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...