By Hyun “Cora” Jung
For the Murphy News Service
On a sunny Minnesota Friday afternoon during the just-ended spring semester, Esther Yang was about to go her Japanese class. Yang is a tall young woman with a great smile. She wore a white sweater and red comfy sweat pants. She complained that her hair was not dry yet.
“But it’s pretty warm outside today, so my hair won’t be frozen,” Yang said.
Studying abroad at the University of Minnesota from China, Yang is a sophomore majoring in economics, one of more than 6,000 international students at the U.
With her great love of South Korean K-pop and K-drama, she said she already registered for a Korean language class for this fall. She lives in Centennial, one of residential dorms, and she and a friend had lunch together at the crowded Centennial dining hall before she went to her Japanese class.
“I usually eat lunch alone,” Yang said as she wiped out her mouth with a napkin. “I know a few Chinese girls living next door, but I am not a friend with any of American students living here and don’t have any close American friends on campus.”
A survey conducted among international students for this story showed that 38 percent don’t have any American friends and 13 percent reported they have but one to three American friends.
A similar survey conducted among American students reported 40 percent don’t have any international friends, and 20 percent have just one to three international friends.
Easy to find are international students clustering by themselves, speaking in their native languages, as American students form groups among themselves. An invisible wall seems to exist between the two factions that just don’t seem to interact all that much.
Barbara Kappler, assistant dean at the U’s International Student and Scholar Services (ISSS), has seen the phenomenon first-hand.
“It is the case that it can be pretty isolating for international students. They are motivated to come to the U.S. and to be meeting with another people from the United States, but it can be hard for students to integrate.” Kappler said. She has worked at the ISSS for more than 20 years.
“It continues to be a theme on campuses, not just U of M, but everywhere,” Kappler added.
The university has acknowledged the problem and tried to solve it by offering events and programs at which people of different backgrounds can interact with each other.
One program creates cross-cultural discussion groups where international and domestic students gather in small clusters to discuss their cross-cultural experiences and perspectives.
Kappler said group facilitators bring questions from their own experiences but students also come up with the topics that are of interest to the rest of the group such as “I think I’m fluent in English but Americans seem to have hard time understanding me,” or “My American peers are so competitive in the classroom so they don’t form study groups.”
“A lot of it is about understanding cross-cultural differences,” Kappler said.
Kappler said there are also “get-to-know-you” types of activities as part of Small World Coffee Hours, events the ISSS runs for all international and domestic students, faculty and staff to gather in a relaxing social environment.
She said people are randomly assigned to groups and they have to answer very specific geographic types of questions. For example, people are shown a durian fruit, native to Southeast Asia, and have to guess what it is. She said the more diverse the group is, the higher the probability the group will come up with the correct answers.
“Not everybody in a world has seen a durian,” Kappler said.
Kappler said the U has looks for successful programs on other campuses to adopt here.
Despite the U’s efforts to reduce the gap between American and international students, its efforts don’t seem to appeal to Esther Yang.
Yang’s definition of education is teaching people to respect others even though they are not fluent in English. She said the U teaches people to be respectful to others but doesn’t teach them to care about others or to listen more patiently.
“Most people are busy and don’t pay a lot of attention to other people,” Yang said.
She said she had expected to make more American friends when she came to the U.S.
“If American friends want to be a friend of me, I will be glad,” she said. “But it’s harder to be a friend with them than I imagined, so I decided not to push myself to get close to them.”
Sociology sophomore Perrin Jackson of St. Paul said domestic students know that international students want to get to know them, but most likely they don’t care about it that much.
“As Americans, we’ve been so conditioned by culture and all kinds of media, just thinking about America and thinking we are the center of the world,” Jackson said. “I think a lot of domestic students don’t stop to think that ‘Maybe these international students want to get to know us,’ or ‘Maybe they are not being able to get in the circle,’ but they are not making any efforts to make their circles a place that is welcoming to international students.”
Kappler said American students should try to be more welcoming and the university will continue to ask Americans to be better hosts.
“We can encourage people to say hi and ask people how they are doing on campus,” Kappler said. “That doesn’t always get to friendship. But for many international students, if they were seeing people reach out to them, I think the reciprocity is much easier.”
Kappler said there is a lot of pressure for international students to be the one to initiate conversation, especially in a classroom.
Yang said her biggest problem is language. She said she is afraid of talking with American students because her listening and speaking skills are not very good.
“I am not as fluent as them so I don’t want to interrupt their conversation,” Yang said. “I hate group projects. During most group discussion times I don’t talk at all.”
Yang said an astronomy class she took last semester was “the most horrible mistake” she has ever made.
“There were two Caucasian guys in my discussion group, and they talked and talked and talked with each other, and I was sitting there saying nothing, but feeling so isolated.”
Yang said she actually wants to be a part of groups and contribute to projects.
“I want to be helpful, but sitting there and feeling not helpful really frustrates me,” Yang said. “It’s very hard to get into their conversation. I can only slowly say something once everybody becomes quiet.”
She said her favorite class is her Japanese language course.
“I feel more confident in Japanese class because I don’t have to speak in English and everybody should speak in Japanese,” Yang said. “I talk more in this class.”
Kappler said even though international students have the language competency to study in the U.S., they lose confidence once they get into the English-speaking environment.
“For groups of five people, I talk, you talk and another person talks. The ideas don’t have to be related to each other so topics change very quickly,” Kappler said. “This way of talking in groups is not the same as other places. People talk over the ends of the sentences. So there is not a really significant pause between speakers.”
Kappler said international students should make the effort to study more to improve their English-speaking skills, adding that American students could try to better understand English spoken by students from other countries.
“It is a skill to listen to accented English,” she said. “This is a skill we all need to develop and I believe this skill should be encouraged.”
Kappler said the best strategy to improve the language problem is encouraging international students to not to overestimate how many native English speakers judge them negatively.
“It’s perception. It is how I perceive myself speaking English,” Kappler said. “A lot of people have a good ear for accented English,”
Underpinning Kappler’s opinion, the survey taken for this story showed that only 4 percent of surveyed American students pointed out the reason why they have no – or very few – international friends are language difference.
It suggests that American students don’t think language difference can be a big problem for them to communicate. Ten percent of the American students surveyed, the biggest portion, answered that not many of international students live nearby.
Jackson said what really matters is not about fluent English, but about things they commonly share.
“That’s the common ground that pushes me to get to know people most regardless of where you come from,” Jackson said.
Jackson talked about her roommates in her freshman year.
“One was from Minnesota, one was from Spain and the other one was from Brazil,” Jackson said. “Because I grew up going to a school that was in Spanish, the fact that they are Hispanic is a lot easier for me (to get close to them). So being able to have that thing in common with them was something that helped me to actually reach out get to know them more.”
Jackson said when she had a Chinese roommate she didn’t spend too much time with her.
“She is the only child, and I have five sisters,” Jackson said. “I mean, really, there was really nothing we had in common. We have completely different experiences, languages and values. This is a really big cultural divide. When there is no common denominator, then it’s harder for me. I’m not putting in too much effort to get to know them.”
She said the problem is more about cultural difference than language problem.
“It is just about who we are too,” she added. “There is no common ground other than the fact that we both go to the University of Minnesota, but that was not enough.”
Kappler said some students are afraid they don’t have something in common.
“They imagine the differences to be huge because they are told all these cultural differences,” Kappler said.
Yang said if she is given a chance to talk with American friends for a long time outside of class, it would be easier for her to get close to and be friends with them.
Kappler said instructors can play a role in getting students interacting in more than superficial ways.
“The instructors can say, ‘Oh I will get my PowerPoint ready, so please turn to your neighbor and share something you like about the university,’” Kappler said. “Some faculty do it naturally, having people work in groups that are the same group for a long time.”
Kappler said in her class she tends to form a group, form a new group, and form another new group. She said this allows students to meet a lot of different people.
Kappler advised finding something common to talk about, hobbies or something about the class is helpful.
“Take the effort to do that mental work of thinking what might this person have in common with me and talking about that,” she said.
“We are right there next to each other, but we are not talking,” Kappler added.
Cora Jung is studying journalism at the University of Minnesota.