Cultural Crossroads: Chinese Students’ Navigation of Class Mobility in American Higher Education

• In Event: 50260 - Section on Asia and Asian America Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 1: Belonging, Mobility, and Racialization in Transnational Asian Contexts

Abstract

This study examines how Chinese international students navigate uncertainty in their social class mobility experiences while studying in the United States. Through 10-months of ethnographic observation and longitudinal in-depth interviews, I explore how these students encounter, interpret, and manage the ambiguity associated with transnational class mobility. The research uncovers multiple challenges students face: difficulties interpreting their class position in an unfamiliar cultural context, unrealistic expectations created by temporary upward mobility, and potential alienation from their original class status upon return home. Upper-middle-class students experience a distinctive "middle position" dilemma - caught between the security of their home position and the potential for upward mobility in a foreign context. This manifests in difficult choices between settling for familiar but potentially unfulfilling paths versus pursuing less certain but potentially more rewarding opportunities abroad. The study demonstrates that transnational class mobility involves complex cultural negotiations between institutional fields, temporal experiences, and family influences that reproduce or challenge existing hierarchies. By tracking the evolution from outsiders' initial perceptions to growing-insiders' experiences of American social class, this research illuminates how transnational mobility both challenges existing understandings of class boundaries and reinforces their significance. This perspective offers crucial insights into how transnational class mobility experiences shape both individuals' strategic navigation of uncertain class positions and reconstruct the very meanings and boundaries of social class itself.

Author

• Yujin Tao, University of Wisconsin-Madison