In April 1988 a literary reporter on Beijing's People's Daily had an idea. He would go overseas and interview the students who had gone abroad to study. With a knapsack on his back, he said to himself, walking, hitchhiking or cycling, he would "travel on the majestic highways of Walt Whitman's poems" and record the students experiences and feelings.
Eighteen months later Qian Ning had entered graduate school at the University of Michigan, and four years later began to write this book. Was it really that easy, you ask yourself. Then you notice something. The author's father is Qian Qichen, China's former foreign minister and deputy prime minister.
The motives of the two nations involved when the arrangement for Chinese students to study in the US was first made in 1977, were simple. To the Americans it was a way to expand their influence, to the Chinese a way to narrow the gap between their technological level and that of Western countries.
The original agreement was for 500 students a year. And so it was that five days before the US and China formally established diplomatic relations Jan. 1 1978, 50 Chinese students boarded a plane, destined for university campuses all over America.
Foreign study was not new for China. Over 1,000 students annually were leaving to gain degrees in the West in the mid-1930s. But during the 1950s and 1960s the door had been closed. When the new wave began to go abroad, it was in essence a fresh start.
Prominent in the book is the experience of the Chinese women. Their characteristic response was that they had not understood sex until they arrived in the US. One former student caused a protest by writing in a Chinese newspaper in Australia that she found Chinese lovers unsatisfactory after Westerners. She was accused of being unpatriotic, but she still refused to withdraw her statement.
Equally important for women from China was the experience of economic independence. They knew what it was like to have their own apartment, to work, and to postpone marriage, possibly even permanently.
This book is a translation of a Chinese work originally written for an audience in China. The result is that the approach feels strange to a Western reader. It reads like a sequence of bizarre facts rather than a systematic survey. This is what Chinese studying in the US become like, the author appears to be saying. Can you believe it? Isn't it extraordinary!
The author's own prejudices, and those of these original Chinese readers, are apparent. There must, for example, have been some gays and lesbians among these students. But the book only includes a couple of anecdotes about students being approached by their gay professors. In each case the student resolutely rebuffs the American academic. It's another example of the book being angled to a domestic audience in China. Such things really happen in foreign countries! Can you believe it?
The crux of the whole matter, of course, is the issue confronting Chinese students of whether to return home or attempt to settle permanently in the US. Backward social conditions in the People's Republic had been the reason they had been sent to study abroad in the first place, but these same conditions proved the reason many of them opted in the end to stay away. All in all, the combination of affluence and personal freedom the US offered proved irresistible to many.
The author concludes the book with reflections on why he himself returned home. These pages are in no way stridently patriotic, but they do talk of the need for returning graduates to face China as it is, not as they hope it will one day become.
You can't help wondering, though, whether the political connections of the author's family didn't play a part in his decision to return. Only pages before he had been writing about graduates with American PhDs earning salaries of US$50,000 a year in the US while their friends who opted to return to China had a monthly salary of 96 yuan to look forward to, only four times what it would cost them to mail an academic paper to an American academic journal, with -- if they were lucky -- a one-room apartment where the windows were likely to blow in on a stormy winter night.
The entire issue of remaining in the US changed dramatically in 1992 with the announcement by the American administration of the Chinese Student Protection Act. Under this act, put into effect the following year, the onus was on the US government to provide evidence that a particular student would not be persecuted by the Chinese authorities on his or her return to China. Many, of course, had engaged in pro-democracy protests in the aftermath of May 1989. In effect, this new law meant that any student from China who wanted to could stay and apply for a green card.
So -- how many did stay abroad for good? The author only offers official statistics for 1978 to 1994, stating that roughly a third returned permanently to China. He points out, however, that the actual rate of returnees was far lower, and quotes an estimate from the Los Angeles Times giving it as between 5 and 10 percent. Since 1993 it must have become lower still.
By and large, it seems a pity the US decided to be so generous. It's hard not to believe that the presence in senior positions of so many men and women with the experience of American freedom and prosperity would have had a profound influence on the evolution of Chinese society.
At one point there's an interesting comparison of mainland and Taiwanese students in the US. The conclusion is that many of the mainlanders, faced with this unique opportunity, showed themselves as bull-headed individualists, talkative and extremely ambitious. The Taiwanese, by contrast, mostly from middle-class families, are judged as being polite, gregarious, and generally modest in their aims.
The book is translated into English by T.K. Chu, a Taiwanese scholar and retired research physicist who came to Taiwan in 1949 at the age of 16. He contributes a long introduction on the history of Chinese relations with the outside world, and an afterword giving his own life story.
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