On March 19, 2020, Keren Chen, then a senior in high school who had recently been admitted to Tufts, began the journey from her boarding school in Minnesota to her home in Shanghai in the midst of the worsening COVID-19 pandemic. Chen brought gloves, glasses, masks and 80% alcohol sanitizer and was too cautious to eat anything on the plane. After nearly 50 hours of traveling, Chen and several high school friends with whom she'd traveled finally arrived at the airport in Shanghai, China.
Despite being relieved to return home during the uncertain times of the pandemic, Chen faced the challenge of starting her journey at Tufts from thousands of miles away. Other Chinese international students were in a similar situation, and many who were first years had never physically been to the Medford/Somerville campus.
“Both me and my parents thought after summer [break] … I could just book a ticket and [fly] back to Boston in September without any restriction. But I guess it wasn’t like that,” Chen said.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the travel ban from China, largely directed at non-permanent residents of the U.S., has been in place since Jan. 31, 2020.
Andrew Shiotani, the director of the International Center at Tufts, said that about 40% of international students are still outside of the U.S., and many of them are from China.
According to Shiotani, the widespread shutdowns of U.S. embassies and consulates in China and the requirement that travelers spend 14 days in a country other than China prior to entry into the United States further complicated Chinese international students’ attempts to get visas and return to Tufts.
“My visa expired right after I came back from high school and the embassy is still not open, so I'm still waiting for the interview,” Chen said.
However, for Tufts international students in China, finding a community in their home country is still possible. Since last summer, Tufts Global Education has collaborated with Beijing Normal University to create the Tufts@BNU program, which allows Chinese international students to take online Tufts classes and in-person BNU classes.
Tufts@BNU started as a grassroots effort.
“Many students in China reached out to us with this request [of attending a local Chinese university partnered with Tufts],” Mala Ghosh, associate dean and senior director of study abroad and global education, wrote in an email to the Daily.
Katie Yang, a first-year from Beijing, China, is one of the initiators who drafted a petition among Chinese international students and contacted the Tufts administration. Yang heard that other American universities, such as Cornell, were partnering with universities in China to provide local programs to international students who couldn't return to campus. Yang didn't know of anyone who was pitching the same idea at Tufts and decided to push for the program.
“It [turned] out that nobody was actually doing this. I was like, okay, I probably should start all this,” Yang said.
Early last summer, before Yang had even enrolled at Tufts, Yang started to conduct surveys and collect signatures from Chinese international students through WeChat, a Chinese social media platform. Yang and a group of students then composed an email with the survey results to the Tufts administration and University President Anthony Monaco.
In the survey result, 100% of interviewees answered “yes” to the question, “Would you like to study in Chinese universities to communicate with peers and share university resources while joining Tufts online courses?” Seventy-eight signatures were also gathered with names and student IDs listed on the side.
Used to being “that kid in the background,” Yang was nervous throughout the process.
“It’s kind of weird ... stepping up front and doing something ... I'm not sure if I [am actually doing] the right thing, even though I think it is,” Yang said.
Thanks to the efforts of Yang and other students, Tufts Global Education saw the needs of Chinese international students and quickly got to work to create a partnership with the BNU administration.
“The two sides were able to reach an agreement within a short period of time and BNU staff worked overtime during the summer to get their campus ready for our students before classes started in September,” Mingquan Wang, faculty director of Tufts in Beijing, Tufts Global Education, wrote in an email to the Daily.
According to Wang, 74 Chinese students participated in the program during the fall 2020 semester and 53 are currently participating in the spring of 2021. Based on a survey he conducted, 92% of the students were satisfied or very satisfied with the program.
Shiotani, who also collaborated with Tufts Global Education, echoed Wang's statement.
“Everything I've heard is that the program has been received very well, that students are enjoying being on a campus, being in a classroom,” Shiotani said.
The benefit of having a sense of a college community, however, does not erase the incredible physical and mental challenges for Chinese international students trying to bridge two academic worlds. Unstable internet and time zone differences are two major issues.
First-year David Liu said that because of the Chinese government’s censorship on web browsing, students at BNU need to use a virtual private network (VPN) to access needed online resources for Tufts courses, and it can be quite slow.
For Liu, who participated in the program in the fall 2020 semester, the internet issues cast shadows over his learning experience. Liu said that his screen would freeze for half of the class and his classmates and professors simply could not hear him.
“I remember that for my last class, I wanted to say goodbye to my classmates, but I was frozen [during] the entire class,” Liu said.
The time zone difference exerts another toll on Chinese international students. Some Tufts@BNU students describe themselves as “yinjian ren,” a word used to describe those who sleep during the day and wake up in the middle of the night.
Last semester, Liu had a writing class at 10 p.m., a Spanish class at 4 a.m. and a calculus class at BNU at 8 a.m. An hour-long shuttle from where the Tufts students live to the main BNU campus made the schedule even more difficult.
Liu would then go back to the dorm at noon and sleep until 7 p.m. for his “next day” to begin.
“[During my remote class at midnight], my brain was like soup… I just felt very tired at the time,” Liu said.
Yang said she could not attend club meetings because of the timezone issue.
“I like anime … [but the club’s] meeting time when translated to our time was seven in the morning, which I can never wake up,” Katie said.
Ghosh acknowledged the difficulties that Chinese international students face.
“The students have done an amazing job at balancing both schedules, but we understand that the time difference is not ideal and is a challenge for students,” Ghosh said.
Despite the long distance, Tufts has stayed connected with its Chinese international students and readily offers support.
According to Chen, Tufts bought a new router for the BNU program to help with some of the internet issues. Knowing that many students choose to use cellular data to avoid the crowded school internet, Tufts Global Education directly offered cash allowance.
“The most impressive thing that I can never forget is the 600 RMB for each of us,” Chen said. “I can feel Tufts still [cares] about us, even though we are like 13 hours away from each other."
According to Ghosh, the students have enjoyed many group activities including celebrating Thanksgiving, doing Secret Santa, making dumplings, climbing the Great Wall and hosting talent shows.
“From what we witnessed during the fall, the students created a strong community while at BNU,” Ghosh said.
Chen believes that because Tufts students at BNU live together under the relatively loose COVID-19 restrictions in China, they actually have more opportunities to interact with each other than they would have if they had returned to Tufts in-person.
“We had fun together. We had debates together about a lot of different topics, it was a great time,” Chen said.
Yang even created a website that showcases life at BNU and their appreciation for the staff members.
“[We have] pictures about … what happened in the BNU program and ... little snapshots over lines [about] something we appreciate about being in the program,” Yang said.
However, being a group of “international” students at a traditional university in their home country, Chinese Tufts students reported struggling to make local connections and find a sense of belonging.
As Tufts students live in another campus of BNU, their life is separated from the main student body.
“We are just wanderers ... we just [go to the main campus] for classes and food. That's it. We have completely different schedules and completely different classes [compared to local BNU students],” sophomore Ran Guo said.
“I feel like I don’t have any BNU friends,” Yang said. “The interaction between me and BNU students is minimal … I don’t have the chance [to interact with them].”
The deep educational difference between the two countries further contributes to the distance between the two student bodies.
Liu said that the competition among Chinese students at BNU is extremely intense. According to Liu, professors expect students to do extra exercises and jump ahead the syllabus, which overwhelms him.
“It is not comfortable … Like you have already read your textbook...then when you're sitting in the classroom, your professor just [talks] about questions, problem sets and concepts outside of the textbook, and all of your classmates seem to be familiar with that part … you cannot catch [up with] them,” Liu said.
Guo, a political science major, does not find his BNU class attractive. In his experience, Guo said that typical BNU students are very busy, and they take around 10 classes. Consequently, rarely anybody has the time to do the assigned class readings. The lectures have limited student-professor interactions, and the tests and papers do not require the mastery of reading materials, either.
“They don't have homework, they don't do reading, they just go to classes and do ... their papers,” Guo said.
Chen, having been in the U.S. education system since middle school, also struggles to deal with her double identity at BNU. Chen said that local students are not familiar with the liberal arts education and are more career-focused in subjects math and science.
“When I talk about, ‘oh, I major in [biology] and art.’ And when [local students] heard art, they were like ... 'why should you take art?' I don't get why they think like that,” Chen said.
Although she is a Chinese student studying in her home country, Chen does not feel like she belongs.
“I do … walk on [the BNU] campus and hear people [speaking] Chinese all around me, that makes me feel like I'm home … [but it] didn't give me a motivation to stay here to study because I don't feel like I could learn as much compared to Tufts. So, [studying in China] does make me feel comfortable, but it didn't give me motivation,” Chen said.
Chen talked about reconciling her American values with her Chinese identity.
“It’s to find a point that makes myself most comfortable because everybody is different,” she said. “I just follow my heart and my mind to do and say whatever I want.”
Coincidentally, Shiotani, being a Japanese American who lived in Okinawa, Japanwith a Japanese family background, can sympathize with Chinese students at BNU.
“I grew up speaking English in Japan. So, I felt very American when I was in Japan," Shiotani said. "If I just walk down the street, people think I'm Japanese … but culturally … everything about the way I was raised was American."
Shiotani said that having a combination of cultural experiences, while challenging, is extremely important.
“We have the opportunity to … develop really important and unique perspectives on things … We have the opportunity to be bridges between different types of value systems … We have the ability to see things from different ways,” Shiotani said.
With ups and downs for Chinese international students at the BNU program, many of them wish to return to Tufts soon.
David Liu already arrived on the Tufts campus for the spring semester. He stayed in Singapore for 14 days to be cleared for U.S. entry. He now faces the challenges of adjusting to life on an American campus in the middle of the school year.
“I need to get familiar with new people and new classmates I met in the U.S.,” Liu said.
Tufts students who were unable to travel back to Massachusetts miss the Medford/Somerville campus; those who embarked upon their first year as a Tufts student in the Tufts@BNU program look forward to experiencing Tufts campus life for the first time.
“The campus experience [at Tufts] was really good … the atmosphere, what people are talking about … during our free time with topics [that we are interested in],” Guo said. “These things happen very [rarely] at BNU.”
Chen is determined to come back to the U.S. for the fall 2021 semester, and she particularly wants to have her art studio experience at Tufts.
“Aiyou, zhen de xiang hui qu,” Chen said in her native language at the end of the interview. “I really want to go back to the States.”
