Chinese Freshmen in American Colleges Facing Challenges

The University of Iowa, like many universities around the US, has seen an increase in freshmen from China


One night in August, right before the fall semester started, I shopped at a local Walmart. Bumping into a few Chinese fellows at Walmart is common here in Iowa City, but never to such an extent like that night.

Mandarin chattings on what to buy, or guessing the use of some gadgets, etc. filled my ears from aisle to aisle. Everywhere I looked or moved, there would be a few Chinese people nearby. They were young and stylish, loading their shopping carts with everything from fruits to rice cookers and furniture. Some of them were shopping with a team, staffed by their parents, with the mother and child browsing through the shelf while the father pushing heavily-loaded shopping cart behind.

Make no mistake, they were the incoming freshmen at the University of Iowa from China, and they were brought to Walmart by two fully-occupied big school buses that night.

As the university struggle to balance its cost and revenue amid steep budget cuts, international students came to the rescue, since they pay full tuition instead of in-state tuition. That is, $23,713 vs. $7,417 per year, according to numbers shown on the UI website. Plus living expenses, health insurance mandated for international students, as well as books, these Chinese students, or, precisely speaking, their parents, are paying around $36,000 per year.

The New York Times ran an article in early August about the challenge to house all these international freshmen at UI. Among about 430 of them this year coming to UI, nearly 350 are from China alone, the New York Times reports. But for these Chinese students, the challenge goes way beyond finding a place to sleep.

After the first meeting of a journalism history class, for instance, four Chinese students came to the professor complaining that they didn’t understand the lecture, and couldn’t take notes. I am an instructor for two sections of the same history class, and the two Chinese students registered for one section dropped out in the first week.

I talked to a Chinese girl in my other section, and she admitted facing language barrier, especially for a journalism class. One day after class, she asked if she could speak Chinese when discussing a class related question with me. I said no. I told her she better speak English, because that was the reason she came to the US to study.

Nationwide in the US, steady increase in enrollment of undergrads from China has been a trend for a few years. In the 2004-05 academic year, 8,299 Chinese undergrads were enrolled in American universities. The number keeps rising year after year, to 26,275 in 2008-09 academic year, according to data collected by the Institute of International Education. Peggy Blumenthal, IIE’s executive vice president, contributed the increase to the rise of an economically strong middle class in China, their determination to provide the best education to their only child, as well as the scarcity of high quality college education within China, according to Inside Higher Ed.

The large number of incoming Chinese freshmen has caught the attention of Chinese students and professionals already at UI, and there is this sense that most of these kids are not able to get into a decent university in China through the competitive college entrance examination. At the same time, many people, including people not from China, wonder how these families can afford four years of higher education in the U.S.

Thousands of young Chinese men and women have made it to the US to pursue college education in recent years. These post-80s youth have far stronger purchasing power than my generation of the studying-abroad Chinese. But studying abroad is more than a shopping trip. I hope they have also the perseverance and diligence to overcome all the challenges and get the education they paid for.

Read more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/education/04admissions.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=the%20university%20of%20iowa,%20august%203&st=cse

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/25/chinese

http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/dmr/index.php/2010/08/28/chinese-students-at-isu-one-of-iowas-biggest-exports-to-china/

Story of the Other Side

Lin Yulan had good reasons to pronounce her whole life a failure.

Her revolutionary course with the nationalists in pre-communist China, to which she devoted the heyday of her life, was denounced and forgotten in her homeland once the communist party won the civil war. She fled to Taiwan, along with other nationalist elites. Personally, the man she married to cheated on her throughout their marriage, no matter in Guangzhou or Taiwan. Worst of all, amid the chaos and despair right before they fled the mainland, her only son wandered away in the city of Guangzhou, never seen by his parents again.

Lin Yulan is one of the characters in a newly released novel, A Thread of Sky, written by Chinese American writer Deanna Fei. Although not the leading role in the novel, Lin’s story is particularly touching to me, because it made me realize that something is missing, on the part of mainland China, in the representation of last century’s revolution.

Growing up in the mainland, I have known the nationalists almost always as the bad guys, while the communists the good ones, in all kinds of representation of the revolution—novels, movies, television dramas, children’s stories, etc, with Mr. Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) being the only exception. Occasionally, the nationalists are portrayed as heroes, but usually only when they cooperated with or joined the communists. I never got to know how it was like for the individuals who belonged to the other camp, what they experienced, how they felt, and what they had to tell.

Lin Yulan’s story somehow became my first chance to gain some insights. Born and raised on the mainland, Lin rose from the countryside to join the nationalist revolution, fighting for women’s equal rights. Qiu Jin, the legendary female revolutionary who sacrificed her life to overthrow the rule of the Qing court, was Lin’s idol.

I found Lin’s passion and dedication just as strong as her communist counterparts depicted in stories popular in the mainland. They might have served different party, but they had the same goal of liberating Chinese women from cruel depression and above all, to change China.

Lin’s story is also the first one that shows me the personal distress and pain experienced by the nationalists when escaping the mainland. It was chaos, fear, and misery. Mainland stories never gave much attention to the kind of human suffering the other side lived through.

The corruption of some nationalist officials notwithstanding, thousands of individuals like Lin in the nationalist party fought, died and shed blood for the revolution: first to overthrow the Qing ruling, later to defend the nation against Japanese invasion. Their life, their struggle, their pain and sacrifice should also be recognized and remembered in mainland China, as have been done with stories of communist revolutionaries.

As mainland cultural workers increasingly try to move the focus of narrative from prominent historic figures to ordinary individuals in the communist camp, more similar stories should be devoted to the nationalists as well. The commemoration of the revolutionary achievements of the nationalists should not be limited to showing the giant portrait of Sun Zhongshan on the Tiananmen Square during the October 1 national holiday. The younger generations of China deserve to know a more accurate and complete version of the revolutionary history. To quote from the novel, “But her [Lin Yulan’s]sacrifices, even forgotten, had made a difference.”

Related article: 
For a Chinese-American Writer, Split Images of China

Google to Resume Search Service in China: A Win-Win Solution?

The Chinese government renewed Google's Internet service license recently, the Associated Press reported today.

The catch? Google ought to stop automatically directing mainland users to its Hong Kong-based search site, which is not cencored by the Chinese government. Meanwhile, to continue to operate within China, Google is very likely to filter information as required  by the government.

This seems to be a win-win solution for both Google and the Chinese authorities.

Google got what it wanted: the chance to expand business and exploit profit potentials in China's growing Internet industry. The Chinese government, on the other hand, eased its tension with Google and perhaps other Western businesses, while at the same time managed to remain its control over information flow.

But what about Chinese web users? While a top American Internet company celebrating its commercial gains and the Chinese authorities chuckling at their political victory, millions of Chinese people hunger for more information are set to be the loser.

Even when Chinese netizens were directed to Google's Hong Kong site, certain information was still blocked to them, according to NPR. Baidu, China's biggest Internet search service, is never interested in challenging the authorities. Now with Google resuming its China-based, i.e. filtered, service, everything is simply same old, same old.

As is Chinese web users' effort to surpass the Great Firewall.  Fortunately for many, access to more information is only a software away.

Related stories:

AP report

NPR blog

A Different China in "The Karate Kid"

The Chinese version of the poster. The title is "Kung Fu Dream." It says on the poster: Kungfu kid, dreams come true in China.

China is no longer the far away, exotic and ancient land, but a modern, familiar place. This is the kind of image “The Karate Kid” presents about China. 

The two-hour-long movie, which opened in the US yesterday, is a remake of a popular 1984 movie of the same title. The year is 2009, and twelve-year-old Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) moves to Beijing with his mom, only to find himself bullied by a group of kung fu-practicing Chinese boys. With help from Mr. Han (Jackie Chan), a kung fu expert disguised as maintenance guy, Dre finally defends himself and wins respect. 

Intentionally or unintentionally, the movie shows a China that is quite different from previous Hollywood productions with a Chinese setting. 

First off, China is not a country where “everything is old.” While looking at a tour book about China on the flight from Detroit to Beijing, Dre tells his mom: “Look, everything in China is old.” 

Arriving in Beijing, on the way from the airport to their apartment, Dre and his mother see the postmodern CCTV tower, the National Stadium (Bird’s Nest) and the car packed streets. “Well, I guess nothing in China is old, huh,” says Dre’s mother. 

Dre is soon to discover that Beijing is, after all, not so foreign. Switching on TV, the first show he sees is “Sponge Bob,” an American cartoon program, although translated into Chinese. 

He plays basketball with Chinese kids in a park, same game as he played in the US. He meets another American boy who lives in the same apartment building. Not to mention that he attends a school that enrolls quite some western teenagers, and everybody eats lunch very much the same way as in American schools, except for the use of chopsticks. 

American music is also not so hard to find in Beijing. Going into a game room, Dre and his Chinese girl friend both show off some American dance on a dancing machine that not only plays American music, but also speaks English. 

Another image about China featured in this movie, but rarely in other Hollywood productions so far, is that of rich people in today’s Beijing, which is new to Chinese society itself. 

The Chinese girl, whom Dre is trying to get close to and consequently bullied for, is from an upper-middle class family in Beijing. Her parents dress nicely, drive a nice car, and live in a fancy court-yard residence with stone lions standing at the gate. They also can afford to hire a western musician to teach their daughter to play violin! 

In reality, this kind of people might not be everywhere in China, but does exist. As a matter of fact, the father character might well resemble one of the creators of this movie, Mr. Han Sanping, president of China Film Group Corporation, the state-owned powerhouse of China’s movie industry. Han Sanping himself is likely the most powerful movie maker in China, having produced international blockbusters such as “Red Cliff” and “Kung Fu Hustle.” People like him, who head profitable state-owned enterprises, have become the most affluent in today’s China.

Still, a movie like this cannot totally leave out China’s rich history and culture. Thus the scenes of the Forbidden City, the Taoist temple in Wudang Mountain, and of course, the Great Wall. Comparing to the scenes of car-packed streets, junk-stuffed narrow alleys, i.e. the messy and hectic inner city, which are fairly truthful portrait of life in Beijing, those from the famous sites seem to demonstrate that China still has some beautiful places. 

A co-production between China Film Group Corporation and Columbia Pictures and set to be released in China on June 22, this movie also intends to make both American and Chinese audience feel good at the end. 

American audience is happy when Dre finally beats up the aggressive Chinese kids, while Chinese audience will be satisfied by the success of Mr. Han, who is arguably the biggest winner. Besides turning Dre into a brilliant kung fu kid, Mr. Han also wins over those aggressive Chinese kids, who decide to turn to him as the true kung fu master. 

For Mr. Han (Sanping), mission accomplished.


More about The Karate Kid (2010)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1155076/