Student Union
- By Parth Vohra
Do You Struggle As a First Gen Student?
Dark hair and eyes. Living at home instead of in a dorm. Speaking a foreign language. Changing into shorts on the school bus.
And grape leaves instead of PB&J.
Those are just some of the issues first-generation Americans say they navigate with one foot in the culture of their parents, and the other in the youth culture of America.
Living dual cultures does not come easily, say four first-generation college students VOA StudentU interviewed last week. While they identify with being young and American, they say they are happy their parents encouraged them to carry on their native cultures, too.
“My mom insisted that I bring authentic Lebanese food to lunch everyday,” Layla Najjar, 21, recalls vividly. “She insisted that I speak to her in Arabic.She just really insisted that I embrace this part of my identity, and initially as a young child, I really wanted nothing more than just to fit in” in America.
Each one grappled with balancing their past with their present. Now adults, they say the silver-lining of those challenges was being not just American, but international Americans.
First-generation Americans are born to foreign parents in the United States or born abroad and immigrated as young children.
Najjar, an international politics senior at Georgetown University, was born to Lebanese parents in Great Falls, Virginia. Fluent in English and Arabic, she calls herself a “unique hybrid” and identifies as American and Lebanese. But as a child, she felt conflicted about that identity.
She didn’t feel different at her small private elementary school in Rockville, Maryland, only because she wasn’t blond and blue-eyed like most of the other kids, she said. It was things like the lunch she brought from home. An elementary teacher once frowned at Najjar as she pulled out grape leaves for a meal, instead of sandwiches, she said.
Around high school, Najjar realized the blessing of being dual-cultured.
“My family, and specially my mother, has never shied away from our heritage, or our identity,” Najjar says.
Najjar danced traditional Lebanese folk dance as she grew up. Friends and family often get together around a table to eat mulukhiyah, an Afro-Middle East dish of coriander, garlic, chicken and rice.
“I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m not one, and I’m not the other,” she says. “And I’m not neither.I’m both.”
Sarah Tayel,19, a junior at the University of Maryland says she is proud of her Egyptian background, and “flaunts” being Muslim and Arab. During ice-breaking sessions in elementary school, Tayel always spoke plainly about her roots, “I’m Egyptian.I speak Arabic.I’m Muslim.”
Tayel was born in New York. Tayel’s parents emigrated from Alexandria, Egypt, and her family also includes two younger sisters and a brother.
Tayel is fluent in Arabic, and credits her mother for that. When she visits Egypt with her family, locals think she was born and raised there, Tayel says.
“I’m just as caught up as any other native Egyptian on, like, the music, the entertainment, the movies ...and I can say the same for my siblings, as well.They are pretty up to date on everything.”
But there were moments of cultural frustration, she says.
Tayel wasn’t allowed to attend the parties or prom that most other American students enjoyed. She said she never had a dying desire to attend these events, and used the time to focus on her studies.
“I've seen friends spend their high school years partying, drinking, and engaging in harmful activities that hindered them, and prevented them from getting into college,” Tayel says, “let alone good colleges.”
But going out of state for college was never an option, Tayel's parents require her to live at home, not in the dorms.
“That’s an instance of, like, frustration,” Tayel says.“Even till now, it's still frustrating to me.I appreciate it, I love being home ... but it can be frustrating sometimes.”
Minah Malik, 21, also has felt the strain of some cultural baggage.
Malik grew up amid her parents, younger sister, maternal aunt and four cousins, who were all Pakistani in West Windsor Township, New Jersey. She was always connected to Pakistani culture, Malik said.
“I was 100 percent that girl that was on the school bus, like, taking off her leggings and changing into short-shorts because her mom didn't want her to wear certain clothes,” Malik says.“That’s what everybody wore, so that’s what I wanted to wear.”
Upon finding them when Malik was in 7th grade, she says, her mother cut up her only two pairs of short-shorts.
Relationships or an interest in the opposite sex is not a topic comfortably discussed with parents, Malik explains.The marriage ceiling is 25 for Pakistani women, and now that she is 21, she grapples with their suggestions about marriage prospects.
“Once I finally asserted myself, and I was like, ‘No, you brought me up in the United States.If you wanted me to be this Pakistani child ... then you should have brought me up there ... Once they accepted it, it was easier for them to move on from it, but it took them a while to get there.”
Malik co-presides the Pakistani Student Association at George Washington University, where she is an aspiring pre-law student. She says she joined the PSA as Pakistani culture is “integral” to her.
Aylin Uyar, 21, an electrical engineering senior also at George Washington University, has embraced both her Turkish and American cultures.
Born to Turkish parents in Sea Bright, New Jersey, Uyar says her family only speaks Turkish at home. When she was five she translated notes between her parents and her teachers.
“Within my family we are only allowed to speak Turkish,” says Uyar. “Like, if you told me to speak English with my parents, I would not be able to.”
Uyar watched Turkish soap operas with her mother to improve her Turkish. Meanwhile, when they went out, they would ask Uyar to translate English. It was annoying at times, Uyar says. But, looking back, she says she feels blessed to be bilingual and have a multicultural background.It brings dimension to one’s personality, she says.
“I’m really, really grateful to my parents who put in all that effort.” Uyar says. “They could have just raised me as an American, but they wanted to keep that culture, they wanted to keep that part of our family active, they didn’t want to just end it there.”
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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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