Leaving home for university is always hard, no matter who you are or where you’re from, but for international students living in Asia, who most likely have to travel thousands of miles away from their home and meet new people with varying cultures and ideas, the off-to-college experience is a little different. From things people say to us, to customs we practice, to emotions we are used to feeling, here is a list of 20 things that I’ve experienced as an international student living in Taiwan that I think are relatable to international students from Asia.
We’ve all been lauded for our “excellent English”, and then had to awkwardly explain that the praise is unnecessary because we are (mostly) American and speak English in school and basically everywhere else. In fact, we are more comfortable speaking English than our mother language due to us being exposed to English 9+ hours a day in school year-round. Hearing this sentence is like being congratulated for knowing how to talk.
International schools are home to students whose parents travel a lot for work or other reasons, so the students travel equally as much. The perks of this is that we are trained to make friends quickly because we are so used to the coming and going of people in our lives, and want to cherish the short time we have together, but the downside is that we also lose contact with these friends fairly easily. People are always leaving, so we’ve unconsciously decided to minimize our close contacts to the people we know are here to stay.
This is a bit exaggerated but I do have friends who have been asked whether they rode elephants to school by kids outside our country. Taiwan is not Thailand, and I’m not Thai, but I’m pretty sure kids don’t ride elephants to school there too. Many international students in Asia, specifically, get asked questions like these because Asia is a largely third-world region, and the stereotype is that people here are less civilized than people in first-world countries. Personally, I find these questions funny and don’t take offense to them, but on occasion I do have to get those explanations out of the way when I meet someone new.
We’ve all experienced awkward slip-ups in conversations with people speaking either English or our mother language, where we’d accidentally include a word or two or sometimes a whole sentence in another language before realizing that the other person didn’t understand a thing we just said. Similarly, we’ve all forgotten words in one language and tried to substitute that word with a translation of it in another language, and ended up in an impromptu game of charades, hoping that the other person understood our hand gestures or magically learned Chinese/English.
Although typhoon season = typhoon breaks = a chance to sleep in or go out with friends, it also usually wrecks the entire country. Typhoon Soudelor, the latest major typhoon in 2015 actually made my entire balcony collapse. The destruction was similar in the city, where trees fell in the middle of streets and caused a lot of expensive and inconvenient damages. When I leave for college, I’ll miss these breaks… but I’ll mostly thank God that there are no typhoons in the States.
While most of our customs and manners are influenced by both Western and Asian cultures, we still live in Asia and are more exposed to the culture here, so there are still some Western customs that are so wild to us that we simply can’t accept it. For example, wearing shoes in the house. In the house!! Most American homes have carpeted floors instead of wooden floors. Which is why this particular indoor-shoe-wearing custom baffles me so much — the floors are carpeted. People are tracking dirt and germs all over their soft white carpets!
This one hit a little too close to home; I actually started taking piano lessons when I was 4 years old and after 11 years of lessons, I barely passed the tests I was forced to take to “level up” and am yet to achieve musical-prodigy-status. Almost everyone else I know have taken lessons in either piano or violin since they exited the womb, and no one has become a professional classical musician yet.
Many international students living in Asia, where the culture is completely opposite to that of the US or Europe (where the majority of us end up for university), feel a little out of place in the West, as we are a) clearly Asian, b) fluent in an Asian language, c) familiar with Asian culture, and d) don’t permanently live/go to school in the West, or all of the above. All these factors contribute to us feeling like we aren’t completely a part of the community in West. Even if we were born in those countries and will live there for the rest of our lives. Similarly, because we grew up being mainly exposed to Western culture in our international schools. And rarely have the chance to interact with the locals for an extended time, we don’t feel completely at home in Asia. This results in us having minor identity crises whenever we interact with locals in Asia or in the West, hastily deciding how local or how westernized we should act.
Brands like Stüssy, Off-White, Anti-Social Social Club, and other similar “hype” clothing brands are everywhere in Asia. A lot of international students in Asia wear these brands. They adopt this specific style because it’s trendy and (in my opinion) a status-symbol. One jacket from any of these brands are give-or-take worth both my kidneys and my entire liver. I’m only alive today because my mom won’t let me buy these clothes.
Growing up in such a wonderful community where excellent GPA, test scores, and college destinations is priority #1 is honestly such a blessing! International schools offer such a variety of IB and AP courses that not taking at least six a semester is a real shame. Especially being a student in Asia, where academic excellence is so sought-after… In all seriousness, my school emphasizes mental health over grades. But the students and parents still feel the need to excel in school, which is great and all. But the community’s overall mentality is so focused on numbers and big names that students can get overwhelmed by the stress of maintaining and pursuing such numbers and big names. We often end up fighting to get into AP classes straight out of middle school. And being tricked into taking the IB diploma to ensure we have at least six IB’s a year.
Memorizing how much of your country’s currency is worth one USD/euro is crucial. With the constant traveling between the two countries, international students have to be familiar with the currency rates. So we can make important decisions like whether buying that pair of ankle boots from Nordstrom is really necessary, or if we can get them for a cheaper price back in the motherland.
Because international students have that whole identity crisis thing as aforementioned. The “international school bubble” is basically the only place we feel completely at home. No matter where we are, when we meet another international student from Asia, there’s an instant connection, especially when surrounded by non-international students. This blanket of familiarity is both unwanted and cherished; we want to meet new and different people that are foreign to our community, especially since we’ve spent most of our lives in the same community, but at the same time we mesh so well with others in the bubble and feel so foreign in other communities, since the population of international students/people is so much smaller in the world, that we don’t want to leave.
Living in an Asian country but mainly wearing American-brand clothes is a real first-world problem for international students. We’re too proud for Forever 21 and too cheap for Zara. So that leaves us nowhere to shop from but American stores online. Shipping fees may give any other shopper a stroke; but for international students who refuse to wear a shirt that says “Smile, Happy looks good on you :)”, paying an extra $5-20 is a fair deal.
Because my dream is to live in a country where the economy is not completely failing. Also, I’m American.
Due to the lack of nice shopping centers, amusement parks, and to the fact that we’re not the elderly hikers who love waking up at 5AM to hike up the many mountains here. Us young people must resort to clubbing to have fun. International students in Asia are used to going out and destroying our livers for fun. Especially since the legal drinking age is 18 in many Asian countries. House parties are less popular. We all live in apartments or houses tucked in the mountains where no one visits but the elderly hikers.
To attend an international school, parents of students must first perform the most intense sacrificial ritual – throwing all their money into the school’s cashier office. To be able to do this and not shed a tear every new school year, many international families are loaded. This allows us to have generous friends who are willing to pay for the Moëts that keep being accidentally ordered and popped at the clubs.
This is probably the most specific thing on this list, and the most accurate. Non-international students get the luxury of driving (because they are legal before they graduate, unlike in Asia) to nice beaches or resorts for their senior trips. Because Asian countries are usually boring where we live. And we are not about to take a 9-hour bus ride to get to a place that vaguely resembles a beach. Our senior trips are to nearby islands instead, the most popular being Koh Samui, Thailand. At least one friend group in an international school in Asia have gone to Koh Samui for their senior trip. And the tradition will be preserved.
Stinky tofu. Bubble tea. Fried rice. Food is a little piece of home, so when we miss home, we eat our native food. Usually, we end up with fake Chinese food from Panda Express, making us miss home even more. However, we also eat a lot of Western food. Because, again, we grew up in a largely American/European environment. So there are also times when we can’t help but crave a burger and steak after spending too much time in Asia.
Cram class is basically tradition in Asian households. International students are also sucked into that vortex of torture, courtesy of CollegeBoard’s creation of the SAT. SAT prep season is big in international schools; it occurs during the summer and winter breaks of Junior year, everyday for 6 hours straight. Students sign up for these classes with friends and they suffer together as a group; it’s like a summer camp but minus the fun and plus the emotional and mental distress.
Being an international student in Asia has its ups and downs. When it comes to going away for university, many students are nervous about leaving the community they’ve been in for years. And traveling 5,000 miles away to a brand new place with people who have completely different customs and views. However, we are also excited about finally breaking away from the bubble we’ve been trapped in. And meeting new people with interesting foreign cultures and ideas, and most people we meet are welcoming and respectful of our differences. In the end, international student or not, we are all traveling to a new stage of our lives. And with all things new comes fear and excitement.
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