Chinese of Fifth Avenue: Student Life
No. 24
Chinese of Fifth Avenue: Student Life
Hello! This week we present the fifth and final installment of our ongoing series, the Chinese of Fifth Avenue. (Catch up on Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.)
The avenue is home to numerous universities, drawing many students from all over China. We feature two separate stories that cover different experiences of Chinese students.
Some discover that while the preparations made in China may have prepared them academically, they completely lack the emotional foundations needed to cope with the pressures of studying in the US.
Yet for others, the chance to attend leading learning institutions in a city as vibrant as New York pushed them to discover more about themselves and become more comfortable in their own skin.
We hope you enjoyed these glimpses of Chinese lives lived along and near Fifth Avenue.
Chinarrative would especially like to thank everyone who took part in this project, including: Lux Chen, Nina Huang, Alex Fang, Belle Lin, Bhrikuti Rai, Clarence Leong, Charlotte Fu, Cao Mengwen, Betsy Petrick, Echo Wang, Lorena Rios Trevino, and Eileen Guo. A special word of gratitude to Zhang Jun for inspiring the series.
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Chinese of Fifth Avenue: Beyond Language Barriers
By Bhrikuti Rai
When 31-year-old Biwei Chen came to the United States in 2011, his major concern was the language barrier. With his level of English proficiency he was just able to get by in casual conversations, but struggled to communicate in class seminars and in public.
“That time I couldn’t express clearly,” he says about his initial days in the US as a doctoral student at City University of New York’s (CUNY) Graduate Center, which is located on Fifth Avenue, diagonally opposite the Empire State Building.
But by the time he polished his English well enough to speak fluently with his peers at school and outside, there wasn’t much really left for him to talk about.
Growing up in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen, which is known as the porcelain capital for its rich history of pottery, Chen always excelled in academics. So it was no surprise when he was accepted to Jinan University in Guangzhou and earned degrees in engineering and economics.
After a good run in the first few semesters at CUNY, when his research papers won accolades in school, his work stagnated and his professor lost patience. The relationship soured and he had to find another mentor.
The financial and academic pressure took a toll on Chen and his mental health rapidly spiraled. For the first time, he felt broken—just like the shards of pottery swept to the corner of tiny shops in his hometown.
Chen recalls:
I couldn’t do anything, I felt helpless. I had to take medicine even to fall asleep.
Chen is one of 350,000 mainland Chinese students now studying in US colleges—five times the number than just a decade ago. They make up 32.5 percent of all international students.
His experience is not an isolated one. A 2013 study found that 45 percent of Chinese students at Yale reported symptoms of depression; more than a quarter reported symptoms of anxiety.
These rates are staggering compared with the depression and anxiety among the general population of American universities, which is roughly 13 percent.
In 2016, Chinese students brought just under $12.6 billion to the US economy. Most of these students pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to American universities; back in China, they had invested in prep classes to polish their language skills and improve their SAT scores.
But what often gets lost in the hullabaloo of college admission and prep classes are the skills to cope with the pressures of assimilating into American society.
For 25-year-old Dian Zi from Shanghai, not even attending an international high school in China taught entirely by Westerners adequately prepared her to integrate into the American way of life and system of education—a system she found deeply entrenched in individualism.
Still, she had always wanted to escape from her traditional Chinese upbringing and the collectivist identity. It took some time but Zi happily embraced these American values.
Over a bowl of salad at a busy cafe near Columbia University where she is now a graduate student, Zi says:
Here in the US, I don’t want to be lumped in with Chinese students. I want people to see me as who I am.
It took her nearly three years to overcome the anxiety of being in a place where no one spoke her language or looked like her.
“It was more difficult for me since, unlike the majority of Chinese students, I took up humanities instead of engineering or science,” says Zi.
And it didn’t help when people from back home mocked her studying “useless” subjects like history. They believed only kids from affluent families could afford to take up arts and humanities.
Zi first came here on a scholarship for her undergraduate studies. She says:
I come from a very middle-class family and my parents have worked hard to help me just get by here.
Even after spending four years at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, she couldn’t muster the courage to step out into the job market.
“I was afraid I wouldn’t get a job,” says Zi of her bachelor’s degree in anthropology. So she enrolled in a master’s program in oral history in Columbia University last year. And now, after nearly seven years in the US, she says she is confident about working in the field of her choice.
Her goal now is to find a job with health insurance. She sees herself working at a museum or for an NGO and is more hopeful about her job prospects now than she was a few years ago.
Having come to the US as a teenager, Zi says adjusting to American society would have been a lot harder if she, like Chen, had arrived in her twenties. Unlike undergrad students, Chinese students who come here for their graduate-level studies don’t have the luxury of time to get used to American life, she says.
Zi adds:
When people come here after [age] 23, it might be too late to get rid of the old value system. They may still feel trapped.
Graduate students don’t live here long enough to build a new value system. Just as they start adjusting to their new life, the pressure of the job hunt takes over and if they’re unable to secure a work visa, they end up returning home.
Seeking Support
After his bouts of serious depression, Chen finally took some time off from school. In 2016, he went home for the first time in five years. When he resumed his studies, he buried himself in work and has been making progress, he says.
While he is grateful for the counseling services and guidance he received at school, he says turning to his Christian faith helped him when he was at his lowest.
Chen says:
I was blessed, I had faith and hope. I didn’t want to die.
Since then, he has been active in bringing together former and current Chinese students in the city to help them navigate school and the job market, encouraging them to lean on one another for support.
“Integrating here has been a constant struggle,” says Chen sitting in the seventh-floor cafeteria at the CUNY Graduate Center. He hopes to help his fellow Chinese students by talking not just about job prospects and networking but also mental well-being, a topic most people aren’t willing to discuss.
Zi and her Chinese friends, mostly women, haven’t shied away from seeking counseling at school even though such assistance would be unheard of in China. But she feels Chinese male students might not be as open to seeking help.
“Maybe it is because Chinese male students don’t admit to being weak and vulnerable,” says Zi. “After all, they’ve been raised with values that says being a man equates to not being weak.”
Bhrikuti Rai is a journalist in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Charlotte Fu for Chinarrative.
Chinese of Fifth Avenue: Designs on the Future
By Clarence Leong
Housed within the New School’s iconic modernist building at the intersection between Fifth Avenue and 13th Street is the Parsons School of Design. Opened in January 2014, the building has a new auditorium, studios, and a 600-bed student residence.
A quote that says “The worth of a woman is not defined by a man” is printed on the stairs, a poster advertising regular “gender vent” sessions for LGBTQ people is posted on the boards, and a “safe space” is designated for gender non-conforming people and people of color.
Clad in a tastefully designed brown trench coat with a flowing tartan cloth attached to the back, a light grey scarf, and sunglasses—both from Armani—complete with a pair of dark blue brogue shoes from Prada, 26-year-old Roy Wu is in his first year studying for an MFA degree in Design and Technology at Parsons.
Roy had heard of Parsons in high school and wanted to go there ever since. “If I do something, I may as well go to the best for it. Otherwise it’ll be a waste of time,” he said.
Ranked third among art and design universities around the world by QS World University Rankings 2017, Parsons has a star-studded list of alumni that includes Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan (who created DKNY) and Anna Sui.
Cao Mengwen for Chinarrative.
Recent years have seen an influx of Chinese students.
“The very first class I taught at Parsons was in the fall of 2000,” said John Sharp, director of the MFA Design and Technology program at Parsons. “I didn’t actually have any Chinese nationals in that class.”
Now, around 80 of the students—roughly half of the program—are from China. Parsons has fostered a more active presence in China with annual visits to major cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou by a group of teachers and students.
One of the crucial differences between education in China and the US is the freedom that students feel to explore their ideas. “You can see a light bulb go on in their head when they realize it’s okay to make things that aren’t necessarily going to be profitable,” Sharp said.
Students from China often feel like they have been constrained to think about things in a particular way, but those limits are taken away at Parsons. “It can be a bit scary at first, but I think a lot of students very quickly embrace it,” he said.
For Roy, New York is the ideal place to be because of its vibrancy, diversity and openness.
In a soft-spoken voice, Roy says:
I like to date guys, and people here are very chilled about it. If we hold hands or kiss in public, people will even come up to say: ‘That’s so cute!’
Charlotte Fu for Chinarrative.
When Roy attended college in China, he was asked out by a male in senior year, which started his process of discovering his sexual orientation. He attributes parts of his self-education to watching American TV shows such as “Queer as Folk,” “Sex and the City,” and the movie “G.B.F.” (Gay Best Friend).
Describing it as a kind of “enlightenment,” Roy’s first experience of American culture was also tied in with his efforts to understand his own sexuality. “I learned a lot of American colloquialisms from them,” Roy said with a laugh.
Roy studied environmental art design and fashion at Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang, the capital of Northeast China’s Liaoning province. He would get frustrated with the practical questions his professors asked and retort that he should be allowed to do whatever he liked since he was a student.
He remembers having to avoid expressing his opinions too directly to his professors so as not to offend them. At Parsons, he enjoys the freedom to pursue any topic that interests him. For example, he did a project exploring different kinds of gender using a magnetic liquid called “Ferrofluid.”
During one interview with Chinarrative, Roy was busy multitasking as he updated his personal website to apply for summer internships. He is inclined to stay in the US.
Roy said:
I like the overall atmosphere here. I think there is more one can learn here compared to back in China. Possibly, the amount you learn after working here for one year is equivalent to three years in China.
While Chinese students benefit from their experience in the West, their very presence is changing the industry around them.
“When they graduate, start working and gain traction, the conversation in fashion becomes that much richer as it’s been dominated—even [in] so-called ‘Asian brands’—by Western viewpoints,” said Tiffany Ap, a writer for Women’s Wear Daily in Hong Kong.
She referred to the China-themed Met Gala in May 2015, which she criticized as being “Orientalist.”
Ap said:
More Chinese designers mean we won’t have shallow, absurd events like that.
Franco Tang, a designer at Lavanya Coodly and Parsons alum, is part of the change happening in the fashion industry that Ap describes. Franco studied computer science in college before he decided it was not something he wanted to do. His real interest was fashion.
Franco would watch fashion shows online and read fashion magazines voraciously. Pursuing an associate degree in fashion design was a surreal experience for him as he had never dreamed of coming to the “fashion capital” of the world.
“My inspiration comes from going to museums, or even just observing people on the subway,” Franco said.
He added:
In New York you can observe all sorts of peculiar people, and their stories fascinate me—no matter if they are homeless, work on Wall Street, or even prostitutes, they all have a story behind their lives. These are the raw materials for my designs.
Since coming here more than four years ago, Franco has been part of a team that dressed Tiffany Trump for the president’s inauguration ceremony and compiled a book about New York through the eyes of a diverse range of creative artists—from director to architect to fashion designer.
“The original idea was to share my experience of a city I love through my own perspective,” said Franco. “Then I realized it won’t be very well-rounded, so why not ask people at the top of their respective fields give their [views] instead?”
Franco imagines he would feel more restricted if he returns to China.
He said:
The US has a free flow of information, high inclusivity, and is very open. Designers don’t just think about catering to the local markets, but also consider Europe and the different markets within Asia. It makes me feel very free. This is the kind of mentality an artist should have.
Clarence Leong is a journalist in Boston.