Far from home and vulnerable, their lives on and off campus are fraught with uncertainty

People take part in a rally against Asian hate at Columbus Park in Manhattan Chinatown in March. (EDUARDO MUNOZ ALVAREZS / AP)

Editor's note: China Daily takes a look at the plight of Chinese students in the United States, separated from their families, hobbled by online learning and often falling victim to hate crimes.

It has been more than two years since COVID-19 first hit the United States. Among the many individuals who have suffered for various reasons, including the loss of loved ones, financial stress and job insecurity, there is a group whose collective image is vague, their voice indistinct.

I was told to move out of the school dorm in one week, no exception. Not a single school staff member could direct me, or any international students, and tell us what we should do in terms of finding a place to stay while remaining safe.

Henry Luo, a student at the University of Washington, recalling his anxiety when the school shut down in early 2020

They are Chinese students, about 317,000 of them, studying at US colleges and universities, according to the Open Door 2021 Report on International Educational Exchange, published in November.

The challenges they have grappled with daily during the pandemic have been real and excruciating. They were given little notice about school closures and had to switch to online learning overnight. Their families have been on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. Then there have been crimes targeting Asians.

All of this has left them scarred physically and mentally. Some retreated; some were left traumatized; others chose to fight on and achieve their goals.

William Zhang, a San Francisco Bay Area community leader, was awakened at 3 am on May 13 by a call from Beijing. The caller was Sam Gao, an acquaintance he had met at a business dinner several years earlier.

"Gao told me that his daughter Jiawen, 21, at Clark University in Massachusetts, had been missing in San Francisco for more than a week," Zhang said. "Jiawen was supposed to take a direct flight back to China from San Francisco, but she had cut all contact with parents since May 6."

Jiawen was admitted to Clark University last autumn amid the pandemic. "However, as excited as she was, she didn't adapt well to the new environment," Gao told China Daily.

Jiawen felt isolated because she did not get along with her peers, and she could not keep pace with online learning. Her plight worsened within two months after several poor test scores and poor academic performance, and she failed to meet the school's requirements.

Gao and his wife took turns to make themselves available 24 hours online, hoping to help their only daughter overcome her difficulties.

"What we saw in the video is Jiawen's exhaustion," Gao said. "She became more and more silent until one day we found she was pale and sweating, rambling nonsense." She was said to be melancholic.

Around spring break in March Jiawen told her parents that the school was considering asking her to withdraw.

"It sounded like end-of-the-world news to her," Gao said. The family immediately decided to let Jiawen drop out of the program.

"We can't afford to lose her. I booked her a flight to Seattle, then to San Francisco, where she was supposed to follow government instructions, securing an international ticket to return to China."

Jiawen landed in San Francisco on May 6 and in a video call told her parents she had arrived safely. "She looked OK but told me that she had lost her credit card," Gao said. "But she didn't have much cash left, so that worried me."

After that chat, her parents tried unsuccessfully to reach her through calls, emails and WeChat.

"It had been one week since her last appearance," Zhang said. "In the end, it was a race for life."

As soon as he received the SOS call from Gao, Zhang brought in a volunteer team of 130 members. Police were informed that Jiawen was missing, and the team combed the airport without success. They also checked shelters and homeless centers and brought in a professional tracing service to help find her.

Eight days later there was good news: San Francisco police had found Jiawen, alive but in critical condition. She was taken to a hospital and admitted to intensive care.

The Jiawen case is one of many relating to Chinese students in crisis that Zhang has been involved in during the pandemic.

"I kept receiving calls from parents, from different places in China. They asked me to help their troubled children in the US, some of whom are having academic difficulties, some of whom were trapped in unstable relationships."

In 2020, the KnowYourself group conducted a survey among more than 10,000 overseas Chinese students in which almost 84 percent of those surveyed said they had experienced "mental breakdown", and almost 45 percent said they had thought of "giving up".

In addition to coping with academic pressure and adapting to foreign environments, international students struggled with psychological stability, economic independence and identity recognition.

"Often we see the frustration (of a person) on the outside," said Julia Xie, a school psychologist in San Francisco. "On the inside, however, the victim has long been feeling devastated and powerless. Parents and educators need to understand the vulnerability of these young people."

Exposed to two different cultures, international students are rethinking and exploring their cross-cultural identity, values, orientations and interpersonal relationships, the KnowYourself report said.

That exploration inevitably includes psychological stress that could be alleviated by regular reunions with family and friends, being in a romantic relationship or simply developing a new hobby.

However, the pandemic has deprived many students of the option of visiting their families regularly, and e-learning has made face-to-face dating and other social activities difficult to arrange.

"It has been two rough years for all Chinese students," Zhang said. "I feel sorry for them."

He had acted as a family representative arranging funerals for two Chinese students who had committed suicide, he said.

"Both were in their 20s and in top-ranking universities. A great loss."

For many Chinese students, the most horrific experience during the pandemic has been Asian hate crimes, well covered by mainstream media. Contributing to this atmosphere were comments by then-president Donald Trump and his supporters that included the terms "kung flu" and "the China virus" in referring to COVID-19.

Parents wave goodbye to their children at Shanghai Pudong International Airport on Aug 19 last year. (YIN LIQIN / CHINA NEWS SERVICE)

Rising assaults

Stop AAPI Hate, a national coalition with a mission of ending discrimination against Asian Americans, said it received 10,370 reports of hate incidents against AAPIs across the US between March 19, 2020, and Sept 30, 2021.

Emily Chang, a University of California, Berkeley student, said she has curtailed her outings such as dining out, hiking and grocery shopping and stays indoors on campus. Since the mid-2020 attacks on and abuse of Asians have become frequent in Oakland, a city adjacent to the university.

"Senior citizens were assaulted," Chang said. "Merchants in Chinatown were robbed and vandalized. Pedestrians were shoved to the ground."

She is too fearful to walk alone, even in daylight, she said, her fear intensified when her car windows were smashed in her apartment garage So she decided, "OK, enough, I would just be a hermit crab."

By May 2020 there had been more than 100,000 COVID-19-related deaths in the US. That daunting fact and the way the Trump administration handled the crisis drove many Chinese parents to despair.

Chang said that over the past two years her parents in Shandong province, where she comes from, have tried to squeeze in a short video call every day.

"We actually don't have much to talk about, but they just want to make sure that I'm safe here in the US," said Chang, who will enter the University of Pennsylvania this autumn to start studying for a master's degree. "For my parents, that means another two years of worry, panic and waiting."

Cindy, studying communications at the University of Washington in Seattle, experienced her real-life Asian hate for the first time last year. "I was waiting for the bus with my friend when a Caucasian woman approached us," said Cindy, who did not want to be identified fully. "She seemed a bit psychologically unstable."

In a video Cindy shot, the woman, who appears to be in her 50s, approached them and said: "I don't think either one of you has a visa or a passport … You go back where you came from and never step into my country."

'Haunting memory'

Fearing she might hurt them, Cindy and her friend quickly left the bus stop. "But the haunting memory is still with me," she said.

On the US East Coast, too, Asian hate crimes are rampant. One hundred and thirty-one hate crimes targeting Asians were reported in New York last year, compared with 28 in 2020, and one in 2019, police say.

As the pandemic spread in the US in early 2020, the number of infections and the death toll soared. That stirred up public panic and administrative chaos, and more than 1,102 US colleges and universities were forced to close their campuses and move classes online.

On March 7, 2020, the University of Washington became the first large US higher-learning institution to announce it was shutting down in-person learning for its nearly 50,000 students.

"You're all on your own," said Phoebe, who will study at Bard College in Dutchess County, New York, beginning this autumn, and who did not want to be identified fully. She was appalled at the very short closure notice sent by her school two years ago, she said.

"Our campus is in the middle of nowhere and we don't have many resources. The stores were shut down and staff weren't working on campus."

She did not own a car to go out safely to buy necessities, she said.

Henry Luo, a first-year student studying computer science at the University of Washington in early 2020 when his school shut down, said: "I was told to move out of the school dorm in one week, no exception. Not a single school staff member could direct me, or any international students, and tell us what we should do in terms of finding a place to stay while remaining safe."

The 18-year-old had to make cold calls to those he barely knew in the US, looking for temporary accommodation. His parents in China joined him, "harassing" friends and relatives by calling around and bombarding potential helpers.

"Fortunately, my father's business partner in Chicago agreed to 'adopt' me for a while," Luo said, adding that he shuffled from Seattle to brutally cold suburban Chicago, covering himself with full protective gear and daring not to dine or drink during the flight. "As long as the outcome is good, I would say, I would endure."

Xiuchun Feng, a student at the University of Washington in St. Louis in 2020, decided to return to China.

"I'm the only child in my family. My grandparents took care of me when I was a child, and now they couldn't sleep well because of fears for my safety. If I stayed overseas it was going to be torture for everyone."

Another obstacle Chinese students learned to deal with was learning online.

By autumn of 2020, 44 percent of US high-learning institutions had developed full, or primarily online, instruction, 21 percent used a hybrid model and 27 percent offered full, or primarily in-person, instruction.

For those returning to China, living in different time zones while taking online courses has meant a day-night reversal, and that has tarnished their school performance and messed up their daily schedules, they said.

A Chinese student at the University of California, Los Angeles said she needed to take online business classes at 2 am three days a week when she returned to China in April 2020.

Time difference

"I could hardly take part in group discussions because of the time difference and could not really get to know the professor because there were no office hours available for my timezone," she said.

"Basically, I lived in China, but in the Pacific time zone. (The video conferencing app) Zoom was my only friend."

Online learning is problematic even for those in the US. "Low efficiency and lack of affection," is how Emily Chang describes her Zoom classroom. She felt dizzy when joining the online meetings with all participants' videos required to be turned on, she said.

"For a big class with hundreds of students, it's very hard to follow the instructor without being distracted. Technical glitches took place from time to time. For example, one minute we would lose the teacher, and the next minute his screen-sharing function wasn't working properly."

Chang complained that much of the teacher's instruction time was wasted, but the academic workload did not lessen.

"Worse, we can't meet professors like in the old days during his or her office hours. Instead, we scheduled online consultations, another frustrating and time-consuming thing."

Although the pandemic has brought hardship and uncertainty to international students in many ways, it has also helped some to hone certain skills and prosper.

Emily Chang for one is looking forward to her master's studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger," she said. "Life goes on."

Contact the writers at junechang@chinadailyusa.com