How Chinese Students Experience America | Hacker News Reader

How Chinese Students Experience America

newyorker.com

61 pointsmitchbob34 comments

Very interesting piece – and as an American that's lived abroad for nearly a decade, I think Americans (in America) dramatically underestimate how much cultural influence the West/US has on the world. It is basically impossible to avoid American culture, for better or worse, whether that be Netflix shows or memes. I wish more Americans were aware of this and understood how much passive influence they have via relatively mundane things.

> I wish more Americans were aware of this and understood how much passive influence they have

How do you think Americans can actually influence things because people abroad wear jeans and watch Netflix?

“Influencing” is not the same as “manipulating” or “controlling” in this context.

Some kid in eastern europe watched Kobe Bryant play and got inspired to sign up for a local basketball team and took it seriously - that’s influencing. People in some countries outside of the US that never had Halloween as a holiday now unofficially observe it (due to the holiday’s portrayal in western media and it being almost a staple for a sitcom series to have an episode dedicated to it) - that’s influencing.

But you are right, it isnt the type of an influence you are thinking about, with an evil man twirling his moustache and trying to manipulate people on the other side of the globe to do his bidding via harry potter movies.

> the type of an influence you are thinking about, with an evil man twirling his moustache

No I never imagined or implied that.

> some kid in eastern europe watched Kobe Bryant play and got inspired to sign up for a local basketball team

That's just the cultural adoption reproducing itself. No American is influencing i.e. changing the course of events meaningfully in their advantage. Some cultural export that's all.

> People in some countries outside of the US that never had Halloween as a holiday now unofficially observe it

Again, just the same cultural adoption reproducing. At best this represents some incremental exports in intangibles. Pay-per-view games, some costumes from China. Hey now American influence is favoring the Chinese economy.

Yeah there's cultural hegemony. There's a lot of talk and hand wrangling about "soft power" and "influence" but even letting your imagination run the best you could come up were nothing more than some examples of aesthetics choices.

>cultural adoption reproducing itself … what? You’ve gone to great lengths here to fabricate a phrase that is semantically equivalent to “influence” in the most obfuscated way possible.

>cultural hegemony See previous … what?

Let’s get down to brass tax.

A does foo. B notices A has done foo. B decides it will also do foo. A has influenced B.

There are other aspects about the original comment which were better targets than attacking the meaning of “influence”, such as America’s status as a melting pot whose traditions are in great part just the collection of influences from the multitude of ethnicities which can be represented by the single term “American”. Thinking America has such dramatic unique influence while ignoring its composition of influences from other cultures is not giving honest context. That’s the part I would have gone after.

It’s far far more than that. I’d say probably 60-70% of youth culture in Europe is just straight from America, whether that be from movies, celebrities, YouTube, or otherwise. Not to mention cultural/political trends and English words.

>Vincent also intended to make a career in China, but he had specific plans for his time in the U.S. Once, during a class discussion, he remarked that someday he would purchase both a car and a real firearm. The illegal airsoft pistol that he had acquired in high school shot only plastic pellets. In 2017, when Vincent ordered the gun, it had been delivered to his home at the bottom of a rice cooker, as camouflage.

If I ever visit America, like Vincent the second thing I am going to do is to visit an American gun range. I too wish to experience a real gun (semi-automatic or automatic) instead of air pistols.

I'm hoping to take it one step further, next time I'm in New Orleans: https://www.gatorsandguns.com/

You should check out a “sporting clay” range. Much more fun than shooting at paper targets.

I think it’s just personal preference. A lot of ranges offer both!

I enjoy plinking more than clay shooting, but that’s just me. There’s something about long distance shooting that attracts me.

Also, if I could afford to try out one of those rotating miniguns from Predator, count me in! (with tracers. I’d really want tracers.)

So much fun, but so much harder than paper targets. They move!

Not sure where you're from, but there are a lot of gun ranges in Europe, too. Especially in Central Europe.

Wear ear protection, even the guy next to you will be painfully, damagingly loud.

Yeah, think of the most loud live concert you’ve ever heard, to the point where your ears physically start hurting, but make it even louder.

22lr rifles go at around 140dB, and large bore rifles and handguns go above 175dB. Meanwhile, the loudest concert ever was sitting at slightly under 130dB (Manowar in the 90s, not sure if their record had been broken since then).

Definitely take care of your hearing. Even at much lower dB at large concerts, you cause some amount of irreversible hearing damage. And even at much lower volume than 130dB, your ears start physically hurting from the sound pretty bad. Aftering hearing a typical gunshot without any ear protection just a few feet away from you, you might just not want to come back to a range ever again.

TLDR: wear (appropriate type for the specific task) ear protection to concerts, gun ranges, and while riding a motorcycle on highways, you will thank yourself later.

By the same author, about the experience of his American daughters in a Chinese school:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/03/the-double-edu... (archived: https://archive.ph/2023.07.07-155232/https://www.newyorker.c... )

I love suggesting the novel “A concise Chinese-English dictionary for Lovers” as it really shows how people from such different cultures such as the chinese perceive the western world (at least in the first few chapters) (and yes i know the book is about the UK and not the US)

Fun and long-winded article, but the author fails to acknowledge the massive blindspot of his lens on overseas Chinese in America.

California is mentioned a total of two times in this entire article. Oregon and Washington zero times. The main character and adjacent are students who choose to live on the East Coast (not even New York City) and at universities with small Chinese student populations. Some of them become hardcore rednecks. The author has a main character who "doesn't like California" and mentions briefly only once a couple living in California. This is quite disingenuous or ignorant for an article that titles itself "How Chinese Students Experience America". It should be qualified as "White America" at the very least. Are Chinese students only capable of experiencing America by living on the East Coast/living in White/Black America? The experience of the majority of Chinese students living in Chinese America is not as valid as the minority who don't?

Try talking about the West Coast next time. Approximately 40% of ethnic Chinese in the USA live there in particular highly-concentrated areas. I guarantee there would be key differences that change the vibe of the story the author wants to tell.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Americans#Demographics

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_signific...

https://ca.style.yahoo.com/most-chinese-schools-america-1430...

> In 2021, there were more than fifteen hundred Chinese at the University of Pittsburgh, and around three thousand at Carnegie Mellon, whose campus is less than a mile away.

This is not a small number, but not as big as the author thinks.

Overall, I think the author is quite credible to write about decades of experience from teaching students in China, but his narrative on the Chinese experience in America is very unconvincing.

> Kefalos’s grandfather had come from Greece, and his father had worked as an electrical engineer in the steel industry. Many of his current tenants were immigrants. “My personal experience is that they are relatively hardworking,” he said. “And I think that’s true with most immigrants who come into the country. Whether it’s for education or a better life.” He looked up at Vincent and said, “My sense is that most U.S. citizens born in the United States don’t have any idea how fortunate they are.”

I roll my eyes at this closing bit on "Americans are born so fortunate", "American Dream" stuff.

Regarding Carnegie Mellon at least, the Chinese population has already surpassed the threshold where you would feel like a minority, depending on which department. (personal experience - I am American-born and from California, and went to CMU in the 2010s).

It's closer to the West Coast than you might think - UC Berkeley in 2021 reported 21% Chinese, which is right in line with CMU (~3k out of ~14k). While the city itself has different demographics, you could start to see the influence of Asian students on surrounding neighborhoods like Squirrel Hill.

How would you compare your experience of being Asian (granted, American-born) in California versus Carnegie Mellon/adjacent cities? I'm interested to hear more on similarities and differences, if they exist. And, what do you think of this article?

At CMU, I was really in a student bubble and spent almost all of my time on campus or with other students. Within that bubble, it was very similar indeed. There is significant opportunity to hang out with mainly-Asian groups/student orgs, and even to primarily speak Chinese (mainly among international students), etc. The article mentions apps like Fantuan, but even before the apps, there were WeChat groups where people would group order Chinese food from a restaurant, and it was delivered by van directly to campus.

I hear from friends in places where Asians are a much tinier minority (e.g. Duke in North Carolina, the Midwest, or Texas), and it sounds like a very different experience - lonelier, being othered, harder to find e.g. Asian groceries, etc. I can't speak from personal experience, as I've only lived in more mixed metros (LA, NY, and SF).

I think the article contains accurate descriptions of students being curious and taking their opportunity to explore in the US. Mainland China has a very different culture from the US, and it is hard to adjust (in both directions). Vincent's story feels more dramatic than average, but it's still believable.

Well Peter Hessler writes like this. By the way we all know American higher education is often interspersed around the US, so Pittsburgh is actually a nice median -- not a college town but far from a big city like Chicago/NYC.

The mental journey Hessler describes rings true to me, a Chinese student in the US.

> ... but his narrative on the Chinese experience in America is very unconvincing.

That depends. As an Indian, I got the impression that his target audience were right-leaning / Republican Americans. Look at the political values he covers - gun rights ("More guns, good!", "Texas better than California"), importance of religion ("going to church, conversion"), racial issues ("Black Lives Matter is indoctrination; Blacks harass Chinese", "white people are nicer"), capitalism ("students running small business") and of course, America is land of free. Sometimes articles like this are helpful - perhaps some Republicans reading this may feel Chinese immigrants are not so bad if they are attracted to Republican values and likely to become Republicans. ;)

>> I got the impression that his target audience were right-leaning / Republican Americans

Right-leaning Republican Americans don't read the New Yorker.

I am a right leaning American who subscribes to the New Yorker. I find a lot of their essays to be surprisingly non-partisan. I especially enjoy the fiction pieces.

Right-leaning Democrats definitely do though.

‘Right-leaning democrats?’ Right compared to who? Lenin?

Contrary to popular belief among Americans, the Democratic party is very clearly right-wing by global standards. There is a "progressive" fringe (with little institutional power) that basically wants what would elsewhere be centrist liberal policies, and an even fringier "leftist" wing (with zero institutional power) that wants the party to essentially be a euro-style Labor party.

American left is the global middle. The non U.S. right is the american left.

The U.S. Democratic Party is about as right-leaning as many mainstream right wing parties in Europe.

Another potential blind spot: has anyone interviewed the CBCs who went back?

> I roll my eyes at this closing bit on "Americans are born so fortunate", "American Dream" stuff.

Why do you roll your eyes? From experience, you or your parents immigrating and finding life is much harder? Everyone I know who would actually have real experience on this would agree with the sentiment, pal. It's only native born with no connection to immigrants who are so unaware of how lucky they are

I roll my eyes not because I think it's untrue, I roll my eyes because this article has such an unsubtle agenda and uses very atypical stories as if it were the typical experience for Chinese overseas while neglecting to include the experience of half the student population and half the ethnic population who choose the West Coast, which has vast communities of Chinese (specifically Chinese going overseas, not just American-born Chinese) who have avoided most of the problems adjusting to American life by creating these cultural enclaves. It's a wholly-different experience on the other side of the country. A lot of Asians living in California long enough forget how white or black the rest of the USA is or forget how much racism there is on Asians once they visit other states. Many people in these embedded communities don't feel forced to choose one set of beliefs over the other as if they are diametrically opposed, but in the case of the article's main character, they deliberately choose the extreme ends.

The article is the experience of a teacher over the course of many years, plus the people he talked to. The line you have a problem with is a direct quote from the grandson of a Greek immigrant.

You seem a bit hung up on the title and assume it is a universal statement ("How All Chinese Students Experience America") and not just the most obvious description for a long piece. It's an essay in a literary magazine, not a logical proof or a sociological study.

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