The Stranded

Lily Cao is dancing in one of Mount Holyoke College’s cavernous performance studios, floor-to-ceiling windows casting shadows across the honeyed floors.

Outside the studio, late-winter ice glazes the trees around the Upper Lake, but inside there is warmth and camaraderie, students gently teasing each other for a misplaced step or wrong-footed combination.

The Pandemic Year

Fifty-two weeks ago, campuses closed and higher education as we’ve known it came to a halt. Ever since, we’ve been asking two questions: How will the pandemic change higher education? And how many of those changes will stick? Read on.

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Since Lily, a senior, came to Mount Holyoke, ballet has been an outlet for her, a release from the stress of her studies. As the accompanist sits at the piano, Lily stretches her limbs and lets the music envelop her.

Then she wakes up.

She’s no longer on the New England campus but back in her childhood bedroom in Lanzhou, a city of three million in west-central China. As Covid-19 spread across the United States last spring, closing campuses, Lily retreated here. Now her dreams, and her computer, are all that tether her to the American college life she had to abandon. Late at night, as her parents sleep, she logs into class sessions.

For all students, the coronavirus pandemic has been enormously disruptive. For the more than one million international students enrolled in American colleges, it has been a vortex, flinging them to every part of the globe.

Some — bound by academic obligations or blocked from returning home by travel restrictions — have remained in the United States. But they, too, are, in a way, dislocated, cut off from the support of family and longtime friends.

The challenges international students face are academic and financial, logistical and mental. Shifting visa policy has left students, both here and abroad, unsettled about their futures. Studying in a language other than their own, often — for those overseas — in the dead of night, compounds the challenges of remote learning. And unable to legally work in the United States, some international students have turned to food pantries to get by.

The acuteness of the issues facing international students led the American College Health Association to single them out as a population made especially vulnerable by the pandemic.

After Lily dreams she is at Mount Holyoke, back in the dance studio, the sadness lingers; it is a stubborn ache not easily shaken. Why am I still here? she sometimes asks her mother.

When students come to America to study, they understand they will straddle two countries, two places, two worlds. The pandemic, though, has marooned them in just one. They are stranded.

To make one of the most important decisions of her young life, to go to college abroad, Khuslen Tulga had years to prepare. She studied hard, winning a scholarship to a prestigious Mongolian high school that is a feeder to top American colleges. When the admission offers came in, she chose carefully, deciding on Hamilton College, a small liberal-arts institution in upstate New York.

For the other big decision, whether to stay in the United States as a global pandemic flared, Khuslen, who goes by the nickname T, had only hours.

Word of a strange new infection in the Chinese city of Wuhan reached Mongolia, which shares a large land border with China, in early 2020, and T’s family told her the news during calls home. But the threat seemed remote in America, where T, then a freshman, found attitudes toward illness casual. When she caught a cold that winter, she wore a mask as she would have done at home, but her classmates stared at her strangely. “There’s a saying in Mongolia,” she said, “in a place of the blind, you become blind.” Embarrassed, she took her mask off.

Soon, though, there were Covid cases in the United States. Suddenly, the pandemic was on Hamilton’s doorstep. First, the college extended spring break. Then, on March 17, David Wippman, the president, announced in-person classes would be canceled for the rest of the spring semester.

T had a choice to make: She could join the queue of students seeking approval to stay on campus. Or she could try to navigate the gantlet of airports to fly home. Doing so would put her at risk of contracting the virus from other travelers and infecting her grandparents, with whom she lived. That is, if she could even get there — Mongolia had closed its borders, permitting few commercial flights in. If she left America, would she be able to come back? She had worked so hard to get to college, and after little more than a semester, she worried the opportunity could be lost.

Mustafa Hussain for The Chronicle

Other international students faced a similar calculus, and in the early months of the outbreak, the majority opted to stay. As many as nine in 10 foreign students remained in the United States during the spring-2020 semester, according to a survey by the Institute of International Education.

There was no single reason that kept them here. Few international flights meant many students couldn’t book a ticket. Some feared they’d be prevented from returning by visa restrictions and travel bans — such as American prohibitions on travelers from China and, later, from Europe and elsewhere. Those close to earning a degree worried they could lose their chance to work in the U.S. after graduation, while others did not want to abandon research projects they were in the middle of. The unreliability of local Wi-Fi, internet censorship and firewalls, the difficulty of taking classes from many time zones away — all led students to stay. And many, particularly those studying for graduate degrees, had built lives in America. Departing abruptly would mean breaking leases, pulling kids from school, even separation from American spouses.

For T, the result was agonizing but ultimately clear: She would stay. “I had to just convince my family that it’s better if I don’t move,” she said. ‘And that was very, very hard to make. It took all of me to make that decision.”

It was a solitary spring. Fewer than 5 percent of Hamilton students had stayed, or about 40 percent of the college’s international students. Although T was one of about 60 students on campus, strict coronavirus protocols meant that she saw little of the others. In her “little dorm bubble,” she registered their presence by the sounds that occasionally seeped through the walls: the melody of someone practicing the saxophone, the staccato tapping of bongo drums, the murmurs of class discussions on Zoom.

Sometimes, she would put her own classes on speaker and prop her phone up on her desk so that her grandmother, a retired schoolteacher, could listen to the lectures. It was a small grace of the pandemic that T’s grandparents could get this glimpse of her faraway college life, a cracked window they could peer through.

T is close with her grandparents, who raised her after her mother left to find work in California when T was still a toddler. She respects the determination shown by her mother — who taught herself English for the U.S.-visa interview — but she has seen her only once in 16 years, when T arrived in America the summer before college. It was her grandparents who had cared for her all this time, investing their savings in her education when she showed an early appetite for learning.

In lockdown, T would spend as many as four or five hours a day on the phone with her grandparents in Ulaanbaatar, 13 hours ahead. In her free time, she tried to keep busy, drawing, playing the piano, binge-watching TV shows like Sherlock Holmes, Black Mirror, and the anime series Hunter x Hunter. Sometimes, though, the loneliness was too insistent, and she could only cry. Her homesickness, she told herself, was a “nice pain.” It showed how much she loved and was loved.

Courtesy of Khuslen Tulga

Colleges have recognized the particular fragility and isolation of international students during the pandemic and tried to offer them special programming, organizing Zoom happy hours, online game nights, and mental-health support groups. Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, in Daytona Beach, Fla., even telephoned all of its 1,700 foreign students in the weeks after the virus spread, just to check in.

Within 48 hours of closing its campus, Hamilton had recruited volunteer mentors for each student who stayed behind, a group that included some Americans. Vige Barrie, the college’s senior director of media relations and T’s host mother, regularly dropped off meals from local restaurants, like shawarma kebab, a favorite; together, they took socially distanced walks through the campus glen. T’s boss, Chau-Fang Lin, assistant director in the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, stopped by whenever she was walking her dogs. The dean of students sent every student a care package with toiletries and Girl Scout cookies.

Before college, T had spent a gap year working with underserved students in the ger settlements, traditional Mongolian nomadic communities that frequently lack plumbing or running water. She knew her coronavirus life, while cloistered, was one of comfort and privilege. That helped her rally at her lowest moments, such as when case counts dropped back home, and people were going to concerts, to cafés — freedoms she didn’t have.

“If I was not hopeful, and if I didn’t recognize that everything’s temporary, maybe I would be in a worse situation than I am now, mentally,” she said. “It’s not just international students. Everyone right now is just having a hard time.”

Lily didn’t go back to China at first. When Covid struck, she was spending the semester at Harvard University. She had an off-campus apartment and a plane ticket for May. She could wait it out, she figured, until the panic, and maybe even the pandemic itself, subsided.

Lily, whose Chinese name is Jingyi, felt comfortable in America. She had first come as a high-school freshman, spending four years at a California boarding school before going to Mount Holyoke. Most international students come to the United States for college, but in recent years, a growing number of middle-class students are attending high schools here — because they hope it will better prepare them for an American college or because, like Lily, they prefer it to the education in their home countries.

But something was changing. Stories of discrimination against Asians and Asian-Americans, tied to Covid’s origins in China, were growing more common. Since the beginning of the outbreak, the group Stop AAPI Hate has recorded more than 2,800 incidents of anti-Asian bias. Then-President Donald Trump repeatedly called Covid “kung flu” and the “China virus.”

As T had before the pandemic, Lily felt self-conscious wearing a mask in public, and she was afraid of being singled out. In a grocery store, an elderly woman approached her. Do you have coronavirus? she asked Lily. The welcome mat was fraying.

“Covid has really made me scared,” she said. “I just thought that, oh, this could really happen to me as an Asian person.”

As the weather warmed, another shift was occurring. Case counts were coming down in China, the initial epicenter, even as the disease was spreading dangerously in the United States. On WeChat, the Chinese social-media app, parents shared daily statistics about outbreaks in American college towns and strategized about how to get masks and other protective equipment, in short supply in the United States, to their children. In a Pew Research Center poll of people in 13 countries, a median of just 15 percent gave America high marks on its handling of Covid.

In Lanzhou, Lily’s hometown, cases were few. She began to feel that she would be safer there.

Getting back, though, wasn’t easy. Like the United States, China had banned foreign travelers and, for a time, placed severe restrictions on international flights. Lily’s May flight was canceled. She rebooked for June, but that trip, too, was scratched. Finally, her third try, in July, was a success. After a two-week mandatory quarantine in a Shanghai hotel, she made it home.

Such delayed departures are not uncommon. Data from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security shows that the number of student-visa holders in the United States fell nearly 25 percent from January, before the pandemic, to December. In a fall survey, colleges told the Institute of International Education that 80 percent of their international students were in the United States, a drop from the spring of 2020.

Yuyang Liu, Redux, for The Chronicle

Being at home with her parents felt a bit like a vacation to Lily. It was the most time they had spent together since she was a young teenager. Every night after dinner and before her classes began, Lily and her mother would take a walk, sometimes along the Yellow River, which wends its way through Lanzhou.

She was also able to reconnect with childhood friends. Because of differences in the Chinese and American academic calendars, their breaks had rarely aligned, and Lily had often spent summer vacations interning in Beijing or Shanghai. They had stayed in touch over WeChat, but now they could hang out.

Soon, though, the excitement of renewing old acquaintances dimmed. Many of the conversations circled back to events that had happened when she was 12 or 13 years old, when they had last been together. That’s not who Lily was anymore. She missed her college friends, the people who knew her now.

Online classes were a disappointment, too. The professors were trying hard, she knew, but remote learning wasn’t the same. A biology major, she was taking vertebrate anatomy. The instructor mailed specimens to dissect to students in the United States; Lily and her classmates overseas made do with watching videos of dissections.

And Zoom couldn’t capture the close connections with her professors and other students, the feeling of being part of a community of learners — the very things she loved about American liberal-arts education.

“Taking classes for me right now is opening my laptop, talking to the computer. In the end, the end of class is marked by, close the computer and close Zoom,” she said, pantomiming the motions during a video call. “That feels completely different from in-person experiences. Taking online classes at home does not feel like going to school at all.”

Mount Holyoke had been wholly remote in the fall, but in November, the college announced that as many as 60 percent of the students could come to campus for the spring semester. Lily began to think that maybe she could be one of them.

T had been looking forward to winter break. Fall had been a grind. To reduce the spread of infection, Hamilton ended classes before Thanksgiving, with professors extending class periods or scheduling Saturday sessions to cover all the material. While T, a computer-science major, had begun the semester taking three of her four courses in person, under tents, cold weather had forced them online. Although most students were back on campus, social-distancing rules made it hard to hang out.

T was exhausted and sick of the four walls of her dorm. “I’ve been in this room alone for a very long time,” she said.

Only about two dozen students would remain behind over the two-month winter break, and Hamilton was putting them up in two extended-stay hotels, in part because the campus would be fully shut down for several weeks. They were excited — in their small quarantine bubbles, they’d be free to mingle. Each of the rooms had a kitchen, and T, who would be a resident assistant, planned to hold cooking classes and game nights. For the group, she designed hoodies, an intricate drawing riffing on the animated movie Soul.

Hamilton had offered T an RA position to cover her room and board costs; combined with a full academic scholarship, it freed her from the kind of money worries that many international students have faced during the pandemic. U.S. visa regulations prohibit students from working outside of the college setting, and at many institutions, campus jobs have been hard to come by. The loss of expected summer work back home worsened the financial pinch. Some colleges, such as Michigan State University and the University of Pittsburgh, have created emergency funds to assist international students during Covid.

The RA job fit T’s personality. Friendly and outgoing, she was happiest when helping others, learning about their stories. Sometimes, she’d randomly knock on doors to make sure no one felt isolated or left out.

When she had come to college, she hadn’t thought of being an international student as central to her identity. But in the winter, just as over the summer, most of T’s fellow stranded were international students, and she began to feel a greater sense of kinship. International students needed to come together so their voices could be heard, she believed. Through the pandemic, Hamilton administrators had done well by them, but they could do still better, could be more proactive in communications and better understand their specific needs. With a group of fellow foreign students, T worked to help build up the international-student association.

Still, those efforts weren’t enough to crowd out her own loneliness. On New Year’s Eve, she video-called with her family and was reminded of all that she had missed out on over the past year: holiday gatherings, summertime camping trips, catching up with old friends. She pined to thumb through her grandfather’s collection of Mongolian literature; the elaborate nature metaphors and sense of place spoke to her in a way that English-language authors could not. Sometimes she feared that she was so focused on the present and on the future that her past, that sense of where she had come from, was slipping away.

NANCY L. FORD

When would she return? her grandparents asked. She was still only 19, and back at home, she’d be a kid again, her grandparents fixing her meals, telling her when to get up and when to go to bed. On her own, she’d had to grow up; her quarter-life crisis was coming ahead of schedule. That was something she knew she had to hide from her family. Admitting how low she felt would only make them more insistent that she come home. It would compound their worry.

Late one night, T lay in bed, listening to Mongolian songs and scrolling through old photographs. “This isn’t the brightest moment of my day,” she said, hitting record on her phone.

“I can’t speak for every international student, but I feel like this is a feeling that you can’t really do anything about. And you just have to take it in and know that it’s going to eventually pass away. And I don’t know when I can go home. I’m just thinking about how I don’t even remember what home feels like anymore.”

The new semester began, and Lily continued to take classes remotely from Lanzhou. She’d been forced to concede that it wasn’t feasible to return. The American ban on travelers from China had still not been lifted, so she would have to fly to a third country and quarantine for 14 days before she could enter the United States. Tickets were hard to come by and cost five times or more what they had before the pandemic. And few of her friends, many of whom were also international students, had gone back to Mount Holyoke.

“It’s all about the people that make the place special,” Lily said. “And if none of my friends are there, then I don’t think it’s worth the energy to travel back.”

The decision had at first been emotional, but now she accepted it. She was too tired to feel much, anyway. In the fall, her classes had ended by 2 a.m., but now her school day stretched from 8 p.m. to as late as 5 a.m. because of a particularly intensive immunology course. She slept fitfully during daylight hours, but even on her days off she was afraid to switch her schedule because of the difficulty of readjusting. Her body was in Lanzhou, but she lived in Eastern Standard Time.

courtesy of Lily Cao

For the first time since she left for the United States, she was home for the Spring Festival, or Lunar New Year. It is the biggest Chinese holiday and one, like Thanksgiving, that emphasizes bringing families together. Lily went to dinner with her parents and grandparents, but she’d had a midterm the night before, and during the meal, she almost nodded off. After dinner, she excused herself and went upstairs to begin classes, the traditional New Year’s fireworks sometimes drowning out her Korean-language lessons.

As it had been back at Mount Holyoke, ballet was her release. Three days a week, she rolled a portable barre into the spare room where she studied, and balanced her laptop precariously on a stack of books for online dance classes. Because of unstable internet connections, the music would sometimes lag, and Lily and her classmates would find themselves dancing out of sync; other times, her teacher’s screen would freeze, and Lily could hear only her disembodied voice, calling out the steps.

Still, she welcomed the discipline of dance and how it could transport her. When she danced, she didn’t think about her Covid exile. “I forget everything that’s happening around me,” she said. “It’s really been something that brings me joy and peace.”

The rest of the time, though, her life was defined by where she wasn’t. During classroom breakout sessions, she’d find herself paired with freshmen or sophomores and feel envious of all that lay ahead of them. They’d get to return to campus.

Lily didn’t really mind that she would miss out on graduation, although she felt some regret for her parents, for whom seeing her walk in her cap and gown was a big deal.

Instead, it was the little things that left her feeling lost. There would be no more late-night study sessions over mozzarella sticks and French fries, no more taking the bus to Amherst on the weekends, no more stopping off for coffee before early morning classes. There’d never be another Mountain Day, where the pealing of bells on a day in fall signals an impromptu campus holiday.

And orange chicken. Lily laughed. “When I first came to the U.S., everybody was like, oh, orange chicken is so good. And I said, it is not even a real thing in China. We don’t have that dish in China. But now I miss it so much.”

Yuyang LIU, Redux, for The Chronicle

Even as she mourned what she was missing, Lily was thinking about her future. She was hopeful that she could start a graduate program, in public health, back in United States in the fall. That hope depended on a lot of ifs — if classes were in person, if American consulates in China began issuing visas again, and, of course, if she got accepted in the first place. Still, Lily allowed herself to think about when — when she would be back in America.

As for T, as the spring semester got underway, she felt some of her winter-break funk begin to lift. She, too, started to think ahead again, making plans for the summer and beyond.

But one thing didn’t appear on her horizon: going home. The fog of that uncertainty kept her from even imagining her return.

When she used to dream of going to America, she thought only of the freedom she would have, to study, to live life as she chose. Instead, that choice proved to be a commitment to going it alone.