last year i took a class in a graduate building and it was like 80% international chinese. it felt like i was in china (it literally did, i went to china last summer)
and so i began to ask:
why are there so many international chinese students here ????
it is nice to connect with my chinese roots and practice my chinese...
but why ???? it wasn't always like this so there must be something happening
i started digging around to figure it out
i asked professors in the grad program but they didn't really know either
asking the international students was also not very effective because they were just like 'you're so lucky you're born in america'
however, one of them did show me 小红书 (little red book), which is china's pinterest/instagram
she showed me chinese influencers and how they portrayed cmu
i couldn't believe what i saw.
what chinese students think of cmu
vs. what cmu is actually like
ok maybe it’s just social media distorting the reality but the point is cmu looks very good in chinese students’ eyes from the app
anyways
as i dug further, i started realizing how large the gap was between the CMU these international students were experiencing and my experience here...
i realized that:
most of the international students live in luxury apartments that are basically the same rent as that in SF (but this is pittsburgh, you can get a 1 BR for ~$1000)
there is an underground system of restaurants to order better chinese food through wechat (which i use now, it is great, i don't have complaints), and these options for food are so much better than what is available on campus
there are group chats for chinese international students from cmu who get certain internships for the summer. i got added to the facebook intern group chat there were already hundreds of people in it when i had joined (which is crazy because we aren't even a big school and this is for one company)
these were all interesting and helpful to know but didn't really answer my question
i was fortunate enough to study abroad in china last summer and i kept this question i mind while i was there
china was so weird. i had gone many times in other summers, but following covid it was a completely different place
some examples:
there was a show called idol producer i liked a couple years ago that i saw ads for all over china. this time the show had become censored because china had banned 'sissy men' and apparently this show didn't make the cut
the second week i was in china an affair with a government official went viral on weibo (china's facebook) and then the dress that the woman wore went viral on taobao (china's amazon). but then a couple days later it was all wiped. everything about this affair. the dress. gone. the only thing i found left was a drawing.
towards the end of my trip, i found out that one of the top idols in china (think justin bieber of china), cai xukun, was convicted of an affair with a woman and then they used AI to literally ERASE HIM FROM THE SHOW. like they literally filmed it and he was GONE. and apparently remnants of his hands and feet appear in parts of the episodes
later i found out a canadian artist from EXO in china also faced charges for assault and his punishments were also as inhumanely severe despite the evidence seeming quite sketchy as well. honestly it's good they are giving punishments that the U.S. doesn't care as much about but these really scared me
the whole time i was like what the fuck. is going on.
and this doesn't come from a place of hate. my parents are from china. i love my chinese roots. i love chinese people.
which is what makes it even tougher to talk about. it's not black and white. but there is something clearly happening that's off.
so i began to trace back the history of modern day china to try to figure out what happened.
i was reading three different versions of chinese history (taiwans’s, U.S.’s, and china’s) and i was so confused and thrown into weird history and politics rabbit-holes as i struggled to understand what was going on and who was telling me what and what to believe
at the end of it, i realized that you cannot learn real history in china. the wealthy were sending their kids abroad to america because they wanted their kids to get a real education
but if you're not wealthy enough to leave then you are stuck there
one of the ways to get out of china for at least a bit is to go to school abroad. so that's what's happening. and getting a STEM degree grants you a longer visa.
bingo. that's why the masses are flocking to CMU (or at least my hypothesis)
its like colleges a gateway into the US... as long as you can afford the high tuition
the chinese exclusion act never ended. just today, its called a 'visa' and it's much harder to get from certain countries than others so it doesn't seem exclusionary. and just today, instead of dressing well and being wealthy to make it in the U.S., you go to a university here and get a job that lets you stay
america advertises itself as a free place, a welcoming place
it's a country built by immigrants, yet it finds ways to stop people from coming in
i visited the immigration station in angel island in san francisco over break. i saw this picture in one of the exhibits.
have we really come to chasing? cat and mouse style? are we really that different from each other?
side notes:
there's a thin line between conspiracy theorist and investigative journalism
going to start publishing more of my controversial takes now because i don’t care anymore. i went to a talk this past week where the speaker was like 'if you write about controversial things you are more likely to go viral because people who agree and disagree with you and people will talk about you more' referring to herb simon when he was one of the first to work on ai back then and he did it to try to get famous and it worked because it was controversial.