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The first warm night of 1952. Music blares. Students' thoughts turn to love and fighting. Time to launch a national craze: the panty raid.
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On Campus
East meets midwest
Chinese students and scholars find themselves straddling the academic freedom of the US and the lure of family, friends and culture in their homeland.
July 15, 2008
To study Chinese literature, Liang Luo left China and came to the University of Michigan.
In 1999, Liang Luo, who lectures in Michigan's Asian Languages and Cultures Department, made an ironic choice. She left her native China for America—in order to study Chinese literature. Luo had graduated at the top of her class at Beijing Normal University, and she yearned for new academic approaches and a fresh intellectual landscape. "I came out of boredom," Luo said.
Luo's motivation to study abroad varied greatly from the generation of academics who left China before her, she said, and the new wave of Chinese students currently attending American universities. "Everyone has their own stories to tell," said Luo. "Many of the now-tenured Chinese professors in the United States had firsthand experiences with the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. The kids ten years younger than me were born around the time of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Movement, and had much more exposure to America before they came here. I had no idea what I was getting into."
As the world gets "flatter," so does higher education. To be a world-class university means you have to understand and embrace the world. The University of Michigan has ties to dozens of countries and every continent, but its international connections may be strongest with China. As far back as the 1880s, U-M President James Angell served as U.S. ambassador to China. Today, a short thirty years after the Cultural Revolution, when schooling was all but obliterated, Chinese students, scholars and professors constitute the highest number of overseas nationals at U-M.
Simultaneously, universities in China have made leaps and bounds—many now offer cutting-edge research departments that are competitive with overseas programs. Several of these universities exchange students and scholars with U-M.
Despite—and because of—competition and conflict between the U.S. and China, scholars in both countries need to connect with each other more than ever. This past year, U-M's College of Letters, Sciences and Arts celebrated this fact with a Year of China, offering numerous lectures on China, dragon boat races in the Huron River, and pipa players in Hill Auditorium.
Yet for U-M's Chinese population, the commingling of cultures and countries often raises more questions than answers.
Seth Yee left a Beijing law firm to come study in America because, as he jokingly puts it, he "wasn't a good enough lawyer." Yee studied social work at the University of Georgia, then worked in Washington, DC, for an Asian Youth association, where he saw his first dragon boat festival. "I've been to more Chinese cultural events in the U.S. than I ever attended in China," Yee says. Yee, who has returned to U-M to study law, says that he has come to a more "complete" view on China since leaving the country. "Chinese legal studies at Michigan are 20 years ahead of Chinese legal studies in China," he says. Still, Yee worries that Chinese academics rely too heavily on Western models. "One sad thing is that no one reflects on what we're adopting," he said. "It is assumed that a Chinese scholar is necessarily a Western scholar."
Yee plans to return to China, but not before he opens a Chinese community center in rural Tennessee. His interest in social work is both moral and pragmatic. He is passionate about helping people, but he also knows that a diverse resume will help him find a better job in China, where increased competition means that degrees (Yee has three) don't necessarily guarantee employment. According to Yee, Chinese employers value quantifiables like test scores—just like in America. "Seen in this light, No Child Left Behind is a very Chinese policy," he said.
Like many international students and scholars, Ph.D. student Xuezhao Lan feels the tug of home. After the earthquake in Sichuan Province, she says she felt "Life is so short" and returned to China for six weeks to be with family and friends.
For Xuezhao Lan, an educational psychology Ph.D. student, Michigan offered resources that she could not access in China, where psychology departments only emerged in the mid-1980s. "Towards the end of my undergraduate education, I felt like the information I wanted wasn't there," Lan said. She sometimes "feels like an outlier" at Michigan because not many any other Chinese students study the social sciences. When other Chinese students "hear what I study, they say, 'What can you do with that?'" Lan says. She traces her academic choice from her parents' encouragement to follow her own dreams and pursue an individualist path, a pointed departure from stereotypical Chinese parenting.
Part of Lan's own research studies individualistic and collectivistic cognitive styles in China. She says that contrary to her predictions, China's booming capitalist economy has not made it a more individualistic one. Studying China at Michigan has provided Lan with incredible opportunities to collaborate with well-known researchers, she said. Yet the tug of home is strong, and Lan would like to move back when the timing is right. The earthquake that devastated Sichuan Province in May highlighted that feeling. Lan felt that "life is so short" and decided to spend several weeks this summer back home with friends and family.
Liang Luo, who came to the US out of intellectual boredom, also finds the question of return to be a complicated one. She and her Swedish husband, who teaches Chinese history at Michigan, have a young daughter, Ingrid, who is trilingual. While Luo's work deals with Chinese literature and history, her professional academic trajectory, at least for now, is in America. Yet her widowed mother is aging and a part of Luo yearns very much to go back. Even writing an academic article in Chinese, which she hasn't done for eight years, would be satisfying.
Luo says she sees Chinese studies in America and in China as increasingly in dialogue. She says that ideology-oriented scholarship has gone out of vogue in China, although political restrictions still remain. For her, the response to the Sichuan earthquake was a sign of similar changes: "I was encouraged by the relative openness of the Chinese government in its dealings with after-quake relief work..." Moreover, it reminded her of the global Chinese community. She "personally witnessed the strong international presence of the Chinese diaspora in time of domestic conflict and natural disaster."
Luo smartly notices that on subject of restrictions, the West is not without its own limits, but they tend to take the form of market demand. "If you do research here on democracy, religion, or race, it's sexier," Luo explained. "Chinese studies in America are conditioned by America's own fascinations, which get amplified in the study of other cultures." And despite the increased exchange between the two countries, some old prejudices linger, she says, offering the example of Lou Dobbs on CNN. "He referred to China as Communist China. Should I say 'Capitalist America'?"
In their efforts to find an academic home, as well as a literal one, Yee, Lan and Luo are similar to almost every international student, scholar and professor at U-M. Their work to bridge two cultures in their own lives mirrors an increasingly interconnected world. The homestyle eggplant at T.K. Wu on Liberty St. will never taste the same as homestyle eggplant back home, from a vendor in downtown Chongqing. But these scholars agree that U-M's Chinese community is exceptional, in its numbers and its cultural and intellectual vibrancy.
The official Year of China may have ended, says Luo, but in fact, "Every year is the year of China at Michigan."
(MFA '07) is a freelance journalist and fiction writer who lived in Shanghai, China for four years.