It was a bizarre twist in the story of Chinese students in the U.S. As far back as the 1800s, Americans have imagined that Chinese students arriving in the U.S. would suddenly see the light—whether that light be Christianity or liberal democracy. Many of the Middle Kingdom’s best and brightest would choose to settle down in the land of the free, and those who returned to China would act as a Trojan horse for American ideals. Now Americans feared the exact reverse: that Chinese students had turned into vessels for Chinese values, tools for suppressing free speech, and conspirators in an international technology heist.
When ideology wasn’t an issue, economics was. Wealthy students had subsidized American universities reeling from budget cuts, but they also sparked a backlash from American students and professors who worried college admissions were being bought and sold on the free market. In 2018, the University of California system finally began implementing a policy to assuage those concerns: enrollment by non-California residents would be capped at 18 percent, or at the percentage in the 2017–18 year for schools in which it already exceeded that percentage.22 For now at least, California looks to have hit its peak for Chinese students.
Undergirding all these changes has been a tectonic shift in geopolitical balance: today’s Chinese students are coming from a country that is far more prosperous, powerful, and stable than at any point in recent history. It’s a change that affects their motivations to come, their decisions to leave, and their posture toward everything they encounter in America. This group doesn’t always feel the pull of American culture, and when they encounter liberal democracy up close, they’re not necessarily impressed.
International, national, and state politics are all at play here. But if you zoom in a little further, the experience of Chinese students in the U.S. is still intensely personal and can be, in its own way, liberating.
CONCLUSION: KAFKA IN SAN FRANCISCO
Groups of painfully shy Chinese students are milling around near the neon-lit red carpet. Tonight, the University of San Francisco is hosting the first-ever “Golden University Student Micro-Film Festival,” and the award nominees look equal parts excited and anxious. The event is put on by the local CSSA chapter, and ten teams of aspiring filmmakers from seven different California colleges are out here. Earlier in the year, I had created an online video series titled The California Spirit introducing California culture in Chinese. The first episode has been nominated for awards in a couple of categories—basically, serving as a token American project to increase the “international” flavor of the event.
The red carpet has been laid out in an alleyway behind the USF theater, splitting the difference between a chain-link fence and the back of the building. Neon-blue lights illuminate the way, and toward the end of the thirtyish yards of carpet, a camera crew waits to interview each nominee. We all take turns walking the carpet and answering a few stiff questions before heading into the school auditorium. I plop down in the center of the auditorium alongside a friend I’ve brought to the event, and we’re soon joined in the row by a handful of chatty Chinese guys dressed in ties and sweaters. They’re clearly enjoying themselves, and we strike up a conversation.
One of them is currently enrolled at San Francisco City College, and two of them recently graduated from UC Berkeley. One of the Berkeley grads, Wu Qiyin, now works in Google’s Cloud department and does creative writing on the side. He’s the scriptwriter behind their film: Kafka. I ask what it’s about.
“It’s about me!” the middle of the three blurts out. “My name is Kafka.”
We all have a laugh at how eager Kafka is to take center stage, and the author explains the film’s background. It’s not specifically about his friend, but it is about a gay Chinese student in America named Kafka, his struggle to make a genuine connection with those around him, and his difficulty in coming out to his family.
Kafka asks where I uploaded my own video: YouTube or on Chinese video sites? I tell them I put it on both and ask the same question to them.
“Just YouTube,” scriptwriter Wu tells me. “If we put it on Chinese sites, I think people would just criticize it—criticize us. We’ll just leave it up in the U.S. and that’s enough.”
Our hosts for the night step onto the stage, including the president of the USF CSSA, a skinny film lover who I had met earlier through Professor Stanley Kwong. He makes awkward banter with his cohost and invites a series of sponsors and esteemed guests to the stage, including a representative from the education department of the nearby Chinese consulate in San Francisco, who makes a few standard-issue remarks on the importance of educational and cultural exchanges.
Sitting there, it occurs to me that in a certain light, an event like tonight could be interpreted as another Chinese “influence operation.” It was put on by the CSSA, an increasingly politicized group. In attendance were multiple members of the Chinese Communist Party and representatives from the Chinese consulate. I imagine that any films touching on sensitive issues like the Dalai Lama or Taiwan would have been barred from competing; for all I know, that kind of censorship may have happened at USF that night.
And yet, that narrative doesn’t get to the heart of what’s happening here. The restrictions described above are real, but so are the new possibilities being explored by students through their films. As the auditorium goes dark, the screen lights up with short clips from each of the projects, small snatches of the stories that these students wanted to tell. One depicts the relationship between an old man and his granddaughter in a poor corner of rural China. Another follows a Chinese PhD student at Stanford who is haunted by paranoid fantasies and eventually saved by faith in God.
Kafka follows its title character from high school in China through college at Berkeley. It shows him getting bullied as a teenager in public by the same boy who is intimate with him in private, and then Kafka echoing that same behavior as a closeted college student. It shows him meeting David at a club in San Francisco’s Castro District, and the tentative first steps of their relationship. Woven throughout are surreal montages and a monologue reciting parts of astronomer Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot.
As the show progresses, awards are doled out and shy acceptance speeches delivered from the stage. My film comes up empty at the end of the night. The same goes for Kafka, despite nominations for best actor, best original screenplay, and best picture. It’s a disappointment for the Kafka crew, but not a major one. They made their movie and were happy to put it out there into the world. Back in the lobby, we all take a picture together and add each other on WeChat.
Kafka featured several shots of the Bay Bridge, and as I drive my car back over it toward Oakland, something Tim Lin said to me three years earlier keeps running through my head.
“When Chinese students go to American colleges, they immediately find out that life can go many different ways. Not a linear one, not a single way.”
SILICON VALLEY’S CHINA PARADOX
It’s eleven a.m. on a smoggy Friday in Beijing, and this busload of Chinese geeks is buzzing about smartwatches. As the bus driver muscles through gnarly traffic, programmers fiddle with watchband prototypes and debate the merits of different wrist-flick functions. The Apple Watch will be released later today, and the most popular models will sell out within seconds.
But the debut of the next big thing from Apple is not what has this group excited. The bus is carrying employees of Beijing-based artificial intelligence start-up Mobvoi to a twenty-four-hour smartwatch hackathon in a scenic village outside the city. The goal for the day and night ahead: build the apps for Mobvoi’s own smartwatch operating system, Ticwear. Mobvoi