisor of the UI’s International Student and Scholar Services, said 752 F-2 and J-2 dependents, including both spouses and children, are with 492 students and scholars from 54 different countries at the University of Iowa.

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Deborah Vance, associate director of the International Students and Scholars Office at Iowa State University, said 208 F-2 and J-2 spouses are at ISU. The University of Northern Iowa has 39 F-2 spouses, according to Immigration and Visa Coordinator Ross Schupbach.

On each campus, most of the dependent spouses are women.

According to the Code of Federal Regulations, spouses in J-2 status may work if they get an Employment Authorization Document (EAD) from the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

But achieving social and intellectual connections is hard. Making friends with other international spouses is difficult, she said, because women her age in similar situations usually have children and are too busy to get together with her. Even in the women’s club, she feels isolated because women from China, Japan, Korea and Mexico stay within their own groups during coffee breaks, speaking languages she doesn’t understand.

Kolpakova applied for her EAD in September, paying a $380 fee. “Like everything in America, it takes three months to get the paperwork through,” she said.

Making friends with Americans is even harder, she said.

She finds most Americans to be friendly but seldom going beyond polite niceties. Kolpakova repeated a conversation with people at a local church that she says is typical:

FROM EASTERN EUROPE TO IOWA

“Where are you from?”

“We’re from Czech Republic and Slovakia.”

“Oh, it’s nice. My grandmother/mother of my grandmother was from Czechoslovakia. I can say in Czech ‘How are you?’”

Without a timer, Kolpakova checks the cake several times until it is done. Taking it from the oven, she covers it carefully with apple slices preserved in a jelly jar — another time-consuming homemaking skill she probably would not have mastered in the Czech Republic, where she was a third-year doctoral student in physics before journeying to the United States.

Kolpakova and Pisa had dated for six years when they married in May, prompted by the Iowa post-doc offer. Becoming his wife – a legal dependent – meant she could accompany him to the United States.

“So when he got the opportunity, it kind of pushed him to propose to me,” she said.

Other women who had accompanied their husbands abroad told her the wives stay home all day and don’t have local friends.

She didn’t relish that scenario.

“I told him, half a year is fine, one year is fine, but three years is a long time, because I don’t want to sit home three years and to just be a housewife,” she said. So they decided to come to Iowa just for a year.

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Along with her new kitchen hobbies, Kolpakova works on her English language skills. On Mondays and Wednesdays she attends a free English class at Kirkwood Community College. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings she attends English classes offered by the Iowa City International Women’s Club (IWC). On Fridays she meets with an English conversation group at the Iowa City Public Library.

“And that’s it,” Kolpakova summarized.

Even so, she said she needs to get out of their apartment near downtown Iowa City. But she doesn’t want to spend too much of her husband’s money because he is the only one earning income for the family at the moment. The couple eats out for dinner once a week — their “Friday date.”

In short, Kolpakova feels lonely. Before coming to Iowa City, she expected to make friends with people from all over the world, but the reality turned out far different.

“We don’t have friends,” she said with a sigh.

Kolpakova said she hopes working moves her out of the margins of Iowa City life.

Kolpakova’s latest baked creation is cooling, and she anticipates that her husband will have one or two pieces when he gets home from work. He’ll pack up the remainder to take to his colleagues the next day – they are getting used to the constant flow of treats generated by his wife’s new hobby. Kolpakova doesn’t touch the stuff.

She doesn’t like sweets.

PUTTING A CAREER ON HOLD

Patricia Leon, 45, a native of Columbia, is trying to leave the margins of Iowa City life, too, but is on an even more restricted F-2 visa. She is a dependent of her graduate student husband Gonzalo Pinilla, in F-1 status, with no prospect at all of legal employment.

A college photography instructor in Columbia, Leon said she made the biggest decision of her life last year when she agreed to travel to the United States with Pinilla and their 8-year-old son Santiago. In leaving their small hometown near Columbia’s capital Bogotá, they also left behind relatives, friends, careers and the house Gonzalo built himself on a mountainside.

Her husband’s pursuit of an M.F.A in printmaking at the UI is a dream opportunity, she said. “We have few opportunities in our country. We are artists, we don’t have resources we need there.” The couple also hoped that their son would become more proficient in English and receive a better education in the United States.

But Leon did not realize she’d be barred from working.

After teaching photography for nearly 12 years at a Columbian university, she found herself a stay-at-home mom in Iowa City.

“It make me depressed because I used to work eight hours a day with young people in the university,” said Leon, whose photographs have been exhibited in galleries and cultural centers in Spain, Japan, Italy, Mexico and Columbia. “I feel lonely because my husband is always outside and my son at school.”

Leon said she never complains to Pinilla about her housewife duties – doing laundry, washing dishes and cleaning the apartment.

Rather, she is concerned about her husband’s health. Besides his teaching assistantship, he works long hours in housekeeping at the UI Hospitals and Clinics.

Employment restrictions also apply to F-1 students. They can work, but normally only on campus. They need to apply for an employment authorization, but can do so off campus if the job is related to their areas of study.

Leon said her albeit temporary loss of professional identity not only makes her feel lonely

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at home, but too dependent on her husband.

new work to exhibit after returning to Columbia.

“I have to ask him for money to shop,” she said. “We used to go traveling or go to cinema in our country. We can’t do it here because we’re trying to save money. We only spend money on things we have to have.”

Leon’s son Santiago, a third grader at Borlaug Elementary School in Coralville, loves American football, but the family can’t afford to pay for a youth league.

However, they find diversion in free concerts and free movies on campus, Leon said.

F-2 visa holders cannot seek a degree or study full-time but can take courses on a recreational or avocational basis, meaning casual classes unrelated to their degrees or professions at home.

Rules proposed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would let dependents of F-1 foreign students study in their chosen field as long as they are not full-time students.

Taking casual classes at the UI is not always an option for people like Leon. Although she loved the jewelry and metal arts course she took last year through the UI’s School of Art and Art History, she is not taking more because they are too expensive, she said.

Yet she remains optimistic, seeing this as a gap year. She finally has free time to focus on her own projects and is doing photography in Iowa City, hoping to have

Leon also seeks other opportunities to leave her apartment on Westwinds Drive, on Iowa City’s west side, volunteering for the UI Museum of Art and attending English classes, always carrying her cameras as she explores her new surroundings.

FROM DEPENDENT STATUS TO BEING A STUDENT

Yike Li, 25, did not get to go to her graduate school commencement ceremony to accept her master’s degree in finance in June. She was in transit to Iowa City from her home city of Chongqing, China, joining her husband Jiajia Li, who was pursuing a doctorate in mechanical engineering at the UI. Sitting in the main library on campus, the young woman wearing

ABOUT THE IOWA CITY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S CLUB

a pair of black Dr. Martens 1460 combat boots looks no different than any college student around her. In fact, she hopes to become one soon.

Yike Li came to the U.S. with a plan to trade up in the visa ladder, changing from an F-2 dependent to an F-1 full-time student like her husband. She is preparing for the GRE test, hoping to get into graduate school at the UI, although she hasn’t yet determined a program.

She said her husband had warned her that life in Iowa might be boring, and indeed, she found it to be so. She also found herself with unfamiliar burdens.

“I didn’t do any housework while living with my parents, but here I have to do all the housework every day and prepare meals for my husband, and I don’t like it,” she said.

Like Kolpakova and Leon, Li said she lacks friends in Iowa City. She sometimes talks to her American neighbors in student housing, but is hesitant to knock on their door because of language and cultural barriers.

The Iowa City International Women’s Club was founded 52 years ago to support the wives of international students and scholars. Kathy Fait of West Branch, a club volunteer for nearly three decades, said she got involved after being a trailing spouse abroad. When she started, Fait said, few international wives could drive and most were homebound. Many drive now, arrive with some English skills and often have higher education.

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So most afternoons, Li goes to the campus library, picks up a copy of The New York Times and sits in the first floor commons area, memorizing GRE vocabulary words.

ISU’s Teshome said U.S. colleges and universities have become increasingly reliant on international students for enrollments, without corresponding changes in policy and law.

In the 2012-13 academic year, a record high number of 819,644 international students and scholars on U.S. campuses contributed an estimated $24.7 billion to the U.S. economy, according to the 2013 Open Doors Report released by the Institute of International Education. Teshome said accompanying wives in particular deserve better conditions, including access to educational and professional opportunities.

“I’m always afraid that I’d be offensive due to cultural differences,” she said. “Plus, I don’t understand all the stuff that they talk, and I’m also afraid that they’d be impatient when it takes me a while to form a complete sentence.”

“Students have become more and more selective on where they want to go, what kind of degree they want,” she said. “So that eventually will become an issue that the couple will ask what kind of support system, what kind of opportunity exists for my partner when we go if we wait long enough.”

•••

Li sometimes regrets coming to the United States rather than settling into a job in China.

“My friends in China are all at work. I know that I won’t feel good if I go back because they’d be at a higher point. But I’d have to start from scratch,” she said.

Anna Kolpakvoa sent out a joyous e-mail early in November that began with “Juhuuuu!!!” – the Slovak equivalent of “Yayyyyy!!!” Her U.S. government work permit had arrived in her mailbox; finally she could find something else to do besides attending English classes and baking.

“They think I speak excellent English here, but that’s not true. I don’t have many chances to interact with people.” At times she misses home enough to cry, she said, but returning is not an option because it would be a “loss of face.”

As she crafts her personal statement, draws up references and prepares for job interviews, her husband and his colleagues continue to eat cake.

As long as she has the time, she’s carrying on with the hobby that has become a routine of her American life.

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Photos of the Soong sisters and Lin Huiyin are from the Wikimedia Commons.

In 1881, Jin Yunmei arrived in the United States from China as a young woman of 17. Four years later, when few Chinese men had the opportunity to study abroad while the overwhelming majority of women remained uneducated, Jin received her medical degree from the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, becoming the first female Chinese on record to have an U.S. education.

女留学生: 今时不同往日

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Times Changing for Chinese Women

Hundreds more Chinese women followed Jin’s step as the 20th century unfolded. The best known among them, were the Soong sisters, Ai-ling, Ching-ling and May-ling, daughters of a Shanghai-based industrialist and missionary, who attended Wesleyan College, a private college in Georgia, during 1904 - 08. Returning to China after graduations, the sisters married to political and business leaders, who used their Western education to help shape the politics and economy of modern China.

Women like the Soong sisters from urban elite families, although not representative at the time, were extraordinary pioneers in pursuit of higher education and professional careers.

Yet they remained a small proportion of overseas Chinese. In 1922, out of 1,446 Chinese students in America, only 135 were women, according to a study of Chinese female students in the United States from the 1880s through 1990s by Huping Ling, a history professor at Truman State University.

Approaching a century later, he world today is much different. What was then a dying feudal empire is now the world’s second largest economy. Students from China now contribute the largest population of international students in the United States. Plus, far more Chinese women are far are seeking a Western education.

The University of Iowa campus alone hosts 2,111 Chinese students as of Fall 2013, 1,070 of them are female, according to Michael Bortscheller, a senior advisor of the UI’s International Student and Scholar Services.

Studying overseas remains exceptional, if not as socially prestigious as before. Today’s female Chinese students come from more diverse backgrounds. Mostly are single children bearing high expectations from parents, some are trying to escape cultural conventions and social and gender norms, but whereas some others accept traditional labels and roles.

Gender equality has been emphasized since 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was founded. But the famous Mao slogan, “Women hold up half the sky” hasn’t been powerful enough to replace the Confucian legacy of male supremacy.

On top of a competitive job market, limited upward mobility and the pressure to take care of parents in later life, the traditional burden of fulfilling the female role still persists in China — and these can all be driving forces to study abroad, said Lisa Rose Weaver, who worked as a journalist in China and now teaches journalism at Iowa.

“China as you have this contrast — you have all this money, but coupled with a sense of insecurity and really fast accelerated social change and economic change,” she said, “coupled with traditional ideas that really haven’t changed.”

•••

In 1911, Chingling Soong, the middle Soong sister suggested China run a western style of government and that the overseas returnees had improved the Chinese government body in an article, “The Influence of Foreign-Educated Students on China,” published in her college magazine.

Four years later, Soong married Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the Republic of China, despite her parents’ strong opposition. She carried her husband’s political legacy on after his death. During the later Chinese Civil War, while her sisters supported the right-wing power under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, husband of her younger sister May-ling, she turned to the Communist Party, finally breaking with her family.

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Jingjing Li, 20, came to America in 2011 from Shanghai, where Soong was from, avoiding the extremely competitive “gaokao”— College Entrance Examination in China. She studies accounting, because her mother wanted her to and she doesn’t dislike it.

her little sister was born. Her mother hopes that she could stay in the United Stated in the future because she would have to stay alone if she returns to Shanghai, but she would not be likely to work in Hong Kong as she is not a citizen there, Li said.

Li is now under stress — on one hand, she blames herself for being too plain, too unambitious, and not sociable enough to stand out among business peers.

On the other, she feels obligated to be excellent to live up to her parents’ expectations, because “every minute I spend in America is earned by my parents.”

“My mom said, ‘Well, if you’ll be alone either where, why don’t you stay in the better place?’” Li said, although deep down she wants to be back to Shanghai.

“Also, it would be seen as a loss of face if I return.”

“My mom has said, ‘I sent you to study abroad because I wanted you to update yourself to a higher level,” Li said.

Her mother, a Hong Kong-based financial analyst, has also said landing a husband who is “men dang hu dui” — “matched for marriage” — is the ultimate goal of her overseas education.

“I could imagine if I were still single at 30, my mom would go crazy,” the she said.

Li’s family has moved to Hong Kong since two years ago when

The pressure of seeking the possibility of having a foothold as well as establishing a family outside of China a can be looked at in economic terms, Weaver said.

“There’s a pretty pragmatic economic unity aspect to marriage in China,” she said. “You marry into a family, you become an economic unit. If you run a business, it’s a family business, everybody has a part in this business.”

Asked if she agree with her mother’s statement of marriage being a woman’s second life, Li said, “Yes, you update yourself through education, but isn’t the ultimate goal to marry a man?”

But she also wondered, “If that is true, how pathetic [my life] would be!”

Li’s roommate Qiuting Zhou, 22, with whom I took rhetoric class last year, doesn’t relish that idea.

Coming to the United States for a sense of cultural freedom in 2011, Zhou said she had been an outlier, constantly breaking rules, loathing the uniformity of thoughts in Chinese society.

Her teachers since junior high had never favored her because they thought she had too many ideas and was too complicated.

When she had countless questions about life, future, relationships, society… no one believed it was worth discussing, so she had to turn to philosophy books for help.

Zhou was raised up in an unusual way in China — she was taught to be independent as a girl and not to rely on men.

But her male friends didn’t like that type of women. “They would think these girls too sophisticated to be controlled,” she said.

Even her female friends limited themselves, Zhou said, for example, “I thought women are entitled to choose when to get married instead of marrying somebody at the age around 27 just because most people think it is the time,” Zhou said, referring to the “leftover women” notion in China. “They’d think I was odd and undutiful.”

Although her parents don’t really care if they could marry her off at a certain age, they do hope her to “do right things at right times.”

“I guess they hope I can maximize my benefits — to get married and have children when I’m

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young and dynamic with fewer obstacles.” Generally, Chinese parents want their children to lead a trouble-free life, she said. “[They would think] if you could live a comfortable life, why bother picking another one with more hardship?”

But she is not fear about hardship; she has made up her mind to stay on in the United States after graduation no matter how difficult it will be.

In 1922 — 11 years after the overthrow of the monarchy and three years after the outbreak of the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal May Fourth Movement led by revolutionary Chinese students that marked the turning point of intellectual domain in modern China — a Chinese student Rosalind Mei-Tsung Li criticized her fellow female Chinese students for chasing correctness and usefulness and lacking ideals in an article titled, “The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Women” published in The Chinese Students’ Monthly, she encouraged her peers to free themselves from social restrictions and discard the uniformity.

Meimei Han, a pseudonym, 25, is another of those seeking independence and liberation.

Coming from a traditional family and a relatively conservative small town, she has suffered enough from traditional dogmas, she said. Her American education has helped her reassess the world, and view social norms for what they are: “The traditional values imposed on women are biased, constraining women in lots of ways.”

Han refeels the new mores of developing China: a comfortable life, marry and have a child

at a young age, and not try to achieve. “Bullshit,” she calls it.

“If [my mom and relatives] continue forcing me to rush into marriage,” she added mischievously, “I’m gonna be a nun.”

Prior to her arrival in Iowa City in Spring 2010, she had studied health management in China for three years. At Iowa she majored in mathematics and planned to pursue a Ph.D against her parents’ wishes.

“They thought it’d be hard to secure a good job with a degree in math, thus, my life would be tougher,” she said. “They were more afraid I’d become a nerd and not likely to be find a boyfriend.”

Graduating with a B.S. in mathematics last May, Han spoke to me in late October while she was packing for returning to her small hometown in Anhui Province. She has since returned to China.

Sadly, Han said, though she believes the conventional ideas irrational, she is still subconsciously tied to them. She cares about what others think of her — a woman of 25 wants to pursue a Ph.D in mathematics instead of settling down sounds just crazy.

So to compromise, she will apply a master’s program and come back to America and wait and see if she will continue.

Weaver, a Californian, was astonished when she first went to China at the age of 22 that educated women around her in their mid-20s were either married or hoping to be — said marriage in China is not simply a personal issue.

“It is about parents, it’s about society, it’s about a feeling that

a women’s life didn’t seem to be complete unless she was married,” she said. More importantly, it’s about security. “If you don’t have children, who’s gonna take care of you when you’re older?”

Weaver sees the Chinese pushing their daughters into marriage as a reflection of the feeling of insecurity about their children’s future and theirs as well, which also prompts them to send children abroad. “It’s everybody’s future.”

“Even with all that money in the Chinese economy and upward mobility, which studying abroad is a by-product of,” she said, “People are clearly insecure with what social security is going to be like in China, what is aging going to be like in China, you know, is upward mobility limited based on who you know and your access.”

••• A century ago, in that turbulent old world, revolutionary Chinese women journeyed to the United States with an emerging self-consciousness and a determination to become modern women. Yet after numerous times of movements and reforms and revolutions, the burden of traditional notions of womanhood is still persistent among China’s rapid economic growth and social changes.

The number of Chinese studying abroad is likely to rise in the next few decades given the rise of the Chinese economy. Women will keep coming to the United Stated for one reason or another.

Some may stay and a lot of them will return. Will they open up another vision for women back home and change the role of women in China?

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