Intercultural Experience of International Students in Shanghai
Living in a different country and studying in your second language is both challenging and rewarding.
Under the Intercultural Experience of International Students research project in China’s Ministry of Education, I explored the changes in life trajectories of 12 young scholars from over 8 countries.
This project impacted education policy-makers to rethink a more engaging way to welcome these aspiring souls.
Here I would love to share two findings that shaped my way of thinking and research.
Cross-cultural experience displayed in visual Interviews
Given that many students’ first language is neither English nor Chinese, our research team deployed visual interview methods - letting the interviewees draw what they think - to accurately communicate their thoughts.
This inspired me to seek sensational ways to empathize with interviewees. Visuals talk more vividly and powerfully than words.
Here are some drawings as answers to the question “What’s your impression of China before and after living and studying here?”
Romantic connections can change an intercultural experience drastically
Every student I talked with dated interculturally. One Mexican scholar even relocated to Shanghai for the girl he accidentally encountered in a plane accident in Mexico. The pull of romance is an inevitable and underestimated factor that connects international students’ choices in a foreign land.
Below is the excerpt of my research and reporting on the intercultural dating experience.
Three Scenes: A Glimpse into the Intercultural Dating Status Quo among International Students
On the night of November 10th 2019, two Chinese Italian International Master students and I were celebrating the last employed day as an interpreter during Shanghai International Import Expo in one Japanese restaurant on the Daxue (University) Road. One male student, spontaneous and jubilant, shared his forthcoming first official date with a local Chinese girl — his classmate attracted to him at the first sight. Noticing it had been merely two months since he arrived in Shanghai and attended the University A, I expressed both my congratulations and surprise. He responded with a bashful grin, “Nah my Caucasian fellows have started dating way earlier than me and their dating life is pretty successful.They have that typical foreigner’s appearance and many girls would like to hang out with them, either online or offline.”
His diction of “typical foreigner’s appearance” reminded me of the vice president of a campus Language and Culture Association back then I was involved in — six feet one inch tall, dashing blonde hair, blue eyes, muscular but slender figure, always wearing a confident smile with white even teeth. His near native spoken Chinese is the icing on the cake, thanks to the five-year study of Chinese Language. I witnessed numerous Chinese girls exchange their WeChat accounts with him after Free Talk, a weekly language exchange activity between international students and local Chinese students on campus of University A. Opposed to the self-effacing Chinese Italian fellow, he is buoyant and sometimes even frivolous with the bad joke: Getting US Green Card is easy. Transfer me one million RMB and I’ll marry you!
However, marriage is not a joke for another Caucasian student who had dated a Chinese girl for 3 years and got married in 2019. When I got to know him in 202l, he was anxiously applying for the working VISA in China, despite his wife’s qualification for the US green card. They appear to be a happy couple even though they remain long-distance when the essay is in progress. He invited his wife to a group dinner by the riverside dining table outside the school canteen, albeit her wife being remotely connected through video call. During the dinner he jokingly mimicked Henan dialect and shared domestic anecdotes of learning Chinese hypocrisy when receiving a gift as he intermittently picked up one clove of garlic and took a bite — a typical habitual quirk of males from Northern China. After we finished the dinner I asked him whether he needs help in the VISA application. He smirked, “I appreciate your offer but my wife is a strong file killer.” I was left watching after him. I realized that his gait and outfit were so similar to Chinese males that I could barely tell him out — especially for he constantly wore the shortest buzz cut with the hood on.
The three short scenes I narrated are selected from my journal, now the record of participant observation, since September 2019. The three different international male students represent two different types of foreigners in Shanghai. The first boy is “Huayi” (Chinese-origin) referring to people of Chinese ancestry with foreign passports (Farrer, 2010). And the latter two US Caucasian males are what Chinese people and mainstream media typically called “laowai” (old foreigner) or more formally “waiguoren” (foreigner), a term European, American or Australasian Caucasians especially enjoy for their archetypical different appearance. (Qi, 1998; Gamble, 2003; Farrer, 2010) Therefore people with the same Asian traits, such as Japanese, albeit strictly speaking foreign, do not count as ‘laowai.’ According to Qi (1998), “laowai” originated from the humor of Beijing local vernacular and afterwards prevailed over the country. The address contains Chinese people’s subtle and paradoxical complex about foreigners: both familiar (the popular prefix lao usually denotes kinship) and estranged, both respect and distain due to the history of pre-modern China (Qi, 1998). This is a culturally differential discourse whose meaning depends on context.
Excerpt from Intercultural Dating Culture among International Students in Shanghai: Self-understanding, Acculturation, and Mobility.