A Chinese Student Says Goodbye

As the Fourth of July approaches, l can’t help thinking about a visit I got at the end of this year’s spring term from a Chinese student of mine. Before she graduated and returned to China, she wanted to say goodbye, but it was not easy for her to do so.  She was uncertain about what was next in her life.  She feared that her time in America and the friendships she made here were permanently at an end.

That visit and the anxiety at the heart of it were heightened for me when the Trump administration launched its ongoing attack on the role of international students in America and Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced he wanted to “aggressively revoke”  the visas of Chinese nationals studying in critical fields.

The Trump administration’s animus toward foreign students, particularly Chinese students, is hard for me to understand.  It goes against our national self-interest. Nearly one quarter of U. S. billion-dollar startup companies had a founder who came to America as an international student according to the National Foundation for American Policy.  Chinese students, who typically pay full tuition at public universities as well as go on to serve as teachers and researchers, play a vital role in American industry and science.

More than 55,000 Chinese nationals graduated with STEM Ph.D.’s from American universities from 2001 to 2015, and in a brain drain that worked in our favor, 90 percent of them stayed in the United States after graduation.

If the Trump administration is worried about Chinese espionage, there are better ways for dealing with it than through a wholesale attack on Chinese students who want to study in the United States and who are facing a slowing Chinese economy in which jobs are hard to find after graduation. Our rivalry with China is not like our rivalry with the highly militarized Soviet Union in the Cold War era.  It is a rivalry with a modern power that views economic and technological success as the key to global dominance. 

Faculty in the STEM fields at colleges and universities across the country have been outspoken about the harm that is sure to follow from cutting off the supply of gifted Chinese and international students who want to come here. But there are consequences to the cutoff that go beyond the tangible benefits these students provide.

As a literature teacher I get to see these intangible benefits in how my international students respond to the books they read.  A case in point, a term paper that a Chinese student of mine did several years ago. 

This student had become interested in African-American literature after reading Frederick Douglass’s memoir “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: an American Slave.”  When we got into 20th-century American writing, she focused on James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son,” and when I suggested that she add Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to her reading, she jumped at the chance to do so.

She turned in a fine research paper, but it was King, whom she knew by reputation before coming to America, who most touched her. She was astonished that after being arrested and jailed, he still went on to have an extraordinary career, meeting with presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in the White House and having a national holiday named for him after his death.

In my Chinese student’s mind, King offered a valuable lesson in what an American who openly challenges the government can accomplish. Without recourse to violence, he had changed American history, she believed. 

I cannot say how in the coming years my former student will balance her public and private life in China. She will certainly have to censor herself at times and be aware of whom she confides in.   But she is bound to have a very different view of the authoritarianism of today’s China than if she never came to America.

And that difference can only be good for us and China.  Of the more than 277,000 Chinese nationals studying in America, it stands to reason that many like my student and other international students have been changed by learning how we do things. We owe it to ourselves to make them welcome.