I made friends because we loved talking about healthcare policy, from being on the debate team, from a shared love for Mad Men, from being interested in starting companies. I did all of this as someone who'd spent the decade preceding college growing up in Bangladesh, with a thick accent and somehow ended up with a group of friends from all around the world.
I'm not saying any of this was easy, but I do think there's a self-defeating element to believing what the parent does.
It happens whenever you have that community available. If it's just yourself, then you are forced to adjust. I saw it happening with my family members too. The ones that went to the large immigrant community led to them not knowing English well, while the more isolated ones integrated properly. One even first went to somewhere with no community, and when they moved to somewhere with community they said that their English used to be better back there! I also saw how they became a burden on their children as they were not able to function properly in a country where they couldn't speak the language properly, closing off opportunity to themselves.
On the other side with Chinese students who come over to a western country, I found it frustrating that they were pretty shy & insular when speaking english while they were gregarious and cracking jokes in chinese amongst each other. I tried to connect, but I think they feel too embarrassed to try to speak english, so they don't practice enough outside the minimum and never reach competency and then stick with their chinese friendship group. And they don't seem that interested most of the time :(
You also see it happening with western expats in asian countries too.
So my suggestion to anyone moving to another country and planning to stay there for years, avoid the home group and force yourself to speak with mistakes. Otherwise you hurt and isolate yourself instead and write sour grapes essays like this one.
Totally agree, if you start off thinking that it's hard to make friends with foreigners, it might discourage you and causing you to not even try.
That being said, pretending the barrier doesn't exist is also harmful, because you do need to try harder. Without that expectation and conscious effort, most people naturally gravitate towards their existing in-group, which may be drawn along not just racial lines, but also regional, political, class, or any other lines that causes difference.
Edit: different groups are also treated differently, because they benefit or suffer from different stereotypes. A white American living in Asia will have very different experience than an Asian person living in US.
This is likely not true for most people.
What parent talks about is acceptance and being member of in-group. That is much much different. It is also much different to really click and be really in-group with people from another culture, because you can't rely on assumptions you grew with.
You and almost everyone else. It's much easier to be emotionally vulnerable using a "throw-away account".
For an example, if you come out as gay to some stranger on a train, it's almost certain that there will never be any real-world repercussions. But if you come out as gay to someone in your hometown, it will likely change your life forever.
> I've made meaningful connections with people in every country I've lived in for more than a week. [...] This is likely not true for most people.
Funny, I've heard some variation on this speech from most people who get to travel around the world for a year.
I attribute it to not having to worry about money, myself, and it's my belief that a majority of humanity would be that way, if they could afford it.
This is likely not true for most people.
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, ordinary American from the northeast. And my first instinct hearing this was "yeah, well, Florida".
That's not to say it doesn't happen everywhere. I know I have heard complaints of this category here in San Francisco.
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 service at a restaurant due to "dress code", if it didn't happen that a white kid had similar clothing as her kid, she wouldn't have realized it was racial profiling.
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.
As a foreigner living in Taiwan, the vast majority of people here do the very same to me as well. I am constantly shut out of circles and deemed too weird to actually know yet always being watched like some sociological specimen. I don’t think that “othering” is a known concept here or if it were it registers pretty low on people priorities when interacting with me or mindlessly staring at me while I eat in public..
People will literally take their children away from the park when I bring my daughter to play. I must insist that I was a well adjusted and popular enough guy home. It’s been a bit of a heartbreaking experience to realize that probably every culture on earth has irreconcilably racial biases and prejudices inherent in the majority because the most common unifier amongst all people is stupidity.
Also, when you mention Americans and never being a part of them do you mean all Americans including blacks, latinos, natives, arabs..? I see a great deal of projection going on here where Chinese Americans are being shut out of socializing when it seems to me the truth is that many Chinese born people living in the west actually don’t like the culture all that much and don’t want to integrate either but don’t vocalize it this way because it doesn’t sound nice to say.
Having tried to make friends with people from many cultures I found my luck to be in the 10-20% range. Majority of people in every culture are only comfortable with people of their own culture. It can be hard to find the few people who are open to developing friendship with people of a different culture.
> This is has nothing to do with being a foreigner, or being in any specific country. It's a university culture, and every university has its own pace of teaching, in China or US.
I think it also has substantially to do with reading/linguistic fluency in the language the class is taught in. Many university courses are paced to push the abilities of well prepared, ambitious, and dedicated native speakers.
If you have to read 500+ pages/week (or in some fields, more like 1000+ pages/week), and write a paper on average once every other week, you have to be a very strong reader, with a lot of experience analyzing and constructing linguistic arguments.
A non-native speaker who is a bit uncomfortable with reading might read at half the speed of their fellow students; they could end up spending twice as much time while still comprehending less, and it would be a serious struggle.
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.
> My sole desire is that when future generations come of age, they will inherit a mature academic tradition, and will not have to travel such long distances and endure these various discomforts.
I am sure the Chinese academy will continue to grow and develop dramatically over the next few decades, but it takes generations to rebuild after as big a disruption as the cultural revolution etc.
> This is has nothing to do with being a foreigner, or being in any specific country. It's a university culture, and every university has its own pace of teaching, in China or US.
It seems odd to assume that every University's pace is set independently of every other University. The vast majority of Universities and professors base their workload using other similar Universities as a reference. Either explicitly or implicitly. Some professors choose to make their courses more or less demanding, but even this is done as an adjustment from the reference point. Because of this, norms can vary significantly across different parts of the world.
I've never studied in China, so I can't say whether Chinese Universities really are less demanding. But after living and studying in multiple countries, I've certainly seen that norms do exist, and vary across different parts of the world.
> How hard it is to consciously decide to go to a book store when you are in need of a book?
That's the entire point. It's not hard at all when you consciously think about it and decide to do it. But most of our decisions and thoughts are driven by habits, not conscious thought. For example, it is extremely easy to not waste my time writing pointless comments on HN. And yet, here I am, because this is my habitual response to boredom.
Can you expand on this? Are you saying that foreigners at university need to be more amiable to be accepted than they would otherwise?
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, or being in any specific country. It's a university culture, and every university has its own pace of teaching, in China or US.
And then,
> Of course, it makes no difference if you don’t go > to bookstores in the US, but if you bring this habit > back with you, it means that you don’t go to bookstores > in China
Seriously? How hard it is to consciously decide to go to a book store when you are in need of a book? This also seems to imply that China has no good libraries, which is untrue. I'm from a small city in China, and I borrowed so many books from the city library. That was how I got into programming as well, borrowing a book about Turbo Pascal.
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.
There are two real choices: 1) pretend to be a white person and be extremely amiable, or 2) fallback to the smaller circle of Chinese people in US.