Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Vanessa L. Fong is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Amherst College, and author of Only Hope: Coming of Age under China's One-Child Policy (Stanford, 2004), winner of the 2005 Francis Hsu Book Prize from the Society for East Asian Anthropology.

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Paradise Redefined

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments................................................................................................................................vii1. Introduction................................................................................................................................12. Is the Moon Rounder abroad? How Chinese Citizens see the World..............................................................................403. Choosing the Road Less Traveled: How and Why Chinese Citizens Decide to study abroad........................................................674. The Floating Life: Dilemmas of education, Work, and Marriage abroad.........................................................................955. When Migrants from the same Hometown Meet, Tears Fill Their eyes: Freedoms Won and Lost Through Transnational Migration.....................1426. The Road Home: Decisions about Returning to China or staying abroad.........................................................................191Notes..........................................................................................................................................223Works Cited....................................................................................................................................241Index..........................................................................................................................................265

Chapter One

GAO NENG seemed an unlikely candidate for study abroad in 1999, when I first met her in the northeastern Chinese coastal city of Dalian when she was 13. She was the only child of factory workers, each of whom earned just under 1,000 yuan (US$121) per month. Her family lived in a one-bedroom apartment and could not afford the luxuries that some other Dalian families had, such as a cell phone, microwave oven, computer, car, or air conditioner. I visited Gao Neng in Dalian again in 2002, when she was 16 and attending a college prep high school. I talked with her and her parents over the phone at least once a year before and after that. In all this time I never heard them mention any plans for her to study abroad.

I arrived in Dalian again in 2004, when Gao Neng was 18. I hoped to visit her and some of her former classmates. But when I called her home phone, her parents told me they had spent 60,000 yuan (US$7,255) of their life savings and had borrowed money from relatives to send their daughter to Ireland, where she was attending English-language classes while working as a salesclerk. They hoped she would learn enough English to qualify for admission to a college in Ireland and save enough money from work to pay tuition there and to repay their relatives' loans. When I visited Gao Neng in Ireland a month later, she told me that she was almost as surprised as I was that she was able to study abroad. She learned only after she had taken her college entrance exam that her parents had begun the process of applying for a visa for her to study in Ireland without even telling her. They wanted her to give the Chinese college entrance exam her best shot and hoped she could get into a good college in China and save them the expense of sending her abroad. But when Gao Neng failed to get into any four-year college in China, she was delighted to learn that her parents were already preparing to send her to Ireland. "I thought my family was too poor, so I didn't dare mention my dream of study abroad to them, but my Ma understood my heart too well," she told me.

I was similarly surprised by the study-abroad trajectories of other Chinese youth I first met in Chinese schools and homes in Dalian in the late 1990s, when I was trying to learn what life was like for the first generation born after China's one-child policy began in 1979. I found that adolescent singletons (only children) were facing unprecedented levels of parental pressure and competition in the educational system and the job market. Every child was expected to become a winner in a pyramidal socioeconomic system that allowed only a small minority to win. Singletons were the sole focus of parents' financial and emotional investment, and they were expected to eventually get work that paid enough to enable them to become the main providers of funds for their elderly parents' retirement, nursing care, and medical expenses. Chinese singletons of both genders and all kinds of aptitudes and socioeconomic statuses were therefore raised with the kind of heavy parental investment, high expectations, consumption demands, and educational aspirations common among children of highly educated professionals in developed countries, even though opportunities for higher education and white-collar work were more limited in China than in developed countries. After publishing these findings in Only Hope: Coming of Age Under China's One-Child Policy in 2004, I returned to Dalian, eager to continue following the lives of the singletons I had gotten to know. I wanted to see what would happen next as they started college or careers. I learned, however, that many of them had left for Australia, Europe, Japan, New Zealand, North America, or Singapore.

I had not expected so many of them to study abroad. To get a student visa to enter a developed country, a Chinese citizen has to show embassy officers proof of sufficient funds to pay for tuition and living expenses without working. The junior high school, college prep high school, and vocational high school where I first met most of the Chinese citizens in my study were academically and socioeconomically average by urban Dalian standards. Few of them seemed wealthy enough to pay for study abroad or were high-achieving enough to qualify for scholarships abroad. Most Dalian residents I knew had no close relatives abroad and had never been outside China. When I first met them in the late 1990s, few of them knew how to use the Internet, much less how to use it to research study-abroad options. Among respondents to my 1999 survey, 87 percent (N = 2,193) indicated that they had no computer at home, and 18 percent (N = 2,195) indicated that their families had no phone of any kind. (N is the number of respondents who answered a specific question on the survey I administered to 2,273 teenagers in 1999 or the resurvey I administered to 1,365 of the 1999 survey respondents in 2008–2010; N is different for each question because some respondents answered some survey questions but not others.)

Yet, when I taught English conversation to the 2,273 students who completed my 1999 survey and asked them to raise their hands if they would like to study abroad someday, the vast majority raised their hands. Many asked me about how they might get opportunities to study abroad and what life abroad was like for Chinese citizens. I tried to answer their questions as best as I could, based on what I knew about the experiences of Chinese citizens in the United States and on research I did on the Internet about international student experiences in other developed countries. Those students especially interested in study abroad were disproportionately represented among those I got to know well, because my English-language proficiency and knowledge about life abroad were part of the reason they befriended me in the first place. Still, I could tell that interest in study abroad was not limited to them. Even when waiting at bus stops, riding the bus, or shopping or waiting in lines at stores, I often overheard conversations about study abroad among strangers who were not paying attention to me and probably did not know that I was not a Chinese citizen.

By 2010, 20 percent of the 1,365 1999 survey respondents I resurveyed had studied abroad, and an additional 11 percent had gone abroad solely for tourism, work, business, or other purposes. They joined a growing wave of transnational students from China. Xiang Biao and Wei Shen analyzed statistics published by the Chinese Ministry of Education and found that 179,800 Chinese citizens went abroad to study in 2008 alone, making China the source of the largest proportion of transnational students in the world. Even among the 619 respondents to the longer version of my 2008–2010 surveys who had never been abroad, 64 percent indicated on the most recent survey they completed between 2008 and 2010 that they would like to someday go abroad for study, work, and/or immigration.

In retrospect, I realize that I had underestimated the extent to which obstacles to study abroad could be overcome by a confluence of four factors: (1) the heavily concentrated financial resources that would be invested in Chinese singletons by their parents and some of their aunts, uncles, and grandparents; (2) the rapid increase in urban Chinese families' incomes and the value of their assets (especially housing) that would occur as a result of China's rapid economic growth and rural to urban migration; (3) the expansion of international education infrastructure (such as foreign-language schools in China and abroad, homestay programs abroad, partnerships between study-abroad brokers [zhongjie] in China and schools in developed countries, and international student recruitment programs and websites run by these brokers and schools) that would result from developed countries' increased interest in developing countries like China as growing markets for educational services; and (4) the eagerness to study abroad that was already widespread among Dalian teenagers at the time I started my research in the late 1990s. I had assumed that study abroad was unlikely even for those who seemed to desire it most. I was not entirely wrong. The desires of some of those who had seemed the most knowledgeable about and interested in study abroad as teenagers waned as they learned more about the risks and sacrifices that study abroad entailed and as they found reasonably satisfactory opportunities in China. However, I was surprised to learn that some others who had seemed less knowledgeable about, less financially capable of, and less interested in study abroad actually did end up leaving China to study in other countries.

I kept in touch with 92 of the survey respondents with whom I was closest after they graduated from the schools where I conducted my initial survey and participant observation. When some of them and their friends and cousins left China to study in Australia, Britain, Ireland, Japan, and the United States, I followed them to those countries, at first thinking that what I observed of their experiences would just be a minor part of the larger story of the transition from adolescence to young adulthood that I would tell about their cohort, all of whom I was determined to track for the rest of their lives. But as more and more of them started studying abroad and as I started hearing even from many of those who stayed in China that they were planning to study abroad and that many of their friends and cousins were studying abroad, I realized that study abroad was becoming more common for their generation than I ever imagined it could be. I therefore spent the first decade of the twenty-first century following these students on their journeys abroad, trying to figure out why they chose to study abroad despite the obstacles, what they experienced abroad, how their experiences changed them, and how they decided whether to stay abroad or return to China.

This book reveals what I learned about the motivations, experiences, and perspectives of transnational Chinese students who studied at colleges, universities, and language schools in developed countries and who hoped that such education would increase their access to social and cultural citizenship in the developed world—and sometimes to legal citizenship in developed countries—while also trying to maintain their social, cultural, and legal citizenship in China. I look at how they won and lost various kinds of freedom through the process of study abroad and at how and why they decided to stay abroad or return to China. I follow them on their journeys from China to developed countries, and in some cases back again, and explore how the process of study abroad transformed them, leading them to redefine what they considered paradise and where they could find it.

The Developed World as One Imagined Community

Benedict Anderson argued that nationalism emerged once people were able to see themselves as part of an "imagined community" resulting from the emergence of a shared language, print capitalism, and, most important, the educational pilgrimages that ambitious youth made to national centers. In describing how Chinese leaders encouraged Chinese citizens to imagine themselves as part of a transnational Confucian community of East and Southeast Asians, Aihwa Ong suggested that Anderson's idea of imagined communities could also apply to "imaginaries ... brought together by the reconfigurations of global capitalism." Arjun Appadurai argued that the speed and ubiquity of global cultural flows have broken down national boundaries in unprecedented ways, causing people worldwide to "no longer see their lives as mere outcomes of the givenness of things, but often as the ironic compromise between what they could imagine and what social life will permit." Building on these ideas, I argue that the increasingly globalized nature of the media, language, and educational pilgrimages available to young Chinese citizens in cities like Dalian encourages them to aspire to belong to an imagined developed world community composed of mobile, wealthy, well-educated, and well-connected people worldwide.

Transnational students play a key role in the building and maintenance of this imagined developed world community. They are a rapidly growing sector of the student population in developed countries and have also been highly influential as agents of globalization in their home countries and in their host countries. As Anderson noted, "There was, to be sure, always a double aspect to the choreography of the great religious pilgrimages: a vast horde of illiterate vernacular-speakers provided the dense, physical reality of the ceremonial passage; while a small segment of literate bilingual adepts drawn from each vernacular community performed the unifying rites, interpreting to their respective followings the meaning of their collective motion." So it was in Dalian, as in other cities in China and the rest of the developing world from where a minority was drawn to study in developed countries, where they would learn to interpret the imagined community of the developed world for their home communities. Many Chinese citizens wanted to become part of that minority. They believed that pilgrimages to developed countries would not only help them become citizens of the developed world but also facilitate efforts to make China part of the developed world. Ideally, developed world citizenship would add to rather than replace their Chinese citizenship. Many transnational Chinese students told me that, after they secured social, cultural, and/or legal citizenship in a developed country, they would channel developed countries' cultural and economic capital into China by working in transnational businesses and organizations that would help to transform China into a developed country. Chinese citizens dreamed that their pursuit of developed world citizenship would enable them to eventually help remake China in the image of the developed world paradise they imagined they would find abroad.

Chinese citizens in my study often experienced and discussed the developed world as if it were one imagined community, sharing one culture, system, and citizenship status. They contrasted how things were done in China (zhongguo) by Chinese people (zhongguoren) with how things were done in "foreign [mostly developed] countries" (waiguo) by "foreigners" (waiguoren), as though all the foreign countries were part of one single country and all the foreigners shared the same nationality. They sometimes mistook the products or customs of one developed country for another. They believed that credentials, experience, and social, cultural, or legal citizenship gained in any developed country could open the door to any other developed country, and they assumed that developed countries set the standards by which success everywhere was measured.

Many Chinese citizens who wanted to study abroad were not determined to study in one particular developed country but rather willing to study in whichever developed country seemed most likely to grant them a visa at the time they applied. Some told me that they wanted to study in a developed country but had no idea which one would be best for them. They asked me for advice about which country they should choose. Others were trying to decide between two, three, or more of their favorite developed countries. Many did have some preferences for studying in particular developed countries based on factors such as how much they liked the cultures, environments, and climates of those countries, how many of their friends and relatives were already in those countries or interested in going with them to those countries, how prestigious and easily transferable to other countries those countries' skills, knowledge, educational credentials, and work experiences would be, how easy it would be in those countries for them to get low-skilled work while they were students and professional work once they graduated, and how likely those countries were to grant them permanent residency rights or legal citizenship if they wanted it. But those who could not get visas to enter their top-choice developed country were quite willing to settle for the developed country that was their next choice, fifth choice, or even last choice. Even while they were living in a developed country, they still sometimes referred to that country as "abroad" (waiguo) instead of by its name (e.g., Australia, Britain, Ireland, Japan, the United States). Some who were dissatisfied with the first developed country they studied in ended up moving to a different developed country in search of better opportunities. They talked about such moves between developed countries the same way they talked about moving from one city in China to another and not in the way they talked about the much more life-changing and potentially permanent move they made from China to a developed country.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Paradise Redefinedby Vanessa L. Fong Copyright © 2011 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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