Opinion

When international students go home

Saturday, December 8, 2007

A week or so ago our son, Don, called to report that 230 international students had attended the free Thanksgiving dinner he and friends from his church put on annually. Don lives Yorba Linda, Calif., near Cal State Fullerton and several lesser known universities.

Actually Don heads up a volunteer ministry to foreign students; he likes to call them "International Students," and has done so since attending the University of Nebraska Lincoln in the early '70s.

Along the way, he also lived several years in Taipei, Taiwan, teaching English and becoming fluent in the Chinese language Mandarin dialect. For some reason, he has always been attracted to Asian people. Maybe it is only natural then, that when international students, a majority of which seem to be from China, look for contacts in America, they are drawn to him.

Don's quest to make friends of the bright young people studying in our universities can be traced to what happened to Col. Mohammar Quadaffi, Libyan dictator. Mohammar came to the United States on a university scholarship and hated the experience. Evidently his fellow students put him down, perhaps treating him like the arrogant Arab that he was, and made life miserable enough that he quit school and went back home to Libya. Sadly, though, he has carried a burning hatred in his heart for all things USA and when he became dictator the relations between both countries became strained. Possibly, though, remembering from personal experience how large and strong the United States is may have influenced his decision to quit the nuclear bomb business.

Don and his friends do such things as meeting new students arriving at the Los Angeles airport. LAX is enough of a problem for those of us who are used to traveling but imagine how confusing it would be if you barely spoke the language and had not even one friend to look for. The group also plans activities for the holiday breaks at school when the American kids go home and the internationals are left to fend for themselves.

Ann and I have attended a Fourth of July celebration and a Thanksgiving feast in Southern California with Don and his internationals. Both have been teaching moments to give the history of those holidays and what they mean to Americans. It warmed my heart to see young Chinese Communist men waving American flags and enjoying fireworks. At the Thanksgiving dinner last year, we sat with a couple young men, Buddhists from India, who don't eat meat but seemed to enjoy the taste of traditional American turkey and dressing, "It is OK, I never tasted before!"

Recently I happened upon a column, titled "Moving beyond revolution" by David Brooks, who writes for the New York Times and whose column is sometimes carried in the Omaha World Herald. The subject was one of the current successful businessmen in today's hugely booming Chinese economy. Brooks writes that "Edward Tian was three years old when Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution. His parents, ecologists who had been educated in the Soviet Union were deported to rural backwaters. A mob invaded his home and burned his family's books. He was separated from his sister and was sent to live with his maternal grandmother in the industrial city of Shenyang."

Life was flat tough for the young man, yet he applied himself to education, including the study of Marxism. He aspired to become a soldier and fight to further the Chinese revolution. His autocratic grandmother put the kibosh on what she envisioned to be a dead end and directed him to enroll in Liaoning University. Graduating from that institution he floated scholarship applications to American universities and eventually accepted one to Texas Tech near Lubbock.

From crowded life in China to the sparsely populated west Texas plains must have decidedly been a culture shock for young Edward. (Don tells me that foreign kids with unpronounceable names adopt an American name when they come here hence the "Edward." One kid he met wanted to be called Conan, as in the Barbarian, Don discouraged it, but Conan he became.) Tian, now Edward, adapted well and earned a PhD in ranch management of all things. The university schedule was typically not totally academic and Edward Tian had access to a Macintosh computer. "During breaks, I had no family and no friends around, so I'd play with it. It planted a seed in my heart."

Following graduation Edward Tian returned home to a 1990s China that was beginning to reform itself into the fantastic economic engine we see today. At the same time the Internet was also beginning to transform the world. "Tian and a Chinese friend from Dallas founded AisiaInfo Holdings to bring Internet technology back home. Within three years, he had 320 employees and revenues of $45 million a year."

Then Tian was named chief executive of a new Chinese-government sponsored company, China Netcom Group, and the young student fresh from Lubbock had 320,000 people working for him. His next step was to resign from China Netcom Group to form "China Broadband Capital" which funds firms using cell phones as the next information technology platform, and it owns part of "MySpace China."

Tian's is a story of fantastic success but not unusual for those foreign students who come to study in our universities. The experience is a success when they go back home to transform in a small way, large in this case, their countries of origin to a better place in this world. I can't help but think that they also take home lessons of a friendly, giving American people who want them to share in the good life. I applaud Don and his friends for doing vital work that will have a positive impact on our future.

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