Ms. Fan, the student now at UC Irvine, just wanted a chance to explore.
A tomboy partial to jeans and sneakers, she knew little about the U.S. other than what she saw in movies and TV. She said she thought of it as a warlike country that bullied other nations, but also made cool products such as Apple devices.
Her parents grew up poor, eating meat only on holidays. They pooled money from relatives to start a paintbrush factory, and the business grew. They hoped their daughter would be the first in the family to go to college. Chinese International students in the US
Ms. Fan’s parents doubted a U.S. education would mean a better-paying job. As more Chinese study abroad, many are returning to find their degree isn’t much of an advantage. They worried the U.S. was filled with guns.
After a two-week U.S. tour led by her high school, though, Ms. Fan was convinced. She saw students could study whatever they wanted and take “gap” years to explore their interests. It seemed so free, she said.
Her parents gave in.
Ms. Fan memorized thousands of English words for a language test and did well enough on the SAT to get in. Before leaving for Irvine, she took cooking lessons from her grandmother in case she couldn’t find foods that tasted like home.
In Irvine, Ms. Fan said she found it hard to keep up with lectures because teachers talked too quickly. She realized students couldn’t just memorize texts and regurgitate them on tests, as they did back home.
She studied hard and got A’s and B’s in her first quarter. She hasn’t yet declared a major. “Math is easy for me,” she wrote in a recent email. “I like anthropology least. It is too hard for me to understand and do so much reading.”
She marveled at the fact that students were permitted to lounge on the grass. She explored Los Angeles and encountered people who dressed like hippies. “In China, those people would be seen as really strange,” she said. She made plans to go skiing and visit a hot spring during spring break.
In one class she met students who spoke Mandarin but turned out to be Taiwanese. It was the first time she had met anyone from the island which asserts its independence, despite Beijing’s insistence it belongs to China.
In December, Ms. Fan returned home for the holidays. She said it was good to be home, but after a while it grew a little dull.
It was different from the U.S., she said, where “there’s always something to do, to learn.”
Back in Yangzhou, Ms. Wang was thinking about her future.
She thought she would likely apply for graduate school. So many Chinese have college diplomas now that increasing numbers are seeking higher degrees to stay competitive.
At times, she felt school may not have boosted her prospects much. Upon graduation, should she get a job teaching, she might make only around 3,000 yuan, she said, about what her father, who never attended college, makes as an auto-parts worker.
Sourced from: Chen, T. & Jordan, M. (2016, May 1). Why So Many Chinese Students Come to the U.S. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-so-many-chinese-students-come-to-the-u-s-1462123552