From The Economist, an article on the experiences of Chinese students in American universities.
The article appears specific to undergraduate students from wealthy families China, as opposed to PhD students, although it does mention a political science professor who originally came as a PhD student with $40.
Huh? How is the religion of her mother’s ethnic group an “unfamiliar faith”?
The photo titled “An intellectual awakening – for some Zhou Bo, a sophomore business major, makes notes in a class on Asian politics” does not look good for the student sitting next to Bo.
It’s not easy studying in English if your English reading and writing skills are not excellent…and if you bluff your way in, it will show (or you cheat).
How are state employees’ children driving these cars and wearing fancy stuff? And we are to believe this is not the product of corruption? We are constantly being told how poor China is. But we are only seeing wealth, in the schools, the tourists buying numerous designer bags, cars, etc.
It is a selection bias in that only the kids from the wealthiest families can afford to attend US universities as international undergraduate students. (Students in funded PhD programs are a different story, and presumably live much less visible and flashy lives.)
I knew several wealthy “Chinese” students in college (I’m including mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, etc. in that) and the one common factor is that their parents made sure that they would have near-perfect English. Some of them had native English speakers as nannies or private childhood tutors, and some of them were sent to private English-speaking schools abroad, but every single one was fluent or near-fluent. I wonder why these students, most of whom according to the article seem fairly wealthy, didn’t have the same preparation… surely they had the resources to do so.
@apresski: Well, HK was a British colony (as was Singapore) and many people from those places speak English well. In Taiwan, English education starts young.
Not so much the case in mainland China. Plenty who are well-off do not have English tutors for kids.
The only sentence I see that may imply this is: “Jonathan’s parents – his father is an official at a state-owned enterprise and his mother a businesswoman”.
But state owned enterprise employees are not government officials, they may be 6-figure (US$) managers in big profit-oriented but state-owned businesses. And ‘businesswoman’ could mean anything.
I’m not sure HK folks consider themselves “Chinese”…
It’s a shame there is self-segregation. Interaction would improve their English, and improve the other kids knowledge of China, which we are lacking!
The Chinese government is not exactly welcoming to organized religion outside a few state-sponsored groups. The mother may be a non-practicing Muslim who never passed any information on to her child.
However, Islam is one of the PRC government’s five recognized religions.
Her mother may not practice the religion–just because her ethnic group does, doesn’t mean she does. And it certainly doesn’t mean her children know anything about it.
My mother is (some mysterious and typically American) high percentage Irish, and Irish are Catholics, but I don’t have any particular special knowledge of Catholicism, for example.
That assumption of HK folks only applies to those who spent most/all their time in K-12 where English is the main language of instruction.
Not all HK students even back when HK was still a British colony attended such schools. Those from the lower SES are more likely to attend Chinese language schools from K-12 and there are HK universities where Chinese(Cantonese) is the main language of instruction.
Most of the Chinese-American students I knew in HS/around the NYC area Chinese communities tended to be from this group. They needed much English remediation as their prior schooling/life in HK used Cantonese as the language of everyday life including school.
I’ve also known HK immigrants who were also proficient in English…such as some in-laws who married into my extended family. However, they tended to be from more well-to-do backgrounds and attended English speaking schools in HK or elite International Schools/Boarding Schools in the UK/US.
Also, my Taiwan relatives and parents/aunts/uncles would be amused at the assumption that the K-12/university English language training turns out students who are proficient. Especially considering they all felt this was an area where the Taiwan education system was lacking(Very similar to the same issues in Japanese K-12 as well).
Most who did become proficient in English communication skills…especially verbal attributed it mainly to spending several decades living/working in the US rather than what they picked up in K-12 or in the case of the English lit majors…university.
The last is ironic considering back when they were attending university, English lit was such a popular major(you could say “impacted”) that the National College entrance exam scores required for admission were among the highest for each university. To put this in context, one needed a higher exam score to study English lit than majors such as Law or Math.
My son made many friends with Chinese students when he was in university, and visited them in China too. We had his friends visit frequently during the holidays with us. The article implies that the students are spoiled kids of wealthy parents, but I found both undergraduate and graduate students to be hard working and fun loving, mostly middle-upper middle class, just like students everywhere.
English skill plays a role in alienation, but this role is probably smaller than most people would expect, particularly at very top colleges. Most international Chinese (also including all other eastern Asian) students at top colleges today are able to speak very good English; many of them attended international schools in Asia or boarding schools in the US.
A major source of alienation is simply cultural. Cultural barriers can come in a variety of ways. Take my S as an example, who is a second-generation Asian American and native bilingual in Mandarin as well. I often encourage him to seek out friendship with international students, particularly those from China, so that he can practice his broken Mandarin. He has a very large number of friends in his college from all background. But he does not have too many east Asian international students as friends so far. I asked him the reason and he said they are mostly too quiet for his taste as friends. My S is talky. When I dined in my S’s residential college, I often saw international Chinese students (they speak authentic Chinese dialects) sitting together and, on average, not much interaction between them and domestic students.