From College Town to Chinatown

Brittany Greeson for The Chronicle

Feel like some Chinese food? You have options in this college town. Not far from the Michigan State University campus, you can get red-braised pork belly or cold jellyfish salad or congee, a soothing rice porridge, topped with preserved duck egg.

There is a hot-pot place on Grand River Avenue, another on Clippert, and two across the street from one another, off Hagedorn. Despite its name, Hong Kong Restaurant serves authentic chili-studded Sichuan cuisine. Lei Ding and her friends, though, prefer Everyday Restaurant, a Cantonese spot tucked in a strip mall. “We’re from the south of China,” says Ding, a graduate student in math from Guangzhou. “None of us like spicy food.”

As foreign-student enrollments have soared in the United States, almost doubling over the past decade, their benefit has often been measured in the tuition dollars they bring, a financial godsend to many strapped colleges during the recession. The value of those students can’t be measured simply in dollars and cents, of course, but also in the diverse perspectives they offer.

But East Lansing’s flourishing restaurant scene is a reminder that international students’ impact doesn’t end at the campus gates. Many of these students — from India, Saudi Arabia, and especially China — are more affluent than previous generations, the result of growing wealth around the globe. Around universities like Michigan State, where one in eight students is from overseas, a whole economy has grown up to meet their needs and cater to their tastes.

East Lansing boasts three Asian markets, aisles crammed with imported sauces and spices and freezer cases stocked with frozen dumplings, just like Mom used to microwave. Local grocers, too, have diversified their offerings — Costco now sells moon cakes, pastries with a dense, sweet filling popular during the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival. A pair of Asian-food delivery apps, Mifan (the Chinese word for rice) and 517, for the local area code, satisfy late-night hunger pangs.

The international-student effect is also present in ways that aren’t so readily obvious. The intercity bus service, for instance, has seen an uptick in ridership, ferrying students — and their luggage — back and forth to Detroit’s international airport. An electronics shop that buys, refurbishes, and sells smartphones has found a market among Chinese students hungry for the latest devices.

“The economic power of the foreign students who have come into our community,” says Robert L. Trezise Jr., chief executive of the Lansing Economic Area Partnership, “is tremendous.”

Nafsa: Association of International Educators calculates that students from overseas contributed nearly $40 billion to the American economy in the past academic year. In the East Lansing area, their economic footprint was more than $346 million, supporting 4,700 jobs, Nafsa estimates.

But while the increase in international students has helped turned college towns across America into quasi-Chinatowns, the very economic expansion they have generated could now be threatened.

The current political climate, from the travel ban on a half-dozen predominantly Muslim countries to the recent news that the Trump administration considered barring all Chinese students, has been the equivalent of erecting a giant “You’re Not Welcome” sign over the United States. But politics is just one of a host of factors — including increased global competition for top talent and the termination of several foreign-government scholarship programs that sent large numbers of students to the United States — that have caused the enrollment growth of the past 10 years to stall out.

Data released last month show that the number of new international students studying at American colleges decreased by nearly 7 percent in 2017, the second year in a row of declines. At Michigan State this fall, international enrollment is down 18 percent from its 2014 high.

Could the international-student boom go bust in America’s college towns?

Even before President Trump was elected, international enrollment at Michigan State had leveled off, then fallen more and more steeply. The university was one of the first to recruit aggressively abroad, and its circumstances may well be a harbinger of things to come.

Lei Ding started at Michigan State in 2014, the high-water mark for foreign enrollment at the university. There were 7,643 international students on the campus that year. Now there are 6,260, including Ding, who has stayed on for a master’s degree.

Even so, the variety of internationally oriented stores and services in East Lansing has seemed only to increase. Just this fall, Meet Fresh, a chain of cafes popular throughout Asia, announced plans for an East Lansing location, to open in early 2019.

When the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, for which Ding does marketing, holds events like the Lunar New Year celebration, it has no trouble getting local businesses to sign on as sponsors, from the managers of high-end apartment buildings to the insurers who do a brisk business selling auto policies to first-time drivers among the international students.

“We have everything we need here,” Ding says. “Everything. We even have a place to sing karaoke like in China.”

Nimbus KTV is located just off the Michigan State campus, up a flight of narrow stairs above a ramen shop and a clothing boutique. In the United States, karaoke is a public event, with singers unleashing their inner Beyonces and Mariahs in front of the entire bar. Not so in Asia. There, karaoke, or KTV, is confined to private rooms, where small groups of friends, family members, or colleagues take turns serenading one another.

Nimbus has four karaoke rooms, with leather couches for lounging and flat-screen TVs that display the lyrics of the latest Chinese and Korean pop songs. Colorful LEDs ring the ceiling, casting revelers in the glow of their choosing.

There’s pool at Nimbus, too, and a warren of mah-jongg tables. Early one Saturday evening, clusters of guys played hands of the game, the rat-a-tat-tat of their tiles punctuated by a little Mandarin trash-talking.

If Nimbus looks as if it could be transported to Beijing, that’s no accident. It was opened eight years ago by a group of Chinese students at Michigan State. They eventually returned home, and the property manager asked Matt Ao, who operated an escape room in the same building, if he’d be interested in taking it over.

Ao, who graduated from Michigan State in 2014, grew up in Michigan, but he was familiar with Asian-style karaoke from trips to China to visit family. He was intrigued and said yes.

Brittany Greeson for The Chronicle

At first, it was just Ao, who would come to the club after his 9-to-5 as a software engineer. To drum up business, he drove around late at night looking for expensive cars, the telltale sign of wealthy international students in East Lansing, and stuck fliers for Nimbus in their windshields.

Slowly, interest grew. With the business turning a profit, Ao was able to hire some staff; Charlie Ogden, a friend from Michigan State, has managed the lounge day-to-day since Ao moved to California.

The karaoke rooms’ decor, though, hasn’t changed. Ao wants customers to feel at home. “The Chinese students are pretty isolated socially,” Ao says. They don’t do the frat-party scene or go to bars, where, Ao says, they can get harassed by drunken Americans. (Nimbus sells soft drinks and juices but doesn’t have a liquor license.) “I wanted this to be a place where they could just hang out.”

On a recent Saturday night, much of East Lansing is watching the Michigan State football team thrash Indiana University. But at Nimbus, the phone trills with requests to reserve rooms, a policy that Ogden instituted after having to turn away too many groups. Several customers tote in cake and clutches of balloons for a birthday party. As the night goes on, the crowd will swell and swell again, as friends text one another: Come over for KTV.

Ogden is a small-town guy, from Northern Michigan. When he was at Michigan State, he says, “I never knew this place was here. Not a clue.” Running Nimbus has been a window onto a wholly new culture. He’s picked up a few words of Chinese and made a bunch of friends. Someday he hopes to save up enough money to travel to China; when he does, he’ll have plenty of couches to crash on.

Nimbus was created specifically for Chinese students, but in many cases, international students are generating fresh business for longtime retailers. After all, students need to open bank accounts, decorate their dorm rooms, and buy items, like bedding and winter coats, that are too bulky to carry on an international flight.

The local visitors’ center was getting so many requests for information — where to buy a cellphone, how to catch the bus to the mall — that it decided to translate its welcome brochure into Chinese.

When Julie Pingston, executive vice president of the Greater Lansing Convention and Visitors Bureau, started her job a decade ago, she didn’t know anyone in Michigan State’s Office for International Students and Scholars. “Now,” she says, “I know them all.”

Ask anyone around East Lansing, on campus or off, about the economic impact of international students, and they will point to one thing: the cars. See a flashy or expensive ride around town and it is almost certainly driven by an international — specifically, a Chinese — student. “You see Maseratis now,” says Trezise, the economic-development official. “We didn’t have that before.”

Still, Steve Shaheen, general manager of Okemos Auto Collection, is quick to say that he sells as many pre-owned BMWs as six-figure Porsches to Chinese students.

Globalization and College Towns

As the number of international students has grown, their economic impact on college towns across the United States has increased. Nafsa: Association of International Educators estimates that foreign students contributed $39 billion to the American economy last year, helping support more than 455,000 jobs. Here are estimates for economic impacts in some communities that are home to major research universities.

Note: Nafsa: Association of International Educators collects data by congressional district. This chart highlights some college towns and the major research universities in their districts.

International students at Michigan State began coming to the nearby dealership, which specializes in high-end German brands, about eight years ago. Initially it was just a student here, a student there. Then the pace picked up. Now Chinese students are a core part of Shaheen’s customer base, accounting for 10 percent of sales and 15 percent of the dealership’s repairs and service.

European brands have cachet in China, but because of steep import taxes, they’re prohibitively expensive. Here, by comparison, they seem relatively affordable. Shaheen typically sells four or five cars a week to international students at the start of the semester, and often buys back as many cars at the end of the academic year.

Shaheen offers rides back and forth to the Michigan State campus, about five miles away, when students bring in their cars for maintenance. He hired a Mandarin-speaking salesperson. And he’s tried to pick up the customs of his new clientele, such as the tradition of giving a small gift — maybe a BMW-branded Thermos that fits snugly in a cupholder — as a token of appreciation for a large purchase.

Occasionally, however, wires do get crossed. Because they don’t have Social Security numbers or credit histories, Chinese students aren’t eligible for financing and must pay the total purchase price upfront. Usually they pay by cashier’s check or money order, or their parents wire the money. But one student misunderstood and arrived at the dealership with $95,000 in cash — about enough to fill a shoebox, Shaheen recalls — to purchase a Porsche. “I was nervous just driving to the bank.”

In the past year, however, the dealership’s once-reliable growth among international students has plateaued. Shaheen says he isn’t worried, as long as his sales to students hold steady. That seems far from a certainty, though.

East Lansing residents have discovered a taste for hot-pot and sushi and bubble tea, the milky drink flecked with tiny tapioca balls, and they could help pick up some of the slack if the number of international students ebbs. But there’s a limited market for $95,000 cars. Michigan State has 1,056 fewer Chinese students than just five years ago — 1,056 fewer potential customers for Shaheen.

Brittany Greeson for The Chronicle

An outsider might be forgiven for thinking that Shweta Chandra is the ultimate helicopter parent.

When her daughter, Adhisha, began her sophomore year this fall at Michigan State, Chandra came with her from their home in Delhi, helping her move from a residence hall to an off-campus apartment. And then she stayed in East Lansing. For two months.

But Chandra wasn’t there to hover. (Or only a little — Adhisha needed her freezer stocked with home-cooked meals, after all.) She was starting a business, which probably wouldn’t be happening if her oldest child hadn’t decided to study in the United States.

Back in India, Chandra and her husband, Ruchir, run a firm that manufactures automobile parts. Their two factories supply major carmakers like Hyundai and Honda, and they have a healthy export business to Europe. The United States, though, has eluded them as a market.

“Everyone has their American dream,” Ruchir Chandra says, “and so do we.”

It’s not for lack of trying. He has visited the United States repeatedly in the past decade, and the company has picked up small projects here and there. But America is tough to break into from afar. Carmakers already have their favored suppliers, and while the Chandras say their products can compete technically, the logistical hassles of importing parts is a strike against them. They thought their American growth was stymied until Adhisha decided that she wanted an American college degree.

Adhisha’s major is food science, a choice inspired, she says, by her father’s poor meals on business trips. The program isn’t offered at Indian universities, and the strongest are in America.

Early in her college search, the Chandras went with Adhisha to the EducationUSA advising center, run by the U.S. State Department. During the appointment, they mentioned their American ambitions. A delegation of economic-development officials would be visiting Delhi from the United States, the counselor told them. They should set up some meetings.

Soon the Chandras had a stack of business cards from state economic offices across the country. Adhisha’s acceptance to Michigan State helped narrow the search.

On his next trip to the United States, a meeting with the Lansing Economic Area Partnership, or LEAP, was at the top of Ruchir Chandra’s schedule.

The organization is eager to welcome foreign investment. The region’s “Achilles heel,” says Trezise, the president, is that it doesn’t have much homegrown wealth to found and foster new companies. International investors — in particular graduates of Michigan State and parents of students there — are a group that LEAP has identified as important to jump-start local entrepreneurship.

Trezise and his staff walked Ruchir through the ins and outs of establishing a limited-liability corporation, helped him set up a bank account, and introduced him to a CPA. By the end of that first trip, Ruchir called Adhisha. “You will be the only student at Michigan State who knows the mayor,” he told her.

This fall, Shweta Chandra opened the company’s office in East Lansing and stayed on to handle orders for their new American customers, negotiating with freight companies, paying tariffs, and inspecting initial shipments.

Within a year and a half, the Chandras hope to set up a plant in the Lansing area, where they can produce parts or do value-added assembly of components they import. People here, Shweta Chandra says, want to buy American.

As for all the nationalist rhetoric in the air in the United States right now, the Chandras pay little attention. “We get used to the political situations where we are,” Ruchir says. “Our job is to run our business profitably.”

But Trezise worries that the Trump administration could do real damage to the international-student pipeline. The United States, he says, is squandering the talent and economic potential of students from abroad.

“Our federal policy already makes it hard for students to stay and work and create businesses,” he says, “and now we want to make it harder for them to even come.”

Even now, some East Lansing-area businesses say they are feeling the pinch of declining international-student numbers. Chad Cushman, president of Indian Trails, which operates Michigan Flyer, the intercity bus service, says he has seen a “notable drop” in student riders.

In the peak travel times of August and May, Michigan Flyer buses would ferry as many as 600 passengers a day to and from the airport, many of them international students from Michigan State and the University of Michigan. “It would make our numbers for the month,” Cushman says. Now he’s looking for ways, such as adding new routes, to compensate for the losses caused by the international-enrollment drop.

Still, people like Shweta Chandra and her daughter continue to be drawn from around the globe to America, to its college towns. At a Starbucks near the Michigan State campus on a recent sunlit afternoon, their affectionate laughter is part of a multilingual melody as students chat in English and Arabic, Spanish and Mandarin, over $5 Frappuccinos.

The Chandras’ younger child, Abhilash, now in his final year of high school, wants to study in the United States, too. Shweta hopes he might choose to enroll near here, to study engineering at the University of Michigan, close to his sister, close to where they’ve already invested so much.