Student Union
- By Parth Vohra
Bengalis Come to the Table Without Partitions
At 6 p.m., the place was still empty, and only one person had trickled in.
Two hours later, seven people were crammed around a table meant for four, with newspapers, cups of tea and food items littering the wooden top.
The authentic Bangladeshi restaurant on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. seemed more like a family room than a restaurant. It draws people together from Bangladesh and India that share the Bengali ethnicity but whose countries have been separated by conflict since 1947.
Delicious Bengali dishes like “hilsa fish,” or goat “biryani” made their way to the tables occupied by members of the Bengali diaspora, their camaraderie overshadowing the chicken, fish or beef. Hilsa — called the “queen of fishes”— is a Bangladeshi delicacy and in danger of being overfished. Biryani is a South Asian mix of rice, vegetable and meat.
From the outside, Gharer Khabar -- which means “homemade food” in Bengali -- looks like many other narrow restaurants with plate-glass front windows in northern Virginia. Operated and owned by Nasima Shahreen and Ashraful Siddique, a Bangladeshi immigrant couple, it sits in a strip mall on busy Lee Highway.
But inside, Gharer Khabar turns the restaurant into a place where “homemade food” comes from a kitchen of love.
“My goal was that,” said Nasima Shahreen, co-owner and head cook of Gharer Khabar. “Homemade food with affection, with love.”
Shahreen and her husband, Ashraful, both from Bangladesh’s capital city of Dhaka, emigrated to the U.S. at the end of 2003.
The couple worked as sales representatives before starting a part-time catering business in Bengali food. When the first order came nearly 12 years ago, the couple had never imagined owning a restaurant of their own.
They only dreamt of it.
“Till now, I am not a trained cook. I don’t know how it happened, so I just cook like for passion,” Shahreen said. “But it happened.”
Their first order came from an immigrant Bengali family from Kolkata, India, who needed help after the birth of their child. They read an advertisement about homemade catered food in a Bengali community website.
“We prepared some fish, vegetables and rice,” Siddique recalled. “We gave it to them. They liked it.”
Next week, an order came in to feed 30 people, Siddique said.
And then, word spread among the Bengali diaspora in the Washington metropolitan area. Approximately 10,000 Bangladesh-born residents live there, according to a 2014 Migration Policy Institute report. And, at least 2,500 to 3,000 Bengalis from India are said to reside in the area, according to Somin Mukherji, who retired from the World Bank in 2014 and is a longtime Washington resident from Kolkata.
Bengali-Indians also come to Gharer Khabar to bond with immigrants from Bangladesh because of familiar language, food and culture.
The union of Bengalis are poignant because the province of Bengal was divided along religious lines in 1947. West Bengal lies on the India side of the line with a majority Hindu population. On the other side in Bangladesh is a majority Muslim population, which was East Pakistan until 1971. But most people from both those regions are ethnic Bengali and speak Bengali, despite practicing different religions.
“See, like here, they are from Calcutta (Kolkata), and they are from Bangladesh,” Siddique said, pointing to customers in the restaurant. “We have lots of people who come from Calcutta (Kolkata), and we feel like since we have the same language, our food taste is 80 percent is the same, we can connect (with) each other very easily.”
The business grew with constant requests from the diaspora for Bengali cooking, which obliged the couple to open Gharer Khabar at the end of 2011.
Every evening around 8 p.m., Bengali immigrants from Bangladesh and India gather for social and political conversations, play games such as chess and lodo (a board and dice game), and eat Bengali snacks with tea, Shahreen said.
One of them is Nusrat Rabbee.
Rabbee is an immigrant from Dhaka and came to the U.S. in 1981 for her undergraduate degree in computer science and economics at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She moved to Washington from northern California in August to teach at the University of Maryland.
Since coming to Washington, Rabbee has been to Gharer Khabar almost every week, she said.
Drawn to its authentic Bangladeshi food, Rabbee was initially shy. She quietly ate her food and left, she said.
But, now that’s changed. The hospitality of the owners and the vibrant community of Gharer Khabar has empowered her to join the discussions of others.
“Gharer Khabar is a community center for all of us,” Rabbee told VOA StudentU. “When I enter, it feels like the sitcom ‘Cheers,’ where everyone knows your name.
“They know what you like to eat.”
This wasn’t the case in northern California, Rabbee said. Even though similar communities existed, a class divide remained, wherein political and social intellectual exchanges referred to as “adda” in Bengali were constrained among the educated elites.
Such is not the case at Gharer Khabar, Rabbee said.
Conversations don’t revolve around reminiscing Bangladesh, Rabbee said. They, instead revolve around art, politics and social issues.
One compelling debate Rabbee participated in was on whether publication of animal slaughter pictures from Eid-ul-Adha on Facebook should be acceptable. Eid-ul-Adha is a a holy Muslim festival, also called the Sacrifice Feast, and is observed, among other rituals though the sacrifice of a sheep, cow, goat, buffalo or camel.
In that discussion, "women's voices were audible,” Rabbee told VOAStudentU. “I liked that.”
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Reports of visa checks, deportations worry Chinese STEM students in US
Geopolitical tensions and growing competition in tech between the United States and China appear to be spilling over into academia despite commitments from the world’s two biggest economies to boost people-to-people exchanges.
The United States remains the top choice for Chinese students seeking to study abroad with nearly 300,000 studying in American colleges and universities during the 2022-2023 school year. But reports of some cases that students and professors are facing extra scrutiny while passing through immigration and the deportation of others are raising concerns.
For Chen Xiaojin, a doctoral student studying semiconductor materials at a university in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, it has been six years since she returned to her hometown of Beijing.
At first, it was the COVID-19 pandemic that kept her from going home. But over the past two years, she has been deterred by accounts of Chinese students majoring in science and engineering being required to reapply for their visas upon returning to China.
She also says she is worried by reports over the past six months of Chinese students being deported, even at nearby Dulles Airport.
"My current research is relatively sensitive, and my boss [adviser] is getting funds from the U.S. Department of Defense, making it even more sensitive,” she told VOA. "I am afraid that I won't be able to return after I go back [to China]."
Chen says that if she did return to China, she would have to apply for a new visa.
In a report late last month, Bloomberg said it had found at least 20 Chinese students and scholars with valid visas who were deported at U.S. Customs since November and barred from reentry. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency does not release relevant data.
Immigration attorney Dan Berger represented one Chinese student who was deported late last year. He tells VOA Mandarin that the student studied biological sciences at Yale University and was about to complete her doctorate.
She visited her family in China and got a new visa but was deported by customs at Dulles Airport and barred from reentering the country for five years. Berger said he did not see anything suspicious in the transcript of the conversation between the student and the customs officer.
"We have seen what seems like a pattern over the last six months of Chinese PhD students being turned around…. more than I've seen in quite a while," he said.
Matthew Brazil, a fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, said neither country seems willing to explain the situation. However, he believes that in most cases, the United States must have valid reasons for blocking visa holders from entering the country.
In some cases, the student’s background may not match what is written on the visa application. In other cases, customs agents may also find something that the State Department missed, and once they see it, they are responsible for taking action.
"I wish the Chinese side would be specific about their students who were refused entry,” he said. “The fact that both sides are mum on details and that the Chinese side is engaged with the usual angry rhetoric means that each has security concerns. And that says to me that there was good reason for the U.S. to stop these particular applicants."
Brazil also sees a connection between the entry denials and export control regulations issued by the United States in October 2022 that restrict China's ability to obtain advanced computing chips, develop and maintain supercomputers, and manufacture advanced semiconductors.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection is one of the law enforcement agencies authorized to investigate violations of export control regulations, he said.
"Beijing's intelligence agencies are known to focus attention on PRC [People's Republic of China] students and scientists headed abroad who study or work on dual-use technologies controlled under the Export Administration Act — compelling Chinese students and scientists to report on what they've learned when they return to China on holiday,” he said. “This has been true for decades."
Bill Drexel, a fellow for the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, said the U.S. government did find some cases where students tried to steal strategic technology for China.
"I think it would both not be surprising that they found some really questionable or incriminating evidence for some students,” he said. “It would also not be surprising if, in their hunt for really solid evidence, they also may have made some mistakes on other students.”
Drexel adds that “it’s just kind of an unfortunate fact of the time that we live in and the tactics that the CCP uses when it comes to these measures."
In a post on X in early May, U.S. ambassador to China Nicholas Burns tried to dispel concerns about visas and entry to the United States for students and scholars. In the post, he said "99.9% of Chinese students holding visas encounter no issues upon entering the United States.”
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal Monday, Burns said it is China that is making it impossible to promote people-to-people ties. Burns told the Journal that students attending events sponsored by the United States in China have been interrogated and intimidated.
He also said that since U.S. President Joe Biden and China’s leader Xi Jinping held their summit in San Francisco last year, China’s Ministry of State Security and other agencies had interfered with Chinese citizens’ participation at some 61 events.
At a regular briefing on Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning dismissed those accusations, saying that they did not “reflect reality" and that went against key understandings reached by both countries’ presidents in San Francisco.
“The United States, under the pretext of 'national security,' unjustifiably harasses, interrogates, and deports Chinese students in the U.S., causing them significant harm and creating a severe chilling effect,” Mao said. “The image of the United States in the minds of the Chinese people fundamentally depends on the actions of the United States itself.”
Drexel said he believes Burns’ comments about visas and students' willingness to study in the U.S. still ring true.
“On balance, it's still the case that American universities are overwhelmingly warm towards Chinese students and want them in large numbers," he said.
However, Berger, the immigration lawyer, is concerned about the chilling effect recent cases involving Chinese students could have.
"In general, we are being more careful about advising Chinese graduate students in STEM fields about traveling and letting them know that there is some small risk,” he said.
Even though the risk is small, it does seem to be real at the moment, he said.
Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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