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The whole article rings false to me. Although I get that it's Zhang's personal experience, but the reasoning makes zero sense, and it feels like he just wanted

The whole article rings false to me. Although I get that it's Zhang's personal experience, but the reasoning makes zero sense, and it feels like he just wanted to vent. Some of the points seemingly have nothing to do with studying abroad, but the nature of the university he attended, for example, > First, you have no time. You read a lot but there’s no time to think. This is has nothing to do with being a foreigner, or being in any specific country. It's a university culture, and every university has its own pace of teaching, in China or US. And then, > Of course, it makes no difference if you don’t go > to bookstores in the US, but if you bring this habit > back with you, it means that you don’t go to bookstores > in China Seriously? How hard it is to consciously decide to go to a book store when you are in need of a book? This also seems to imply that China has no good libraries, which is untrue. I'm from a small city in China, and I borrowed so many books from the city library. That was how I got into programming as well, borrowing a book about Turbo Pascal. Personally, I think the biggest difficulty for a Chinese in studying abroad in the US, is the difficulty of being accepted into the circle. You could make friends and acquaintances with Americans, but you're never part of "them". I constantly feel like I'm on the wrong side of a aquarium glass pane, being observed and judged. There are two real choices: 1) pretend to be a white person and be extremely amiable, or 2) fallback to the smaller circle of Chinese people in US.

chillacy 6y ago
The essay reads as satirical to me. Especially the ending line: > My sole desire is that when future generations come of age, they will inherit a mature academic tradition, and will not have to travel such long distances and endure these various discomforts.
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  Sounds like something out of a travelogue by a Victorian gentleman of leisure.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Written in 2008. But that says that in 2008, China does not have a mature academic tradition. That's... I don't quite know what to make of it, but it's an interesting admission.
  - jacobolus 6y ago
    That's true though. The academic tradition in China was substantially dismantled several decades ago, and for decades afterward the focus was on practical fields (say, engineering rather than literature). Academics in China are under much more pressure than in Europe or the US to avoid politically controversial research or advocacy, and for better or worse students are under more pressure to pursue fields with high earning potential instead of those they find personally interesting. I am sure the Chinese academy will continue to grow and develop dramatically over the next few decades, but it takes generations to rebuild after as big a disruption as the cultural revolution etc.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      I don't disagree. I just find it surprising that anybody said it.
ghostpepper 6y ago
> pretend to be a white person and be extremely amiable Can you expand on this? Are you saying that foreigners at university need to be more amiable to be accepted than they would otherwise?
- pochamago 6y ago
  I believe they're referring to the general perception of white people as extremely gregarious compared to East Asian cultures.
L_Rahman 6y ago
The final claim is hyperbolic. There absolutely is another option which is to find people who aren't interested in performing amiability or socializing exclusively in the safety of their ethnicity. I made friends because we loved talking about healthcare policy, from being on the debate team, from a shared love for Mad Men, from being interested in starting companies. I did all of this as someone who'd spent the decade preceding college growing up in Bangladesh, with a thick accent and somehow ended up with a group of friends from all around the world. I'm not saying any of this was easy, but I do think there's a self-defeating element to believing what the parent does.
- L_Rahman 6y ago
  In the interest of intellectual honesty, it's possible that I'm an extreme outlier in this respect. I've spent the last year traveling around the world, I find it really easy to share emotional vulnerability with strangers, and I've made meaningful connections with people in every country I've lived in for more than a week. This is likely not true for most people.
  - scsc 6y ago
    haha easy there traveler. True for more people than you think.
  - watwut 6y ago
    Emotional vulnerability is easier with strangers you will never meet again. What parent talks about is acceptance and being member of in-group. That is much much different. It is also much different to really click and be really in-group with people from another culture, because you can't rely on assumptions you grew with.
  - dondawest 6y ago
    In the interest of intellectual honesty, I just wanted to say that I’m an awesome person and I am literally so cool. This is likely not true for most people.
    - 6y ago
asveikau 6y ago
> Personally, I think the biggest difficulty for a Chinese in studying abroad in the US, is the difficulty of being accepted into the circle. I am white but I have heard this from Asian people and Asian Americans. I wonder if some of it could vary from region to region. For example an Asian American friend had very big problems in Florida. Her white peers said unbelievably ignorant things to a fully American born, ordinary American from the northeast. And my first instinct hearing this was "yeah, well, Florida". That's not to say it doesn't happen everywhere. I know I have heard complaints of this category here in San Francisco.
- analyst74 6y ago
  It's quite well known that SF is full of subtle racism towards Asians despite ironically being full of Asians. Actually calling those racism is a bit overblown compared to lynchings or police shootings. It's mostly biases and stereotypes affecting how people treat strangers, and Asians suffer silently in those situations like many other groups. Think of the recent issue where a black woman and her child was denied service at a restaurant due to "dress code", if it didn't happen that a white kid had similar clothing as her kid, she wouldn't have realized it was racial profiling.
  - asveikau 6y ago
    Yeah. There is even an implied bias in my comment above. As a white person, I can move to any part of Florida and not feel harassed. Not so for my friend and a bunch of others.
  - thisrod 6y ago
    > It's quite well known that SF is full of subtle racism towards Asians despite ironically being full of Asians. It's the same in Asia. Except not so subtle. I think that the history, in both cases, is that imperialism moved groups of people around the world in response to specific labor shortages. That has left a lot of communities that are still concentrated in whatever economic niche the British dropped them in, and who the "locals" still resent sharing "their" country with. I trust that the need for scare quotes is obvious when discussing an English speaking community that considers itself local to a part of North America named San Fransisco.
rob_austin 6y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with your comment about never being part of them. That experience is real and difficult and one that I experience as well with people from my own culture. Having tried to make friends with people from many cultures I found my luck to be in the 10-20% range. Majority of people in every culture are only comfortable with people of their own culture. It can be hard to find the few people who are open to developing friendship with people of a different culture.
glitchc 6y ago
Lack of friendship is primarily due to a language barrier. The Chinese that obtain a reasonable mastery of vernacular English for daily discourse have no trouble making friends.
jacobolus 6y ago
>> First, you have no time. You read a lot but there’s no time to think. > This is has nothing to do with being a foreigner, or being in any specific country. It's a university culture, and every university has its own pace of teaching, in China or US. I think it also has substantially to do with reading/linguistic fluency in the language the class is taught in. Many university courses are paced to push the abilities of well prepared, ambitious, and dedicated native speakers. If you have to read 500+ pages/week (or in some fields, more like 1000+ pages/week), and write a paper on average once every other week, you have to be a very strong reader, with a lot of experience analyzing and constructing linguistic arguments. A non-native speaker who is a bit uncomfortable with reading might read at half the speed of their fellow students; they could end up spending twice as much time while still comprehending less, and it would be a serious struggle.
whack 6y ago
>> First, you have no time. You read a lot but there’s no time to think. > This is has nothing to do with being a foreigner, or being in any specific country. It's a university culture, and every university has its own pace of teaching, in China or US. It seems odd to assume that every University's pace is set independently of every other University. The vast majority of Universities and professors base their workload using other similar Universities as a reference. Either explicitly or implicitly. Some professors choose to make their courses more or less demanding, but even this is done as an adjustment from the reference point. Because of this, norms can vary significantly across different parts of the world. I've never studied in China, so I can't say whether Chinese Universities really are less demanding. But after living and studying in multiple countries, I've certainly seen that norms do exist, and vary across different parts of the world. > How hard it is to consciously decide to go to a book store when you are in need of a book? That's the entire point. It's not hard at all when you consciously think about it and decide to do it. But most of our decisions and thoughts are driven by habits, not conscious thought. For example, it is extremely easy to not waste my time writing pointless comments on HN. And yet, here I am, because this is my habitual response to boredom.
grawprog 6y ago
>Personally, I think the biggest difficulty for a Chinese in studying abroad in the US, is the difficulty of being accepted into the circle. You could make friends and acquaintances with Americans, but you're never part of "them". I constantly feel like I'm on the wrong side of a aquarium glass pane, being observed and judged. One of my classmates in university was from mainland China. He loved being in Canada and everything we were learning in school. He'd gone to another university before and already had a degree in a similar field. Then near the end of the last year, he got word from home that his father was getting ill and it was time for him to return and takeover the family business. So after graduation, he left, lost touch with everyone and as far as I know now runs his family's business in China totally unrelated to what we were going to school for and that was that. He seemed to accept everything, but was still pretty sad about it all. Not just his dad being ill, but having to go back, leave all the friends and life he'd made here, give up everything he'd went to school for and just go like the last near decade of his life never happened. I still have him as a facebook friend, he hasn't been online since he left though.
kinghtown 6y ago
> Personally, I think the biggest difficulty for a Chinese in studying abroad in the US, is the difficulty of being accepted into the circle. You could make friends and acquaintances with Americans, but you're never part of "them". I constantly feel like I'm on the wrong side of a aquarium glass pane, being observed and judged. As a foreigner living in Taiwan, the vast majority of people here do the very same to me as well. I am constantly shut out of circles and deemed too weird to actually know yet always being watched like some sociological specimen. I don’t think that “othering” is a known concept here or if it were it registers pretty low on people priorities when interacting with me or mindlessly staring at me while I eat in public.. People will literally take their children away from the park when I bring my daughter to play. I must insist that I was a well adjusted and popular enough guy home. It’s been a bit of a heartbreaking experience to realize that probably every culture on earth has irreconcilably racial biases and prejudices inherent in the majority because the most common unifier amongst all people is stupidity. Also, when you mention Americans and never being a part of them do you mean all Americans including blacks, latinos, natives, arabs..? I see a great deal of projection going on here where Chinese Americans are being shut out of socializing when it seems to me the truth is that many Chinese born people living in the west actually don’t like the culture all that much and don’t want to integrate either but don’t vocalize it this way because it doesn’t sound nice to say.
jeegsy 6y ago
I hope you mean amiable in the literal sense and not as some sort of quality associated with a white person.

chillacy 6y ago

The essay reads as satirical to me. Especially the ending line: > My sole desire is that when future generations come of age, they will inherit a mature academic tradition, and will not have to travel such long distances and endure these various discomforts.

Apocryphon 6y ago
Sounds like something out of a travelogue by a Victorian gentleman of leisure.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Written in 2008. But that says that in 2008, China does not have a mature academic tradition. That's... I don't quite know what to make of it, but it's an interesting admission.
- jacobolus 6y ago
  That's true though. The academic tradition in China was substantially dismantled several decades ago, and for decades afterward the focus was on practical fields (say, engineering rather than literature). Academics in China are under much more pressure than in Europe or the US to avoid politically controversial research or advocacy, and for better or worse students are under more pressure to pursue fields with high earning potential instead of those they find personally interesting. I am sure the Chinese academy will continue to grow and develop dramatically over the next few decades, but it takes generations to rebuild after as big a disruption as the cultural revolution etc.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    I don't disagree. I just find it surprising that anybody said it.

ghostpepper 6y ago

> pretend to be a white person and be extremely amiable Can you expand on this? Are you saying that foreigners at university need to be more amiable to be accepted than they would otherwise?

pochamago 6y ago
I believe they're referring to the general perception of white people as extremely gregarious compared to East Asian cultures.

L_Rahman 6y ago

The final claim is hyperbolic. There absolutely is another option which is to find people who aren't interested in performing amiability or socializing exclusively in the safety of their ethnicity. I made friends because we loved talking about healthcare policy, from being on the debate team, from a shared love for Mad Men, from being interested in starting companies. I did all of this as someone who'd spent the decade preceding college growing up in Bangladesh, with a thick accent and somehow ended up with a group of friends from all around the world. I'm not saying any of this was easy, but I do think there's a self-defeating element to believing what the parent does.

L_Rahman 6y ago
In the interest of intellectual honesty, it's possible that I'm an extreme outlier in this respect. I've spent the last year traveling around the world, I find it really easy to share emotional vulnerability with strangers, and I've made meaningful connections with people in every country I've lived in for more than a week. This is likely not true for most people.
- scsc 6y ago
  haha easy there traveler. True for more people than you think.
- watwut 6y ago
  Emotional vulnerability is easier with strangers you will never meet again. What parent talks about is acceptance and being member of in-group. That is much much different. It is also much different to really click and be really in-group with people from another culture, because you can't rely on assumptions you grew with.
- dondawest 6y ago
  In the interest of intellectual honesty, I just wanted to say that I’m an awesome person and I am literally so cool. This is likely not true for most people.
  - 6y ago

asveikau 6y ago

> Personally, I think the biggest difficulty for a Chinese in studying abroad in the US, is the difficulty of being accepted into the circle. I am white but I have heard this from Asian people and Asian Americans. I wonder if some of it could vary from region to region. For example an Asian American friend had very big problems in Florida. Her white peers said unbelievably ignorant things to a fully American born, ordinary American from the northeast. And my first instinct hearing this was "yeah, well, Florida". That's not to say it doesn't happen everywhere. I know I have heard complaints of this category here in San Francisco.

analyst74 6y ago
It's quite well known that SF is full of subtle racism towards Asians despite ironically being full of Asians. Actually calling those racism is a bit overblown compared to lynchings or police shootings. It's mostly biases and stereotypes affecting how people treat strangers, and Asians suffer silently in those situations like many other groups. Think of the recent issue where a black woman and her child was denied service at a restaurant due to "dress code", if it didn't happen that a white kid had similar clothing as her kid, she wouldn't have realized it was racial profiling.
- asveikau 6y ago
  Yeah. There is even an implied bias in my comment above. As a white person, I can move to any part of Florida and not feel harassed. Not so for my friend and a bunch of others.
- thisrod 6y ago
  > It's quite well known that SF is full of subtle racism towards Asians despite ironically being full of Asians. It's the same in Asia. Except not so subtle. I think that the history, in both cases, is that imperialism moved groups of people around the world in response to specific labor shortages. That has left a lot of communities that are still concentrated in whatever economic niche the British dropped them in, and who the "locals" still resent sharing "their" country with. I trust that the need for scare quotes is obvious when discussing an English speaking community that considers itself local to a part of North America named San Fransisco.

rob_austin 6y ago

I wholeheartedly agree with your comment about never being part of them. That experience is real and difficult and one that I experience as well with people from my own culture. Having tried to make friends with people from many cultures I found my luck to be in the 10-20% range. Majority of people in every culture are only comfortable with people of their own culture. It can be hard to find the few people who are open to developing friendship with people of a different culture.

glitchc 6y ago

Lack of friendship is primarily due to a language barrier. The Chinese that obtain a reasonable mastery of vernacular English for daily discourse have no trouble making friends.

jacobolus 6y ago

>> First, you have no time. You read a lot but there’s no time to think. > This is has nothing to do with being a foreigner, or being in any specific country. It's a university culture, and every university has its own pace of teaching, in China or US. I think it also has substantially to do with reading/linguistic fluency in the language the class is taught in. Many university courses are paced to push the abilities of well prepared, ambitious, and dedicated native speakers. If you have to read 500+ pages/week (or in some fields, more like 1000+ pages/week), and write a paper on average once every other week, you have to be a very strong reader, with a lot of experience analyzing and constructing linguistic arguments. A non-native speaker who is a bit uncomfortable with reading might read at half the speed of their fellow students; they could end up spending twice as much time while still comprehending less, and it would be a serious struggle.

whack 6y ago

>> First, you have no time. You read a lot but there’s no time to think. > This is has nothing to do with being a foreigner, or being in any specific country. It's a university culture, and every university has its own pace of teaching, in China or US. It seems odd to assume that every University's pace is set independently of every other University. The vast majority of Universities and professors base their workload using other similar Universities as a reference. Either explicitly or implicitly. Some professors choose to make their courses more or less demanding, but even this is done as an adjustment from the reference point. Because of this, norms can vary significantly across different parts of the world. I've never studied in China, so I can't say whether Chinese Universities really are less demanding. But after living and studying in multiple countries, I've certainly seen that norms do exist, and vary across different parts of the world. > How hard it is to consciously decide to go to a book store when you are in need of a book? That's the entire point. It's not hard at all when you consciously think about it and decide to do it. But most of our decisions and thoughts are driven by habits, not conscious thought. For example, it is extremely easy to not waste my time writing pointless comments on HN. And yet, here I am, because this is my habitual response to boredom.

grawprog 6y ago

>Personally, I think the biggest difficulty for a Chinese in studying abroad in the US, is the difficulty of being accepted into the circle. You could make friends and acquaintances with Americans, but you're never part of "them". I constantly feel like I'm on the wrong side of a aquarium glass pane, being observed and judged. One of my classmates in university was from mainland China. He loved being in Canada and everything we were learning in school. He'd gone to another university before and already had a degree in a similar field. Then near the end of the last year, he got word from home that his father was getting ill and it was time for him to return and takeover the family business. So after graduation, he left, lost touch with everyone and as far as I know now runs his family's business in China totally unrelated to what we were going to school for and that was that. He seemed to accept everything, but was still pretty sad about it all. Not just his dad being ill, but having to go back, leave all the friends and life he'd made here, give up everything he'd went to school for and just go like the last near decade of his life never happened. I still have him as a facebook friend, he hasn't been online since he left though.

kinghtown 6y ago

> Personally, I think the biggest difficulty for a Chinese in studying abroad in the US, is the difficulty of being accepted into the circle. You could make friends and acquaintances with Americans, but you're never part of "them". I constantly feel like I'm on the wrong side of a aquarium glass pane, being observed and judged. As a foreigner living in Taiwan, the vast majority of people here do the very same to me as well. I am constantly shut out of circles and deemed too weird to actually know yet always being watched like some sociological specimen. I don’t think that “othering” is a known concept here or if it were it registers pretty low on people priorities when interacting with me or mindlessly staring at me while I eat in public.. People will literally take their children away from the park when I bring my daughter to play. I must insist that I was a well adjusted and popular enough guy home. It’s been a bit of a heartbreaking experience to realize that probably every culture on earth has irreconcilably racial biases and prejudices inherent in the majority because the most common unifier amongst all people is stupidity. Also, when you mention Americans and never being a part of them do you mean all Americans including blacks, latinos, natives, arabs..? I see a great deal of projection going on here where Chinese Americans are being shut out of socializing when it seems to me the truth is that many Chinese born people living in the west actually don’t like the culture all that much and don’t want to integrate either but don’t vocalize it this way because it doesn’t sound nice to say.

jeegsy 6y ago

I hope you mean amiable in the literal sense and not as some sort of quality associated with a white person.