13 Unwelcome Truths: On Chinese International Students and Asian American Studies

Abstract

13 Unwelcome TruthsOn Chinese International Students and Asian American Studies erin Khuê Ninh (bio) "These students, they cheat." "And they come late or leave early—they take phone calls during class!" "They're filthy rich, so what do they care." It was a meeting of a few UCSB faculty willing to speak to a reporter about our experiences teaching Chinese international students. This was the fall of 2018, and the idea was to take to task administrative policies that had casually turned teaching—and learning—into nonessential considerations of the classroom. We were not all Asian American(ist)s around that table, and comments soon took on an unsettlingly personalized sense of grievance. As voiced by white colleagues, these resentments, though not empirically unfounded, were a hardly veiled alarm at the barbarians. To argue against the proliferation of Chinese undergraduates in US higher education is to risk feeding into such Sinophobia, though the latter is not my intent. In a blog post from September 2016,1 I'd mainly worried that Asian American students would be tarred by the same xenophobic brush—Will we come to miss the Model Minority Overachiever stereotype, if it is replaced by the Unqualified Cheat?—but that concern has become so quaint since the violent end of the Obama years. Yet the present era of pitched nativism and anti-Asian violence has not made an honest accounting of the plight and presence of Chinese international undergraduates less necessary, just exponentially more tricky. This essay holds that we all have things to answer for: administrators, Chinese [End Page 319] international students, Asian American studies. But whether the critique I pose here—of structural problems and structural responses, yes, but of individual investments and answerability, as well—will be legible for the difficult reckoning it is remains to be seen. In the United States, we are well aware of the structural conditions that have driven colleges and universities to aggressive pursuit of international undergraduates: In 2014, these students contributed more than $30 billion to the American economy, according to a report issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce. International students, often paying full freight, … help colleges address budget shortfalls (especially as state governments cut funding).2 International tuition and fees have been a kind of emergency transfusion to replace the public funds that public and private institutions both need to survive, but which neoliberalism's profit model has banished.3 Supply and demand have gladly met in the push factors of China's own neoliberal reforms, producing a post-socialist economy in which increasing numbers of newly "upper-middleclass families" seek the greater cultural capital and yet more relaxed admission standards of a Western college education: "This time abroad is called dujin, a 'golden vacation' that also improves job prospects. … [A] foreign degree was worth a lot on a resume back home."4 And like anyone on vacation, these students also prove huge boons to the local economy.5 Of the more than 1 million international students in the United States in 2016–2017, mainland Chinese made up one-third.6 At UCSB, Chinese students comprised 90 percent of the undergraduate international student population on campus in 2018–19 (the next countries of origin being the United Kingdom and Japan, at very distant seconds of 2.8 percent each)7, and 12 percent of the undergraduate population overall. The state of affairs in 2011 was already such that the Chronicle of Higher Education christened it "The China Conundrum." How does the situation read now, a decade later, having passed (through) a virulent Trump administration but still in the throes of an anti-Chinese/anti-Asian pandemic? "Fall 2020 saw a whopping 91 percent decrease in new international student enrollment in U.S. academic programs."8 But while fall 2021 enrollment figures were, as of this writing, not yet available, applications are said to be up 43 percent from last year nationally, and 77 percent of "U.S. colleges and universities … continue to fund outreach and recruitment of international students at the same levels or higher than previously."9 If this moment proves only a lull, it's one that university administrators but also faculty within...