The grassy vistas of the upper Midwest were different from China’s congested cityscapes. He had free time to fill, unlike his regimented high-school days, when he was roused before dawn and mandatory study sessions lasted late into the night. And American food—it wasn’t so tasty, he thought.
But one thing was the same: All around him were Chinese students.
Mengshi’s dorm, McDonel Hall, sometimes seemed as if it belonged back in China. At meals, chatter in Mandarin mixed with the clink of silverware. Waiting for the campus bus were always knots of Chinese students; it was easy to fall into conversation.
Nearly 1,000 incoming freshmen at Michigan State last fall—roughly one in eight new students—were from China. That proportion was made yet more remarkable by this fact: Just six years earlier, fewer than 100 Chinese undergraduates, total, were enrolled here. In 2012, by contrast, more students starting their freshman year called China home than hailed from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin combined. It’s a significant shift at a university that has been called “a big Michigan high school.”
On a drive around East Lansing, the impact of those changing demographics is visible. There are not one but two Asian grocery stores in town, along with nearly 20 Chinese restaurants within a few square miles. Heartbeats, a club started by Michigan State students from China, offers karaoke and pool tables to a largely Chinese clientele. On East Grand River Avenue, the commercial strip bordering the campus, Chinese students grab Frappuccinos at Starbucks and browse the racks at American Apparel.
Michigan State isn’t the only college, of course, with a burgeoning Chinese population. In the fall of 2011, nearly 200,000 Chinese families sent their children off to study in the United States, almost double the number of any other country and twice as many as five years earlier.
Most will return home with what they came for—an American degree. But will they get an American education?
It’s a distinction with a difference. The Chinese students who come to Michigan State and universities like it are undeniably book smart. But a college education is meant to be more than a credential, most educators would agree, one that is measured not so much in grades as in learning, exploring, testing new waters. Will Chinese students reap its full value if they graduate with a 4.0 but few American friends? If limited English holds them back during class discussions? If the pressure to study keeps them from socializing?
Students like Mengshi have come so very far for an American education. But some wonder if it’s far enough.
Susan Tusa for The Chronicle
International students at Michigan State, most of whom are from China, hold a get-acquainted session on the campus at the start of the academic year.
“Welcome, international students,” the loudspeakers intoned. Outside the Breslin Center, Michigan State’s basketball arena, hundreds of new students milled about as a pep-band anthem played in a loop. Just a few days earlier, most of these students had been in gray and smoggy China; now, blinking in the late-summer Michigan sun, they were gathering for the first day of orientation.
Inside, they stumbled over the school cheer: “Go green! Go white!” Looking up from the stadium floor, Peter Briggs, director of programs for international students and scholars, told the sea of faces, “We’re not strangers. We’re just friends who haven’t met yet.”
In the jet-lagged crowd, Mr. Briggs’s exhortations may have gone unheard. But one high-spirited freshman was listening, and she believed. Americans were “kind,” said Yan (who asked that her full name not be used because she was nervous that the publicity might upset her family back in China). She was excited at making “foreign friends.” Of her new roommate, a Michigan student who had not yet arrived: “I already love her.”
Yan was just 16, and her enthusiasm was no doubt part youthful optimism, part sugar high. It was the orientation’s second night, time for an ice-cream social, with treats from the campus dairy. Yan and her friend Huajing, a classmate from back home, had just gotten their picture taken with Sparty, Michigan State’s Greek-warrior mascot; now she was digging into her second cup of ice cream.
As dusk fell, Yan spun out her plans: the classes she would take, the friends she would make. She would get an internship, buy a bike, go to parties in her dorm. She would speak nothing but English. Even her diary, she vowed, would be English only.
And snow! Yan’s eyes danced. Her orientation leader had shown her photographs from last winter on his phone. “We get snow in Hebei"—her home province, about five hours from Beijing—"but not that much.”
Last winter Yan was in Beijing, where she attended a school for English-language training. As more and more Chinese students go overseas for college degrees, such schools, which also get students ready for entrance examinations like the SAT, have flourished.
Even with the preparation, Yan’s English-language scores were below Michigan State’s minimum. Still, the university accepted her, on the condition that she sit for another English exam once she arrived on the campus. Do well enough, and she could enroll in regular academic courses. Fall short, and she’d have to take remedial-English classes.
Yan had taken the test a few days earlier. She’d know the results soon. She had already begun to pick out her fall course schedule.
It was like kindergarten, Yan thought. “The teacher, she treats us like little children.”
Despite her confidence, Yan had failed to score high enough on the university’s English-placement test. Instead of starting the prerequisites for her management degree, she was taking all her classes in the university’s English-language center.
Yan wasn’t alone. Forty percent of the Chinese students in Michigan State’s fall-2012 entering class were admitted under the same arrangement, known as conditional admission. Of that group, almost all had fallen short on the language exam.
Conditional admission has become common at large public universities like Michigan State, a recognition that today’s international students may lack the fluency to succeed on Day 1 in an American classroom. (There have also been concerns about cheating on standardized tests in China.) But the large numbers had begun to tax the English center, and although Yan didn’t know it, university administrators were planning to sharply curb the number of conditional admits in next fall’s class.
In dark moments, Yan theorized that Michigan State was trying to earn extra tuition dollars by forcing students to spend months in English courses before they even got to study for their degrees. But mostly she was just frustrated. Maybe she should have taken the language exam one more time back in China. Maybe, as a friend had, she should have come to East Lansing early and studied English over the summer. Yan had spent that time visiting her family; her grandmother was aging, and Yan knew she might not get to see her for the next four years.
The English classes bored her. The assignments, she thought, were simplistic. The students were given basic tasks, like looking up words and identifying parts of speech. They had several days to write and revise a single paragraph.
Yan’s English wasn’t perfect. She regularly mixed up “he” and “she,” and her subjects and verbs didn’t always align. (Mandarin lacks gender pronouns and verb conjugation.) Unlike students from larger, more international cities, like Beijing and Shanghai, she’d been studying English for only a few years. Still, she found the classes easy.
What’s more, with so many Chinese students in remedial English, Yan found it ever more difficult to stick to her resolution to speak only English. And now she was living with another Chinese student.
Her original roommate had not worked out. Several times Yan woke up to find strange men sleeping on the couch. Worse, money had gone missing, a watch, too. Her roommate denied having anything to do with it. “She always says, ‘I’m so nice. I’m so kind.’ But I think maybe she’s terrible,” Yan said. “Before I had a roommate, I thought all Americans were so friendly.”
Yan thought about reporting the theft, but she wasn’t sure how, and she was convinced that her roommate wouldn’t be punished anyway. Instead, she turned to her ever-expanding group of Chinese friends, who had become like family. For her 17th birthday, in early October, they threw her a party; one friend recorded herself singing some of Yan’s favorite songs.
Still, between her roommate and the English-language classes, Michigan State in those first weeks was not turning out exactly as Yan had hoped. Sometimes she even thought about going home, but she hid those feelings from her parents in video chats. “I never say this kind of words to my parents. Because my parents, when they hear those kinds of words from me, I think they will feel upset from the deep of their heart,” Yan said.
Her mother and father, she knew, had sacrificed a great deal so that Yan and her younger sister could have a better education. The family had moved from the countryside so they could go to the province’s top schools. Her father had been a policeman, a job he loved, but he went into business in construction materials. Other people put money in the bank; her parents invested it in her education, in the hope that, by going abroad, she would have a brighter future.
When they found out that she had done poorly on the English test, Yan’s parents had comforted her, telling her that she’d be even more prepared for her academic courses after spending time in the language center. But she worried that she had let them down. “They spend so much money for me to go to study abroad, and I just want to give up.”
On a blustery day, a tent city sprang up on Munn Field, a grassy expanse near the center of the campus. Students drove tent poles into ground made spongy by intermittent drizzle, then ducked through the shelters’ snapping flaps to unfurl sleeping bags. As friends shouted hellos, a DJ’s bass line rumbled. A couple of guys tossed a football. Meat sizzled on a grill.
This was the Izzone Campout, an annual kickoff to the basketball season. Izzone is for Tom Izzo, who has coached the men’s basketball team since today’s students were toddlers. He and his team hold near-mythical status on the sports-crazed campus, and the highlight of this Friday night would be a sunset pep rally with the coach. A chilly dawn’s reward for the dedicated: tickets to the choicest spots in the Izzone, Michigan State’s rowdy student section.
Walking by after class, Mengshi Zhao paused to take in the scene. Gangly, his hair a spiky brush cut, he hadn’t known about the camp-out. But he did know basketball, which is wildly popular in China. There’s a professional league, with teams in more than a dozen Chinese cities, although none in Zhengzhou, Mengshi’s hometown. Thanks to the popularity of the now-retired Houston Rockets player Yao Ming, NBA games are shown on CCTV, the state broadcaster; sometimes, with the time difference, they air at breakfast.
Mengshi loved basketball—his team was the Los Angeles Lakers—and sports in general. By now he’d already attended four Michigan State football games, although he was still trying to tease out all the rules. “It’s so physical,” he marveled. He would walk around the perimeter of Spartan Stadium, where students and alumni thronged to tailgate on game days. “Like a festival,” he thought, and promised himself that, after he graduated, he would return with his parents, or maybe his wife, for a game. “It’s so attractive for me,” he said, “because of the atmosphere.”
The feeling at the camp-out was similar, and Mengshi wondered, not for the first time, how he’d missed notice of an event that so many students—locals, anyway—knew about. During orientation he’d unwittingly deleted an e-mail about signing up for student passes to football games. They were sold out by the time he realized. After that he swore he wouldn’t miss out on any part of the basketball season, and yet here was this party.
He wandered through Munn Field, hoping, he confessed later, that someone might offer him a place in a tent. “If I had American friends,” he said, “we could sleep together.”
Finally, Mengshi turned toward his dorm.
The testing center wasn’t where Yan thought it was.
She had gone to Grand Rapids, a two-hour bus ride from East Lansing, to take an English-proficiency exam. Other such tests were offered closer to the campus, but Yan had gotten used to this one—Ielts, or the International English Language Testing System—back at her prep program, in Beijing.
Students usually take tests like Ielts before they go off to college. Once enrolled in Michigan State’s English-language center, they advance through levels of its curriculum. But Yan realized that even if she aced her current level, she’d probably have to take a hybrid program the following semester: part English classes, part regular coursework. She had no patience for that; she didn’t want to spend any more time studying English. Some of her classmates had been at the language center for two years. “Two years, oh my God! You wasted two years? I cannot imagine that.”
So here she was, in a strange city, lost. It took nearly an hour before she found the correct spot, in a low-slung shopping center, near a hookah lounge and a bar and grill.
Yan’s friends had offered to go to Grand Rapids with her, but she’d declined. She had taken the test often enough that she was sure she would know if she had flubbed it. If she did, she reasoned, she would feel better on her own.
Studying for the exam had given Yan’s semester some direction. She was settling into campus life. Most Fridays, she’d join a group of friends at a nearby restaurant for dinner; sometimes, they’d hang out at an older classmate’s off-campus apartment. On Halloween they put on vampire costumes and went out dancing at a local club.
Susan Tusa for The Chronicle
Jianwei Li (right) and a classmate, Hanyi Wang, have lunch at a Thai restaurant. Everything that Jianwei’s family did, she says, was toward the goal of providing her with opportunities for a good life.
Too many Chinese students, Yan thought, did nothing but study; they were shudaizi, nerds. “If I study, I just want to study hard,” she said. “But I don’t think we need to study all day. If it is time for the party, I will enjoy the party.”
And party is what Yan did when, a couple of weeks later, she received an e-mail saying that she had scored high enough on the Ielts to no longer need the English center. Her friends took her to a big meal to celebrate. She began to choose her courses for the spring.
“That day is almost the most exciting day when I came to America,” she said later. “I reach my goal.”
Mengshi returned from winter break to a mailbox full of postcards, stamped from cities throughout the United States. Looking through them, he smiled—in memory. He’d sent them all himself.
With three weeks off between semesters, Mengshi had decided that he’d use the time to see some of America. The vacation was too brief to travel all the way to China and back, he felt, and besides, his parents and friends would be busy with work and classes. In China the biggest holiday of the year is the Spring Festival, the lunar New Year. People crisscross the country to reunite with their families and celebrate; Chunyun, the Spring Festival travel season, is said to be the largest human migration in the world. But this year, the holiday wouldn’t fall until February, more than a month into the new semester at Michigan State. Mengshi would miss out on all the festivities—the firecrackers, the crimson envelopes filled with money, the food. There seemed little point, he thought, to travel 7,000 miles just to hang out alone.
Instead, he mapped out a trip that would take him from Chicago to St. Louis, through Memphis, and on to New Orleans, with a detour to Texas. High-speed rail has made travel throughout China increasingly fast and efficient, and so Mengshi decided to book tickets on Amtrak.
He had been elsewhere in the United States but never by himself. He researched hotels at each stop and promised to call his mother on Skype each night. The Chinese news media are filled with reports about crime and violence in America’s cities, and she didn’t like the idea of a 20-year-old in a strange place alone.
In truth, Mengshi was a little nervous, too. But Americans, he found, were friendly and helpful. They recommended things to eat: oysters in New Orleans, steak in Austin, Mexican food in San Antonio. In St. Louis he came across a man photographing the Mississippi, who explained the river’s rise and fall, how it bisected the country. Mengshi went to the Alamo, to NASA’s Johnson Space Center, to Graceland. “I’d heard of Elvis and knew he was famous, but I didn’t know exactly who he is,” he said. In every new city, he addressed a postcard to himself, keepsakes of his adventures. On the back of each one he wrote: “This is a fantastic place.”
Mengshi knew he was an outsider looking in on America, an anthropologist trying to decode the habits of the natives. Some behaviors he thought splendid (cars yielded to pedestrians at crosswalks!), others perplexing (why drown lobster in melted butter?). He wished for a guide, an American friend, who could let him in on the secrets. Instead, when he was confused, he turned to Google. But you can’t Google a friend.
With the start of the new semester, though, Mengshi had hope. His previous roommate, Michael, a genial Australian exchange student, had returned home. Now he had a new roommate—a transfer student and an American. Things might be looking up. The roommate, Peter, had a television and a love of basketball. He told Mengshi he liked Chinese food, which was cool, although Mengshi sometimes dismissed local restaurants as “kind-of Chinese food.” And Peter was into rap music, Eminem especially. Mengshi’s taste skewed toward Westlife and the Backstreet Boys, “soft music,” and he couldn’t understand Eminem’s lyrics. But he looked up the rapper and his songs online and, he allowed, “learned a few expressions.”
Yes, maybe this would work out.
The band was warming up before what was likely to be the biggest home game of the basketball season, the woodwinds creaking, a snare drum sounding a discordant beat. Michigan State was playing a bitter rival, the University of Michigan, and fans had been lining up outside the Breslin Center since the afternoon, hours before the 9 p.m. tipoff. Inside now, the Izzone was rollicking, erupting in cheers of “Let’s go, Green!” and “Stomp those Wolverines!” as the Michigan State team emerged onto the floor to take a few practice shots.
Romain Blanquart for The Chronicle
Mengshi Zhao missed only one Spartans home basketball game all year. He clapped along with the Michigan State fight song but had trouble with some of the words.
Mengshi was in the crowd. He may have missed the fall camp-out, but he hadn’t skipped a home game, not even one. He could talk knowledgeably about the team: Branden Dawson played well at Indiana. Do you think Appling’s shoulder is still bothering him? Clad in a white-and-green Izzone T-shirt, with a knit cap that mimicked the plumed helmet of the Michigan State mascot, Mengshi looked the part of a Spartans fan.
Except for one thing. While Chinese undergraduates made up a larger and larger share of the Michigan State population, in this undulating sea of students Mengshi’s appeared to be the only Chinese face.
Perhaps next year some of his friends would buy season tickets, too. But Mengshi’s activities for now were divided between those things he did with Chinese classmates, like a party the previous weekend to celebrate the Spring Festival, and all-American basketball fandom.
He had hoped that Peter could be a bridge, but it wasn’t turning out that way. His roommate’s hometown was nearby, and every other weekend he went back. For Mengshi it was like having a single, at least for a couple of days at a time.
What’s more, when Peter was around, Mengshi sometimes found the living situation uncomfortable. Once Peter had dozed off with the TV on; it blared throughout the night, and Mengshi didn’t sleep at all. Another evening Peter stumbled home from one of the bars that line Grand River. “Normal for Americans,” Mengshi said later. “It’s the culture here.” Unlike Peter, he didn’t have a fake ID. Next fall, when he turned 21, he thought he’d go out on Grand River. He didn’t really care for beer’s bitterness, but, still, he’d “let it have an effect on me,” at least for one night.
There was no guarantee, Mengshi supposed, that you’d get along with any roommate. And if there was one good thing about Peter, it was that he couldn’t understand when Mengshi complained to his mother over Skype.
In the Breslin Center, the game was about to begin. As the band began the Michigan State fight song, the students stood, clapping in unison: “Smash right through that line of blue, watch the points keep growing. ...” Mengshi kept time with the rest, punching the air with his fist. “Rah! Rah! Rah!” But he mouthed most of the words.
If there was something fundamental holding him back from making American friends, it might be language. He’d studied English for years back in China, but it didn’t really prepare him to live all day, every day, in English. Some people spoke too fast, or too softly, for Mengshi to catch what they were saying. Often he simply was unfamiliar with American idiom. For the longest time, he couldn’t figure out why his roommate occasionally interrupted him with “Sorry?,” nor did he realize at first that it seemed rude when he said “What?” when he didn’t understand a word or phrase. And how, he wondered, were you supposed to respond to the greeting, “Whassup?”
Sometimes, going out for Chinese food, he’d get embarrassed ordering, worried that he wasn’t pronouncing the Chinese menu items in the proper American way. Instead, he preferred to point: “I want this and this.”
In English, it seemed, he could never get fully comfortable. “I’m not outgoing enough,” he said.
Susan Tusa for The Chronicle
In his dorm room, Mengshi Zhao talks with Chen Liu, a fellow student from China. He knew he was an outsider in America, an anthropologist trying to decode the natives’ habits.
By contrast, when Mengshi spoke with his friends in Mandarin, he stood taller, smiled more. He could be funny, even a little flirtatious. One night, while grabbing a bite at Everyday Restaurant, an unpretentious strip-mall spot popular with Michigan State’s Chinese population, he spotted a fellow student from Henan province walk in with a friend. Mengshi had met her the previous summer on QQ, a Chinese equivalent of Facebook, and they had taken the train to Beijing together to catch their flight to America. After several minutes of sneaking looks over their menus, Mengshi got up to talk with the girls; their table pealed with laughter.
At all the basketball games he’d attended, Mengshi had spoken to only one other student. That guy, it turned out, was an exchange student from Germany who couldn’t quite follow the game’s rules.
The Izzone was in a frenzy as Michigan State opened up a 30-point lead on its intrastate rival. “It’s our state!” the fans chanted. “U-S-A!” In the heaving crowd, a lone Chinese student cheered along.
Jianwei Li sometimes thought about how different her life was from that of her parents and grandparents.
Her mother was born in the midst of China’s Cultural Revolution. She’d been among the fortunate few Chinese, and even fewer women, to win a spot at a university. She’d met Jianwei’s father there, and they both had become successful bankers. But Jianwei could remember back to her childhood, before China’s economy took off, when times were tough and the family had struggled.
It seemed a world away from the here and now, from East Lansing.
Everything her family had done over the years was with the aim of getting Jianwei to this place, of giving her the greatest chances in life. Growing up, with her parents busy at work, she had been raised largely by her maternal grandparents. Her grandfather was her first teacher. Her grandmother learned English to help Jianwei with her studies.
As the family’s finances improved, so did Jianwei’s opportunities. She took English lessons and spent time as a high-school exchange student in North Dakota. Now, at 19, she was a freshman at Michigan State.
Jianwei had only to look at her roommate to understand her good fortune. She was Chinese, too, but born in the United States, to parents who ran a restaurant in small-town Michigan. Every weekend she drove a couple of hours to work for her parents, to help cover her tuition.
“That’s kind of an American thing,” Jianwei said. In China it was a given that parents would pay for the child’s education.
Jianwei’s parents were generous, although not as generous as some. Most of the fancy cars at Michigan State, the Mercedes and BMWs and Land Rovers, were driven by Chinese students. It was said that the local auto dealerships hired Mandarin speakers to cater to these new customers. Some on the campus saw this as a conspicuous display of wealth, and it may have contributed to tensions at the blue-collar institution. The previous summer there had been an ugly incident: Several cars were vandalized, “Go back to China” spray-painted on them in Chinese characters.
Jianwei appreciated all that had been afforded her, but sometimes she wondered about the trade-offs. Her American classmates, she saw, had hobbies nurtured from childhood: They did ballet, ran track, sang. As a young girl, Jianwei had begun learning to play traditional Chinese music. But the other parents had told her mother, You should let your daughter focus on her studies. She’d had to give it up.
Jianwei knew that her parents, too, had sacrificed. Two decades earlier, her father had hoped to go to the United States; he’d been accepted by a graduate program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. But without scholarship help, he couldn’t attend. Now his daughter was studying in America. “It’s like his dream,” Jianwei said.
And it was hard not to wonder what Jianwei’s brilliant, talented mother might have done if she’d had greater advantages, her daughter’s advantages. Jianwei felt certain, for one, that if her mother had worked in the financial center of Hong Kong, rather than in mainland China, she would have been even more successful in business.
At her parents’ urging, Jianwei was studying for a business degree. But it was when she talked about seeing the world, about living in Spain or volunteering in Africa, that a faraway look came over her face. It was as if she was already seeing herself strolling the streets of Madrid, or working in a village on the Sahara’s edge.
Jianwei had more possibilities, but also greater expectations.
Mengshi got a job washing dishes two days a week in a campus dining hall. And he found himself enjoying it.
While his parents paid his tuition and college expenses, it was good to have extra money, which he planned to spend on a camera. He also liked his American co-worker, Doug. “D-O-U-G,” he said. “Sometimes, I think I say D-O-G. I can understand his pronounciation, but I don’t know how to pronounce it myself.”
Doug would tell jokes and pull pranks, like blowing bubbles out of dish soap. And he seemed genuinely interested in Mengshi’s life in China. Do you have Facebook? he’d ask. Are you allowed to drink? Even though Mengshi had been in the United States for nearly a year, he still had lots of questions of his own. For instance: What was high school like in America? If Doug didn’t know the answers, he’d tell Mengshi to Google them.
Doug wasn’t the only American whom Mengshi was getting to know. At spring break, Peter had moved out of their room, to live off-campus with a friend. But Mengshi barely had time to digest the news before he was off on another trip, this one with fellow business students, to visit factories and corporate headquarters in Nebraska and Oklahoma.
Of the two dozen students selected for the trip, only a couple were Chinese; one was a Saudi, and the rest American. Mengshi had a roommate on the trip and ate his meals with the others, American food, like pasta. One night he went out with some of the guys to explore Omaha. It was fun, although Mengshi occasionally missed his solo travels, the freedom to explore.
On the drive back to East Lansing, the entire bus hushed listening to the basketball game, the only one Mengshi would miss all year. They parted with hugs and high-fives.
Maybe some of the business-trip students would turn out to be friends. In the flush of their return, they posted photos online, commenting on one another’s snapshots, and made plans to meet. A month later, it hadn’t happened yet.
After all this time, had Mengshi finally broken through the wall that seemed to separate him from Americans? He was optimistic but not too optimistic. “It’s hard for me to start a relationship with a stranger. I think I’m not so good at that.” He paused. “It’s the biggest challenge for me.”
It was a Friday night, but televisions across East Lansing were turned to the news. A week of horror was nearing its final chapter; within hours, the police would capture the second of two suspects in the crude bomb attack that had killed three and injured hundreds near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
Jianwei had a connection to the bombing: She had gone to school in China with one of those who was killed, Lingzi Lu, a Chinese graduate student at Boston University.
Jianwei had not known Ms. Lu well. But as word spread throughout their hometown that Ms. Lu was missing, Jianwei’s mother, with little sense of the distance between Massachusetts and Michigan, called to make sure that she was safe.
Jianwei felt a particular sadness for Ms. Lu’s parents. “Her parents are of the same age as my parents; they cannot have another child. She is the only child of her family.”
“That must be really hard for her parents, for her to die suddenly.”
Because of China’s policy of limiting families to just one child, the country is full of Lingzi Lus, of Jianweis, singletons—more than 100 million, according to Xinhua, the state news agency. They are doted upon—"the lucky one,” Jianwei called herself—but it also means that parents, and grandparents, too, are deeply invested in their success.
Susan Tusa for The Chronicle
Jianwei Li is studying for a business degree, but she talks about seeing the world, about living in Spain or volunteering in Africa.
Jianwei wanted to do well. Final exams were only a few weeks away, and she had planned to spend the weekend studying, physics especially. She was “getting crazy” about the course; the vocabulary seemed like a senseless mush in her brain.
But Jianwei couldn’t concentrate. She was frantically scanning news sites and social media, although not because of Boston. Hours earlier, a major earthquake had struck Sichuan province, in southwest China. Her boyfriend, a musician, was there for work, and neither Jianwei nor her mother could get through.
Feeling helpless, she went to her computer and called up an airline Web site. She purchased two tickets out of the provincial capital, Chengdu, at full fare. When the airport reopened, she reasoned, many people would be trying to leave; those holding pricier tickets might get priority.
She checked to see if her mother had had better luck. She had not.
Jianwei and her mother were close. She told her mother just about everything; they talked through all the major decisions in her life. When it was time to figure out what she should study, it was her mother who pushed her to pursue a business degree. Jianwei’s original choice was biology, but her mother thought it was a bad idea. If Jianwei became a doctor or a medical researcher, her mother said, it would take many years to earn a degree, and she might never come back to China.
They talked about that, about whether Jianwei would return to China. Whether she should. Her mother told her, “You probably won’t want to come back.”
Jianwei herself didn’t know. As with so many things, she was caught between the push of China and pull of the world beyond, between obligation and exploration. In a year on her own, she had tried hot yoga and music appreciation, lost her passport and found it, signed a lease on her first apartment. She’d formed a circle of friends—Chinese and Americans—whom she never would have met at a university back home. Maybe next year, she would take more science courses. Maybe she would study abroad—there was this cool program in Uganda, if only she could get her mother’s permission. Maybe.
For the other students, too, the year ended with both uncertainty and possibility. Yan had gone from English lessons to earning a grade of 4.0 for the semester; she’d go to summer school to try to make up for the time, and credits, lost. Mengshi had more travel planned, this time in China: Wuhan and Qingdao. The fall would bring his first honors course. Only a half-dozen other students were enrolled; he’d get to know them all, a prospect that left him at once excited and apprehensive.
Soon Michigan State would welcome a new freshman class, among them, another 1,000 Chinese students seeking an American education.
But now, in April, Jianwei was waiting for her cellphone to ring. And finally it did: Her boyfriend was shaken by the earthquake but was OK.
After classes ended, she was supposed to stay in East Lansing for a five-week summer session.
But she had to be with him, had to be in China. She searched for airfares and found one, for $1,300.
For now, anyway, Jianwei Li was going back to China.
