我在美国遇到的三种华人留学生

 

有很多关于中国留学生在美国的讨论。在纽约时报和美国高等教育纪实报发表”中国难题“——这一篇关于解释中美学生为何在相处方面不甚愉快的文章之后，网络上的评论漫天飞。

外交家上的三个博客也针对此事发表了看法。第一篇是Jiang Xueqin（我以前深圳中学的老师）的”文明的坍塌“，他将中美学生之间紧张的关系定义为不同价值观，规范以及世界观间的冲突”和回应。Kevin Slaten在“如何帮助中国学生”，中给出了几个方法以帮助中解决这个问题。读完这些讨论后，我觉得作为一个在美的中国学生很应该给出我自己的观点。



我目前是一名伊利诺斯州的大二学生，那里有大学超过3000人来自中国的学生，占到了留学生的三分之二，是在美中国留学生最多的地方之一。

就个人而言，我跟中国同学和美国同学相处的都很好，但是校园里的绝大多数中国学生的情况不是这样的。我跟我的中国同学谈话时，他们总是带有偏见的看待他们的美国同学。有的人告诉我说，从美国人看玩笑的方式来看，他们认为他们很傻。

当然，一小部分人会爱上美国文化。但是对大多数人来讲，他们的跟美国人同伴的不合一直有增无减。

Slaten先生提出了一系列的措施帮助这些不满的中国学生，包括“吸收学生进入学生会”，“更关系学生的选举”，以及”强化英语计划“。这些办法都由我们学校予以实践：我们有一个部门是专门用来帮助留学生以及大多数的以英语作为官方第二语言的非英语国家的学生。虽然本意不错，但是通常没有什么作用。

大多数中国留学生不参加学生组织的原因是他们已经有了自己的团体——他们的中国学生圈子。当然，如果华人申请人能通过面试独立的被审核的话，那当然很好。但是，正如Slaten先生所说的，为了在面试中国学生过程中，避免被贴上美国人噩梦般的种族歧视的标签，每个来自世界各地的学生都被以同样的方式对待。学校怎么能提高预算来实现这一可能性呢？也许通过招收更多的中国学生可以做得到。

实行英语强化计划在理论上是个不错的主意，但是通过英语水平考试班很容易。要么抄——对那些更勤奋的人来说，从别人已经做的纸上改述一下，或者直接就是字迹潦草，一堆无法辨认，希望教授会不耐烦辨认直接给个”B"。

上个月，当我的一个同班的中国同学被告知他的英语水平考试论文被拒“这篇论文的语言错的太多了，简直读不下去。”他生气的宣布，他要向老师抗议，而且，“如果他不给我一个满意的成绩我就去找他的上司谈话。”我从来不知道那样的对峙是怎样的，但是大家看过Coen兄弟电影“一个严肃的人”的童鞋们可能会知道。帮助中国学生融入美国大学的一个问题是，这样的努力看起来有点故意讨好的意思——许多人都不想融入。我的一个朋友在读完网上的辩论后说,"我们在这里是成年人，我能将我的生活安排的很好。是什么让他们觉得我们学要帮助？”

我在美国遇到的三种华人留学生。第一种，他们过着与世隔绝的生活，他们要么把时间花在我在宿舍看动漫，要么就是独自一人呆在图书馆学习。他们在中国的教育体系中待了十几年后，而这跟他们成长的生活方式是完全吻合。对他们来说，来美国要么是在中国高考失利后的最后一种手段，或者就是一个很不幸的决定。

第二种就是那些越来越多的来自富裕家庭的华人留学生，他们来美国仅仅是因为他们有钱。对他们来说，真正的生活就是回国——他们的钱，关系以及社会地位——所以美国只是一个短暂的离开，一个旅行的机会，买些便宜的奢侈品，或者在继承家产，在中国通过父母的关系找到动作之前拿到一个学位。他们形成了自己的圈子，他们在那里聚会，八卦以及开着好车，就像他们已经回到中国了。

实际上，他们永远不想融入美国的文化，他们只是把时间花在揶揄讽刺上，例如，嘲笑美国人可怜的服装审美能力，例如，“他们为什么总是穿着卫衣和网球鞋？”

第三种中国留学生。他们投身到国外的环境，拥抱新的经历，无论有没有帮助。他们选择了最难回报也是最高的班级，得利于他们独特的文化背景，他们刻苦学习。而且尽管开始有一些困难，他们永远不会放弃尝试新的活动，向不同的文化学习，独立的成长。毕业之际，他让认识他的老师和同学们都感到幸运和自豪。但是这一类的学生很难找得到。从我来到这里我只遇到过几个而已。

那么，为什么绝大多数的中国留学生不像他们一样呢？难道是学校在挑选他们的申请人的时候不够仔细？还是美国人在“融入过程”中没有给中国学生足够的帮助？不是。仅仅是因为在中国超过157000的能出国的人不能在一个完全不同的社会规范下并在其中取得成功。然而，大问题是，吸引大多数人吸引力的焦点是实际上它在减少文化间的交流，甚至对那些一心适应的人都是，因为将中国拉向华人圈子的引力是太强了。对那些冒险的学生来说闲逛时遇到那些能说他们自己的语言的人简直是太有诱惑力了。

一个中国学生他在将雪芹的文章下署名“toyo”发表了这样的观点：

他说，"有这么多的华人留学生，我们没有必要将自己推出那舒适的圈子而去过一种正常的社会生活。我有些来美国上高中的朋友，而且也交了些美国朋友。但是又退回到校园里的华人学生的圈子里了。”

结果，拥有众多华人留学生的大学实际上对那些中国的申请学生来说没有什么吸引力，他们可以拥有最好的适应环境。过了这个夏天，当我问一个中国的高中学生他是否想来我的学校读书时，她说，“或许是个后背学校，但是它不会是我的第一选择。那里有太多的中国人。”

好像美国的华人留学生的真正问题不是关于融入的话题——其实是对从中国招收学生有太多的不成比例的关注。在2010到2011学年共有160000名中国学生流（比前年增加了23%），他们中的大多数人不可避免的难于融入他们的学校。而且随着越来越多的美国人对大量涌入的与校园生活毫无益处中国留学生产生抱怨，中国人通常讽刺的评论他们认为他们是到美国来的而不是中国城。

然而，有一个解决方法。很简单，而且大多数学校应到也想到了，但不敢认真的考虑：招更少的华人学生。而不是每年的几千名，招据说50000人。这样的话就很容易把注意力放在质量上而不是数量。这样多的话，美国大学可以获得更多的聪明，积极的有能力的中国学生，这些人反过来也会有一个更为投入的美国校园生活经历。这就意味着文化间的多样性，和交流以及对美国人和中国人双方都更好的教育质量。

不幸的是，这也意味着利润的巨大折扣。正如“toyo”在评论末尾所说的那样，“人们总是选择更容易的生活方式。”问题是这种容易的方式正在伤害中美人民。

周烨冉（音译）是伊利诺斯州大学的一名英语专业的大二学生。他定期为校报写博客。

Next week, Chinese students take the national college entrance exam. It’s the soul-destroying culmination of years of study. And as good as it gets.

By Jiang Xueqin

June 7 and 8 are the two days that China’s senior three students (twelfth graders) have lived the first 18 years of their lives for, and whatever anxiety, neurosis, and insanity that has simmered beneath the surface among students, parents, and teachers this past year will now reach its climax.

Everyone’s in agreement: the national college entrance examination (gaokao) robs Chinese students of their curiosity, creativity, and childhood. So as gaokao students, with their thick textbooks and memory pills, sequester themselves in four-star hotels while their parents prowl the neighbourhood for construction noise and rambunctious restaurant patrons, now might be a good time to devise an alternative to the gaokao.

In his book A Theory of Justice, the political philosopher John Rawls conducted a thought experiment in which people, shrouded under a ‘veil of ignorance,’ were asked to devise a new social structure to live under. Unsure of their lot in this new society, people would be risk-averse, John Rawls assumed, and would agree to a society that ‘maximised the minimum,’ which is to say a society that aimed for equality, fairness, and social mobility.

So let us return to John Rawls’ ‘original position’ and ‘veil of ignorance,’ gather 1.3 billion Chinese into a nice conference room, and see if we can all work together to negotiate an alternative to the gaokao.

Because everyone in the room has Chinese cultural values and lives in the not too pleasant realities of modern China, there’ll be certain constraints that this new education system must consider. First, every Chinese can agree that this new education system ought to be a meritocracy and that the most diligent and brightest students ought to reach the top.

Second, every Chinese can agree that China has limited education resources for too many people; while it would be nice to educate everyone to the best ability of the state as is the case in Finland and Singapore, China is too poor to do so. Third, China is a guanxi-based society with little respect for institutions, processes, and laws; whatever new system that everyone agrees to must be able to resist the pull and power of the well-connected and wealthy. Fourth, Chinese can agree that education is first and foremost about social mobility (rather than about national economic development), about the opportunity for anyone who is willing to work hard to rise in society.

So, given all this, we can now begin constructing an alternative to the gaokao.

First, this alternative must be an objective indicator of a student’s academic performance. College admissions committees or admission interviews would be unacceptable because it would offer too much power to individuals and institutions that can’t be trusted. No one would agree to a college lottery whereby qualified students are just randomly assigned a college. And artificial intelligence technology hasn’t yet advanced to the point where computers can replace college admissions officers. Thus, the only alternative seems to be a series of tests.

But even with tests we need to consider what we want to test. If we were to test writing and thinking ability, then that would mean an automatic bias towards the children of well-educated parents who have from an early age discuss books, current affairs, and travel plans with their child over the dinner table. Moreover, to teach thinking and writing (or any soft skills such as creativity and collaboration) would require highly specialised and highly professional teachers who would naturally congregate in expensive private schools or prestigious public schools in Beijing and Shanghai. And if this were the case, China would just be like the United States, where education is monopolised by the self-perpetuating and self-interested educated elite, and social mobility through education becomes a distant dream for everyone else.

But China has 800 million peasants who depend on schooling as their child’s only chance out of the rice fields. Rural children don’t have access to the libraries, well-trained teachers, and intellectual spaces that wealthy cities can offer — all they have is their willingness to work hard to improve themselves. If Chinese believe in fairness and social mobility, then tests must be more about the student’s ability to memorise the textbooks he has access to, rather than about his ability to think critically, which is the result of making the most of a special set of resources available only to society’s elite.

So, if we were to start from scratch and try to build an alternative to the gaokao, we would end up with as the only viable alternative…the gaokao. That’s what a lot of people tend to forget: that given the complete lack of trust in each other and in institutions, given the stifling poverty that most Chinese find themselves in, and given China’s endemic corruption and inequality, the gaokao, for better or worse, is the fairest and most humane way to distribute China’s scare education resources.

Yes, the images of children memorising and regurgitating away for 18 years may be disheartening. The poor eyesight, bad posture, and crushing of imagination, independence, and initiative will haunt them for the rest of their lives. But we must remember that many of these children and their families find themselves fortunate just to be able to dream of a better life.

How to Help Chinese Students

Chinese students often have problems fitting in at U.S. universities. But there are steps to make things easier.

By Kevin Slaten

This week, China Power blogger Jiang Xueqin wrote about the struggles of Chinese students to assimilate into U.S. universities’ student life. He attributes this social problem to the fundamental differences between Chinese and American culture – the “clash of civilizations.” Not only is this view flawed, but he offers little in the way of ideas to resolve the problem.

Jiang argues that rising China’s challenge to the United States’ status as the global hegemon is perceived as threatening to American students, who consequently reject Chinese students on college campuses. But Jiang’s line of reasoning commits a common (and critical) logical fallacy: correlation presumes causation. What’s more, he’s attributing macro-level characteristics to micro-level phenomena. China is, in fact, challenging the United States’ status, and many Chinese students are, in fact, struggling to fully participate in American college life. But just because the two are occurring simultaneously doesn’t necessitate their causal relationship.

This “hegemonic anxiety complex” simply doesn’t exist in the mind of the majority of American students. Unless they study international relations, most students would wear a confused expression when you ask them what they thought of China’s rising challenge to the United States’ hegemonic status. Most students don’t think about this. And even if they were aware of it, they wouldn’t necessarily connect it to individual Chinese students. When deciding whether or not to befriend someone, the international status of that person’s homeland is rarely a major factor.

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The real reasons for Chinese students’ struggles are more nuanced. In 2010 and 2011, I developed and ran a program at The Ohio State University that sought to promote the interaction of Chinese and American undergraduate students. OSU has more than 2,000 Chinese students, which is more than most U.S. universities, so this lack of assimilation among Chinese students isn’t a small problem on campus.  Via focus panels (conducted in Chinese) with students as well as running events that brought Chinese and American students together, I wrote a report for the university that discussed the main causal factors of the Chinese-American student divide.

We can divide these factors into three assimilation processes.

First and foremost is language assimilation. As the Chronicle of Higher Education report and Jiang both mentioned, Chinese students’ average level of English is an initial problem. Their English environment in China is rarely authentic or compelling enough to provide many Chinese with advanced English competency – especially conversational skills – before entering a U.S. college. But within a year of regular interaction in and outside of classrooms with Americans, this begins to improve markedly. After attaining better listening and speaking, the more advanced problem becomes understanding young Americans’ colloquialisms.

A second problem is academic assimilation. Classrooms in U.S. universities are operated much differently from those of Chinese high schools – and even Chinese universities. In the United States, discussion-based classes are the norm, and paper assignments often require a student to motivate themselves to start a research question from scratch. In many Chinese classrooms, the teacher lectures and then gives students a very specific subject on which to write. When Chinese students arrive in the United States, they are still accustomed to Chinese-style education. Critically, adapting to the American style forces them to spend a lot more time studying, often in the library or away from places where students socialize. After a year, these students have adapted to American education, but they’ve lost their best chance to make close American friends in the dorm. Additionally, they are habituated to studying and sticking with Chinese students.

The last issue is cultural assimilation. I’m not talking about the “clash of civilizations” that Jiang discusses. The details are smaller than that. Chinese high schoolers spend almost all of their time studying for tests, particularly the gaokao, a college entrance exam. They don’t get a lot of time outside of school to socialize – few sports, no parties. But Americans’ high school experience is half academic and half social. When Chinese students find that some U.S. college students spend their free time partying and dancing, it becomes difficult to settle in.

A separate cultural issue is that American students expect people in social situations to actively work to enter the group. The United States has a culture of individualism, and if people don’t want to participate in a social gathering, others will simply let them exclude themselves from the group. Where Chinese might perceive it as “impolite” to throw themselves into a conversation, Americans see it as par for the course.

However, like the other issues above, these cultural gaps can be overcome with experience.

This brings us to how to fix these problems. Identifying a social problem, after all, is only a precursor to attempting to tackle it. Here are some ideas:

Encourage Chinese to attend high school in the United States. Language, academic, and cultural assimilation could all be hastened early on by sending more Chinese students to America before they attend college. There are noticeable differences in the social assimilation between Chinese college students who attended a year of high school in the U.S. and those that didn’t. In high schools, classes are not as intense as college, but the teaching style is still similar. Outside of class, Chinese students become accustomed to the way in which American students socialize. And, of course, their English level will skyrocket throughout the process.

Promote Chinese student participation in student groups. Chinese students, who are spending much of their time studying, are hesitant to join students groups. Some don’t know about the groups. Universities need to more actively advertise student groups toward the Chinese student population. This could be done easily by working through Chinese student associations on campus.

More careful student selection. Jiang himself details a more qualitative way to pick Chinese students that would blossom in the American liberal arts atmosphere: an application interview that tests students’ ability to think creatively and independently. Of course, a lingering problem with this method is discrimination. Could Chinese students be the only students subjected to application interviews?

English enhancement programs. As detailed in the Chronicle, the University of Delaware set up a language institute to give students with sub-par English skills a chance to prepare for typical college classes. These sorts of programs could be carried out at any university. The focus shouldn’t only be on English language competency; in addition, the style of teaching should be discussion-based, like most liberal arts classes.

In the end, the assimilation of Chinese students in U.S. universities isn’t, as Jiang claims, a “ticking time bomb.” It isn’t primarily a story of waves of elites returning to China to serve in powerful positions with negative impressions of the United States. For every Chinese student Jiang knows with a pessimistic view of America, I know a Chinese student who has grown intellectually and emotionally in their U.S. education and has made many American friends. Anecdotes abound.

The Chinese and American cultures only clash when we believe that it is inevitable. Consciousness is self-fulfilling; this goes double when educating the next generation. What we should be telling our students – no matter the continent on which they reside – is not “our culture is incompatible with theirs.” Rather, we should be teaching them how to understand and participate in other cultures. This is the embodiment of empathy, and empathy is the cornerstone of all education.

Kevin Slaten is a master’s degree candidate in the Ohio State University’s Chinese Flagship Program.