Studying Abroad: The Ivy League Dream and Chinese Modernity

In 1854 Yung Wing, who graduated with a bachelor's degree from Yale University, returned to a poverty-stricken China, where domestic revolt and foreign invasion were shaking the Chinese empire. Inspired by the U.S. and its liberal education, Yung believed that having more Chinese students educated there was the only way to bring reform to China. Since then, generations of students from China have embarked on this transpacific voyage in search of modernity. What forces have shaped Chinese student migration to the U.S.? And what impact do they have on the formation of Asian America? This talk is based on my book, Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America (University of Hawai'i Press, 2013) which provides a historical sketch of Chinese students' literary and political activities in the United States and beyond from the 1850s to the 1990s. Rather than attempting an overview of the book, I focus on the story of the Harvard girl--a story about the education for quality in China--to open up a discussion about the Chinese obsession with the "Ivy League Dream" and its tense relations to the questions of Chinese modernity and intellectual independence that remain crucial in the age of globalization. I argue that study abroad has always been a project of neoliberal subject formation by creating accesses to the West, in which becoming Asian American becomes both the lure and burden of Chinese modernity. Contact: 919 668 2603.