I think a more appropriate title would be "The harm of studying abroad in the US for Chinese students"
The Harm of Studying Abroad
91–100 of 121 posts
Re: The Harm of Studying Abroad
#92As an international student in the US, I pretty much disagree with all of what the author is saying.
Re: The Harm of Studying Abroad
#93From my reading of this, this is just someone who was very isolated due in part to cultural/language barriers. I would be curious if someone who had the same experiences but was less isolated and had social nets would have a very different take. > You sing the praises of whatever it is that your enemy opposes, and you oppose whatever your enemy praises. That screams like someone who feels pushed out and isolated from…
My daughter spent her freshman year in the International dorm and noticed that most foreign students tend to keep to their own nationality. Maybe there was no other Chinese students to hang with? (She's currently on the student committee whose purpose is to get intl' students to interact outside their cliques. But I wonder how many there will actually be this Fall term.)
At my college, the Chinese students tend to hangout with each other a lot and they are in great numbers so kinda developed a sub culture.
Re: The Harm of Studying Abroad
#94The 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,…
>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.
Re: The Harm of Studying Abroad
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chinese person saying something you don't believe yourself? Must be a brainwashed party drone! Sigh, the racism is running wild on HN too. It really is becoming the new Reddit.
Since when is making a plausible quip "racism"? It is common knowledge that public statements made by Chinese citizens are scrutinized by the government and are effectively "filtered". People like you have completely diluted the meaning of the word.
You are asserting that no public statement by a Chinese person can be trusted, how is that not racist
Re: The Harm of Studying Abroad
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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, or…
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 se…
> 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.
Re: The Harm of Studying Abroad
#97It seems a bit strange to view the physical 'traveling abroad' as harmful, when he's so obviously 'traveling abroad' in thought throughout the piece - Heidegger, after all, was not Chinese. It also seems that a lot of what caused the century of humiliation for China was this inward-looking tendency in Chinese culture, a tendency that left them ignorant of western ideas and technology until it was essentially too late…
> it's at its very best when it's vigorously confronting the outside world
How so? The examples that spring to my mind—Imperial Japan, the Manchurians, that Genghis bloke—all end very badly for China and its culture.
Re: The Harm of Studying Abroad
#98Re: The Harm of Studying Abroad
#99> The text translated here, written in 2008, has nothing to do with Zhang’s academic work, but instead reflects changing attitudes among younger Chinese intellectuals concerning the value of Western ideas and the experience of studying abroad. > Zhang is surely right that doing an advanced degree in a foreign language is a challenge involving at times a loss of autonomy and a loss of status. More interesting is the o…
> China is a great place to be if you've got the right connections This might be true for the majority of China, but for big cities like Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen, no, connections mean far less even comparing to western world. > but no so great if you're gay, muslim, tibetan, or like to have opinions. Do you get this from reading western media or did you actually go there and talk to those actual human beings? I…
I'm not saying you're wrong,but what was the deal with the lesbian author who was arrested for her books? There was this webcomic I read called 他们的故事 which is about a lesbian high school couple which has gone nowhere plot wise, and someone told me the reason why they stopped focusing on the romance part of the story is it was the author's reaction to the news about the erotic novel author getting arrested.
Re: The Harm of Studying Abroad
#100This essay is in a totally different genre than an HN blog post, so all of the comments here are totally wide of the mark. It's like asking why Thoreau didn't just get a telegraph line back to Boston. We don't use this genre in the US, which reinforces the point he's making. The Analects quote at the beginning is also crucial. All educated Chinese know that quote and ~0% of Americans do: we have radically different c…
Is the second (not directly quoted) part of the Analects reference important to understanding the essay?
I think it’s more just that a) having a classical allusion makes you seem erudite in this genre b) it’s clearly part of the shared culture that you get living in China that you could miss by living abroad. The second half where Confucius says he no longer trusts people without observing them probably plays some role (he’s giving his own observations) but I don’t think it’s that important to the whole.