Speaker 1  2:04
Things that are probably relevant to me when I meet a new person is where I’m from because like they can’t tell from just looking at me. And like I don’t like being assumed where I’m from. I’m from Swaziland.

Speaker 2  2:19
Not a lot of people say anything when they look at me. But as soon as I speak, people ask me, “Where are you from?”

Speaker 3  2:25
They definitely cannot tell that I study video, or what my interests are, or what goes on in my brain.

Speaker 4  2:33
The caste I come from is not something people expect me to be from when they look at me.

Speaker 5  2:40
I don’t think anyone can assume my nationality. That I’m from Kosovo because almost everyone I talk to here, it’s like, “Oh, Kosovo, where is that?”

Speaker 6  2:52
People can’t tell that my favorite food is popcorn. They can’t tell that I was an only child raised by a single mom.

Speaker 7 3:00
Something that people can’t tell about me when they see me is that I am actually very sweet.

Lushik Wahba  3:07
Everyone you heard is an international student at Bennington College, a small liberal arts school in Southern Vermont. For these students, every social interaction on campus is a negotiation -a compromise between self-expression and assimilation. Even something as simple as introducing yourself in this new environment can get pretty complicated.

Speaker  3:31
I feel that the first part of introducing yourself is your name. And I think that the first time in my life at Bennington ever, in my dance class, I introduced myself as [*blank*], which is my full first name. And it was interesting because all these people were playing this game, which is that one person says their name, and then the whole class repeats it. So, it’s like an echo. And then I said my name and then there was like a second of silence. And then everybody was like *makes an awkward noise*. Like they just sort of fumbled through it. But yeah, I think I would like to introduce myself as [*blank*]. And I’m from India. I’m a senior at Bennington College. But yeah, I’ve been using Addie since 10th grade, I guess. But I didn’t realize that it was a problem because I was in my own country, and I am the racial majority. And I don’t necessarily think that there are specific institutions that are set against me specifically in terms of race, or caste. But coming to the US, and actually understanding what it means to be a brown person, but then to also then extend that to my context in India made me think in retrospect as to how that was indeed problematic from the first place to begin with.

Speaker  4:57
I’m [*blank*]. That’s my name which I prefer to go by to other people because it’s more friendly than my full name, which is [*blank*]. It’s not much of a difference, but like it’s more friendly. It definitely is.

Speaker  5:15
I’m [*blank*]. I have gotten used to introducing myself in a particular way after being at Bennington for this long, which is saying, I’m an international student. I would never say that in general to introduce myself. I would say I study political theory and economics and have been inquiring about just ways of living in post-colonial settings for the past couple of years.

Speaker  5:42
My name is [*blank*], I’m from Albania. And I’m an international student on an F1 visa in the US. No! I shouldn’t disclose my visa status publicly, ICE is listening to, like, the channels and the internet. I’m a student in the United States. A student of life because I graduated from college.

Lushik Wahba  6:07
They also have something else in common. All of them attended a United World College or a UWC. UWC is a network of scholarship-based international high schools existing in 17 different countries. When you apply to a UWC, you apply through your home country and if you get selected, you can be sent to any of the 17 schools. Some end up halfway around the world but there are those who do go to UWCs in their own country. The UWC movement aims to make education a force to unite people, nations, and cultures for peace and sustainable futures. For these students, it is not their first time living away from home, or even in another country. But that doesn’t mean that their transition from a social justice-oriented high school to an American liberal arts college has been easy.

Jenny Lee  6:54
We have a little over a million students now studying in the United States. International students in colleges and universities across the country.

Lushik Wahba  7:03
That was Jenny J. Lee, a professor at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona. So, these students have been abroad, or at least in boarding schools since they were 16 or 17. But why did they leave in the first place? A lot of people assume that international students leave their countries seeking upward mobility, which is true for some, but is it always the case?

Speaker  7:28
I come from a very stable financial background. I never felt that there was any lacking in my education, I never felt that anything was lacking in terms of food on the table, or my access to transportation. The one thing that was lacking, I think, is my access to internet and access to technology, which is having access to a computer. A lot of work started happening on computers, specifically schoolwork. That became a barrier for me because I needed to do all these research projects for which a lot of my peers had access to internet and computers at their homes. So, they could do them with ease whereas I would go to an internet cafe, and I would pay 10 rupees an hour to access a computer on which I would have working internet or working browser, and that I could also print things from. I’ve always been aware of my class, I would say, but it was in ways that I didn’t necessarily give credit to. As a kid, I always had this understanding that there were things that other people had, that I had to pretend to have. Because if I said otherwise, I wasn’t really sure if I would be in the same social circles or not. So, for example, being a kid, I remember lying that my family owned a car whereas we didn’t own a car up until 2011, I want to say. So, for 12 years, I lied to my friends that we had a car. I just could not tell them that my father was like riding a Vespa, which is like a scooter. I felt really ashamed. In case I missed the bus, I would ask my father to drop me off a block away so that I could walk to the gate of the school instead of having other students see that I arrived on a scooter that’s like about to break down. Yeah. It’s not his fault. Like I felt ashamed because of the social circumstances that I was in. And I think my father understood that. There was a lot of shame around like my lunchbox. Like I would open my lunchbox and it would be leftovers from dinner the night before. Whereas lunchboxes of other students, or like a lot of my friends would be these like, really nice, pressed sandwiches that were neat and clean and like had a specific smell. Or like I don’t know, not a specific smell, but it wasn’t like curry in a box, you know?

Speaker  10:06
I have a twin sister. She has cerebral palsy that was caused when she was born because of a poorly performed blood transfusion. Like she is 19 years old but, in her head, she’s still 12, or eight years old. So, it’s more of an older sister, younger sister relation. I wanted to run away from my family because it was very complicated for me to see that my life was going in such a way that I was going to have to take care of my sister as soon as I graduated university, or as soon as I started working. So, my whole thing was I want to run away. I don’t want to be here anymore. I wouldn’t go home often, which also made me feel guilty because of my sister. It was weird for her, and it was very complicated for her to understand that I was not living at home but that I was still in Costa Rica.

Speaker  10:57
Going to a better school and having the chance to live abroad, I would have a better life in terms of prospects for my life. Abroad is always just, make money. Not even necessarily better. I think actually, a lot of people talk about like how it’s worse because you miss your people and you miss your placedness and your land in many ways, and you also miss your childhood. So, you feel like you can vicariously. Home becomes a magical inexistent oasis of at least feeling right. At least feeling like you have the right to be there. You have the right to exist there. But abroad is always make money. I think there’s no two ways about it. Like even the people that always talk about like, “a better life”. A better life because you can make money. It’s not about like making more money. It’s about literally about making money. Like I was on a mission to go abroad. And once you have left the country, you can find ways to just piggy around the world.

Lushik Wahba  12:01
I was also on a mission to go abroad. I don’t know when it started. But from a young age, I had this dream of living somewhere else where life was just better. There was no clear path to achieving this dream, but I believed in it so deeply. And as I grew up, I realized that it wasn’t my dream alone. You see, this dream is the American Dream, the dream that we could achieve great things regardless of our race, or class, or religion, or anything else that held us back. And even though it was the American dream, it can be achieved in any Western country which we expected would welcome us with open arms once we finally made it there. But as we all know, dreams can be very far from reality.

Speaker  12:48
I arrived in New York, I get a cab and go to the bus station. And just like on the way to the bus station, there’s so many homeless people. And I was like, wow, this is New York? This is the capital of the world? There’s so much, like, inequality. I honestly didn’t expect it. They’re so lucky that you can’t capture a smell on film because I don’t think New York would have like the same kind of like image it has now.

Speaker 13:10
I thought I was going to get to Bergen, which is where the airport is and I would kiss the floor. I think I imagined gold. I imagined that the airport was like draped in gold. But then I got to this airport and it was very dirty. The floor was far from kissing material. Very far. I did not know what I was doing there. I was in shock. Like I was in complete shock. And I think it’s mostly because I felt poor as fuck. I felt very poor. And I had no idea how I was going to like, make it here. I was alone. Like I didn’t have parents to send me money. Like I just felt very alone. It’s like my dad just died and my entire life was in turmoil and Albania had no prospects. And especially us in Albania had no prospects or in the world at that time.

Speaker  13:59
I used to be really effeminate as a boy. And no matter what I did, it’s not like I could pass as like, the idea of like a straight male. So, I remember me trying to use the internet -also like going to these internet cafes to figure out who I am. So this time of like 2008-2009 going all the way until like 2013 also coincides with this whole time in the US of this whole rhetoric of like, born this way; it’s not a choice; I can’t change who I am. So, I definitely consumed this media that was all about, “gay liberation” for me because I related to it. I was like, yeah, like, it’s not my choice. Like stop treating me this way. But what that led me to believe is that somehow gay liberation was also related to whiteness, or that it was also related to like a Western ideal, or that it was somehow only existing in the US. But it was a direct effect of the media that I was consuming constantly. Of all these coming out stories. Like, I don’t have coming out stories in India, you know? Like where does like a 13-year-old gay boy in India go to find coming out stories? When you Google coming out stories, you get these YouTube videos, or you get these blog articles or blog posts, or you have your Human Rights Campaign pushing coming out stories or National Coming Out Day. It was such a horror to me. I was like, how are these people coming out? I just had no idea. So, I didn’t necessarily associate UWC as a space where I could just be myself. But I associated it as a place where there would be foreigners who were not Indian and then therefore, it would be a safer space for me. Because all the media that I’ve consumed had shown white people being tolerant towards homosexuality. I really wanted my gay liberation. Yeah. I just really wanted a boyfriend. I thought that I would find a boyfriend if I were to attend this school.

Speaker  16:09
I realized just how many places I couldn’t go with an Indian passport. The more I’m learning about the world, the more I’m realizing I can enter Serbia, I can enter Ukraine with an Indian passport apparently. But it was also this understanding that with a US visa, I could go to so many different places, just with the student US visa.

Speaker  16:26
Maybe a possible expectation that I kind of experienced would have been like, I wish the people here would be more like people centered. I just expected everyone to be, like, friendly. I mean, they were friendly. It’s just that they were friendly when you approach them rather than like mutual acknowledging of each other. Like if you see someone it felt like you had to mechanically start a conversation rather than flow into. Like, meet someone and you start talking to them. So, it kind of felt like you had to like to insert yourself in someone’s personal space for them to make a real conversation with you. And that was definitely difficult. I kind of just resorted to stay in my room more, just attending class, then going to my room. Like my whole routine was just going to class, back to my room, going to class back to my room, and stay in my room when I don’t have to be in class. Because I just felt like I was walking outside and no one was really interested in knowing who was next to them.

Lushik Wahba  17:32
What happens after you finally made it to these countries, and there is no dream to be had. Well, you start asking questions about where the dream came from in the first place. You start looking back and tracing the facts. What did I learn? And where did it come from? So, you look into the history you’ve been taught. And that’s when things begin to unravel.

Speaker  17:54
I realized so many myths I had been educated, the biggest one being colonization. I genuinely learned of colonization in school as the exchange of two cultures, when the Spanish came and gave us technology. That is really how I learned about it with those words, in that way. And they would be like “Yeah, and there was a lot of war. So, a lot of people died”. But it wasn’t like these people took over the space, interrupted these communities, mass murdered, enslaved. It wasn’t taught to me that way. It was not that someone denied that there was a lot of deaths but it was more about like, they brought the Catholic values, and they brought salvation, and they brought all this technology and then suddenly the country was so much more productive. And that was the jargon, with which I learned it. So, learning history was incredibly life changing. That really was the first moment I realized how colonial my education had been.

Speaker  18:47
I’ve never expected governments to, like, blatantly lie in a textbook, you know? But then I think the way Indian history textbooks do it is a lot more subtle. Like they’ll miss out swaths of information. And we have a very specific viewpoint on the British. We always talk about them as bringing railroads to India. So, yes, like, we didn’t have self-determination. So, what? They gave us railroads, they give us industry, they like advanced us, blah, blah, blah. They gave us educational institutions. But in India, you never talk about the atrocities. The Indian freedom struggle to this point, students think it is a peace struggle, you know, which is the greatest lie that you could ever tell someone. So many people died. No one talks about, specifically, the effect on like indigenous communities in India. Yeah, just like swaths of information that I think is important is missing. So, the way history is taught in India is not necessarily by, like, twisting facts, it’s more by omitting things. Whereas I was surprised that in some of my friends’ textbooks there were blatant lies, which is not something that I expected.

Speaker  20:02
In school, we are taught that we were the victims, which is true. Nobody can deny that unless you’re a fascist. There was an ethnic cleansing, which is just like a euphemism for like attempted genocide, whatever, and all that. But it was way less centrists. So, when I went to UWC, it was very centrist. You know, it was like, “Oh, yes. There was an aggression by the Yugoslav army, by the Serbs. However, there was also the guerrillas from the Albanian side, who were sometimes killing civilians. And to me, that was outrageous, because yes, of course, that is true. I do not deny that. And we didn’t learn that in school. But why do you focus on that, you know. You cannot like -it was a class war. It was like the side that held all the power, and the lower classes were seen as scum. They were racialized for like 30 years. And then a literal attempted genocide started to happen. There are mass graves that are still being discovered from time to time and all that. So, yeah, I found that in UWC outrageous, like the absolute need to be centrist and to hear both sides of the story. I was alive during the war, my mom was pregnant, I was three years old, I think. And we had to leave her house because an ethnic cleansing was happening. I know that one of the times -like the first time. So, we had this truck and in the back of the truck, a shit ton of people had to go in, and that’s how they would get transported away. And I know that my grandma and my aunt were there, and my mom was holding me in order to push me into the back of the truck thing. And as soon as my aunt and grandma grabbed me, my mom fainted in front of my face. And there were like a shit ton of people surrounding her and all that and then the truck just leaves. It was like the biggest prank ever pulled on me. I get so pissed off if somebody calls me white passing in the US. You’re denying my whole people’s history.

Jenny Lee  22:19
When an international student is stereotyped or targeted by their peers, or administrators, or faculty, this is not necessarily because they’re racist. It may be a form of neo-racism, where there’s a sense of cultural or national superiority that is used to justify a mistreatment of those outside of one’s nation state or culture or nation. And so, that’s basically what neo-racism is. It doesn’t mask biological racism but is used to justify, in this globalizing world, a hierarchy of countries and cultures where some are favored more than others. And that’s also why I don’t really buy into just blanket xenophobia where all immigrants are just not welcomed. That is certainly not the case. And I think neo-racism adds some more nuance to it and such as suggesting there’s a global order of cultures that goes beyond race and thinking beyond the color of one’s skin, that has to do with how certain countries are positioned in relation to the United States.

Speaker  23:22
With the simple fact that a lot of the classes here are absolutely American-centric, even when they’re supposed to be talking about international matters. Everything here, any conversation goes back to “Oh, but the amendments in the US…and I’m like, I don’t know the amendments of your country. I’m completely unfamiliarized with this but I do understand that there’s also that feeling on behalf of the American students. Because a lot of the international students we tend to refer to a lot of like treaties, and particularly in politics, but we refer to a lot of like treaties or a lot of situations and we can compare the situation in the United States with other countries. But I feel discriminated against because I have to adapt to the American students. But the American students cannot adapt to me.

Speaker  24:06
I got a lot of interesting questions about India. Do we have a prime minister? Is it true we actually speak that many different languages across India? Why do we like spicy food? That one I’ve gotten? Do I like the railways? Is one. Do I like the railways? Just and I’m like yes, because I love the concept of railways. I don’t know what they expect me to say.

Speaker  24:28
The perception of Costa Rica that I encountered here was, where is it? What is it? It’s an island? It doesn’t have a military? It is only a country for tourism? It’s where all the Americans go and retire? So we don’t have an identity. We are just the retirement home for all expats. You don’t look Costa Rican. That was one of the comments and I was like, how does a Costa Rican look like? Tell me about it, you know? Exotic. That word -oof. I always link exotic to inferior. Or like exotic to incomprehensible, or exotic to barbaric even. I think that I don’t know why but I always make those connections and I hate it.

Jenny Lee  25:07
International students have reported that they are being stereotyped in class, even by faculty, not just by peers, and sometimes administrators as well. But assumptions being made about them being in a so-called third world country, sometimes they’re excluded. There are policies in place where they can’t work above a particular number of hours. They can’t work full time on a student visa. But not only that but also not having the same kind of opportunities when it comes to being a teaching assistant maybe because of their foreign accent. There are actually programs in universities that help students get rid of particular types of foreign accents. In regard to enrollment, we’re not seeing US universities trying to get students from the UK or Australia. And so, we’re targeting students from India, from emerging economies, China, of course. I have yet to come across a white international student from the UK, Canada, Australia, Western Europe, who complained about ways that they were discriminated against negatively -maybe positively but negatively- based on their country of origin. Very unlike the experiences of international students from Asia, from Africa, from Latin America.

Speaker  26:21
For me, it’s always a question of why do they give these scholarships to people? Like, what’s in it for them? Like, why do they want people to come here from other countries and study? And I think that experience is also someone from a developing country going to Canada or US for a UWC experience or college, I think. It is definitely introducing people to an ideology and then introducing them to its material ways of living.

Speaker 26:52
The interesting thing, to me, is why the new empires that are becoming increasingly restrictionary in terms of immigration, why are they so open to students? And you see it with Canada. Canada is kind of closing down towards immigrants but it’s opening up to international students. The same with Ireland. Ireland is opening up to international students. Australia and New Zealand, they’re trying to attract a lot of them. So, I think it’s curious, why do they not want -well, first of all, you start with the refugees. Why do they not want regular workers, trade workers, manual workers to come from Turkey and all these other places, and Albania and Bosnia and Poland but they’re so welcoming of students? -at least for a period of time. And they provide new paths to naturalization. You know, it’s only through studying or marrying that you have paths to naturalization.

Jenny Lee  27:42
International students in the United States bring in about $42 billion to the US economy. International education is considered an export considering the funding that international students and their families bring in through tuition, room and board, other expenses. This is all data collected by the US Department of Commerce. But in addition, international students support over 450,000 jobs in the United States. International students certainly contribute to the value of our institutional diversity, promoting our intellectual conversations in class, cultural, social, political exchanges. They bring international perspectives to US classrooms. I think any US professor can vouch for the added value that international students bring into their conversations. And of key rationale is promoting political goodwill. The US being well-known for its high-quality education, attracts global leaders who we’re basically training, providing high quality education, but also promoting American values such as democracy and academic freedom. So, most of the rationales that we read about in the news has to do with the economic benefits but there’s certainly many other intangibles.

Speaker  28:58
Studying, first of all, if you take it from the perspective of -and again, we have a lot of countries that are doing this Canada, Ireland- but take it from the perspective of the US that is sort of a pioneer in international students. Studying exposes you to the culture. In effect, it’s going to make you more acclimated and accultured to, used to American culture. The signs, the symbols, the soft skills that you need to communicate with Americans and within America. So, there’s two paths. You try to stay in the US in one way or another, or you go back home. Those are both beneficial. If you go back home, you’re kind of a living ambassador. Even if you talk shit about the place you came from, you are kind of a living ambassador in many ways. I think the education game is also a long game. So, it’s also about like the future -constructing a future with these places. So, if you have a lot of, say, Albanians going back to Albania and starting to work et cetera, they’re going to make connections with who? American businesses or Irish businesses or like et cetera, et cetera. Like Irish people, they have certain contracts, they have certain understanding of both the culture and the way things move there. So, that’s a win. If you decide to stay, the other way, then you’re a naturalized foreigner, and naturalized foreigners are the most dedicated people. Because you always have something to prove. You can fit in but never perfectly. You’re like a slightly defective Lego. And when you have something to prove, you’re more dedicated.

Speaker  30:30
I definitely am in a position of privilege from getting a liberal arts education going to UWC. That is completely true. In an ideal world, people wouldn’t feel like they have to leave their countries in order to get a better education. I imagine a whole world where I would be happy back home. I would be like, “Oh, I can get a good education here. I have all my friends here. I’m quite happy”. I wouldn’t need to go to UWC.

Speaker  30:55
Education would not be such a private, commodified resource that is used for further privatization and to sort of proliferate some types of ways of living more than the other.

Lushik Wahba  31:09
On a student visa in the United States, you are a temporary migrant. And the assumption is that once you get your degree, it’s time to go back home. But what is home anymore?

Speaker  31:20
When you’re poor, I don’t feel like you ever really feel like home. You can move at any time.

Speaker  31:25
I did not go home. I got an eyebrow piercing and then two weeks later, my dad sends me this really dramatic message. It’s like, “I’m sick, like I’m about to, like, die or something”. And then I’m like, “Fine. I’ll get on a plane. I’ll come home”. And I’m standing -I remember this moment so clearly. Standing outside my door and just having this thought, do I want to give him a second heart attack by having him see that I have both my ears pierced and I have an eyebrow piercing. So, I remember like unscrewing the bolt and then like taking out my piercings and then just like slowly ringing the bell. Then to find out that he was fine. He was just emotionally blackmailing me to come home.

Speaker  32:07
Home still felt like home in a million ways. But it was the reverse culture shock that happens. I think it’s that first time when you go back home, it was for me, incredibly intense. And not finding myself in the spaces, not finding myself in my friends, seeing their faces and almost not recognizing them was very difficult. Also seeing how my country had changed. Venezuela was like entering fast crisis more. So, every time you went, even if only a year had passed, it would be very different. And I always felt like a marriage of my two selves. Someone who I had been my whole life and was kind of destroyed by the person I became when I went to UWC and now having to see how both of them could live in my body. Because in this place, I had the history of one but more recently, I had the history of another and, in some ways, believed more in that second UWC person had become. So, marrying both of them was incredibly important for me to grow up into adult.

Lushik Wahba  33:02
These students come to the end of their college experiences with no home to go back to, but they are not wanted by their host country either. A country where they have grown up, learned about themselves and the world, found lifelong friends and even fell in love. Calling them cosmopolitan fails to capture the displacement they often feel. So, I asked them: How do you find a place to belong? If you could imagine a place, what would it look like?

Speaker  33:34
I think cosmopolitanism is a way of sort of being or having a way of accepting that you can be tolerant of many ideologies, and many ways of living, and sort of like it gets treated as this melting pot of exciting cultures. It takes away the various central power dynamics that exists between all of the actors acting in a particular realm, which is why I don’t like that terminology. Which is why I would never call myself a global anything. Or even, for that matter, like a sense of belonging, I think, for me is very dangerous territory-wise, nationalism-wise, and I try not to ascribe to it. I don’t believe nation states as we understand them today should necessarily exist the way they do. I don’t believe in a type of nationalism. And I don’t think I fit in. I don’t think there is a place where I feel like I truly, truly sort of belong and enjoy. I think there are certain people I love dearly and when I’m with them, there are fleeting moments of, like, bliss, where I think I’m happy and I belong in that moment, like temporarily with that person or those people, but then it’s gone. Like it’s less of a place. Rather than having identifiers like territorially based, it would definitely be the understanding of like shared means of living. I know a very strong emphasis on communal living, sharing means of production, etc. But I think it’s difficult for me to even imagine an imagined community today. Like it’s difficult out of the very little spaces we have left. I think a positive definition of community comes from understanding how one forges relationships with other people when there are no necessary restrictions or impositions in the way that one is to interact with another.

Speaker  35:28
The ideal community is one I’ve not constructed. One that just exists, and I find ways to become a member of it. I don’t know. I really don’t like the idea of curating a community. You do it every day, right? When you choose what people you surround yourself with. But the idea of doing it with a certain intention feels very classist to me. I think I like the idea of having parts of me that belong and represent themselves in any group I inhabit and parts that don’t. And parts that adapt and some that fight each other with resistance. I’m a lot more comfortable with that. I find it very classist to think I have to like in any way actively have some criteria to discriminate. I think, for me, it’s a lot more based on a different kind of sensation, intuition, which is not articulable in this setting.

Speaker  36:14
I do not know what my imagined community is. But if I had to choose an imagined community, I would choose like the Latin American community in general. Just the Latin American countries in general. That is where I would belong. And it would be a community -Damn, it’s going to sound very bad, but where Spanish is spoken. And of course, it is absolutely biased because I can express myself better in Spanish than I can do in English. I really do realize that the Costa Rican culture itself, of that non-military -I hate that phrase, but that “pura vida” kind of thing. I always say it for everything. It’s just like, everything is fine. And if everything’s not fine now, it will be fine later. So, that sense of things happen, they happen for a reason, and you’ll be alive after them. That is the community that I want to belong to.

Lushik Wahba  37:05
Thank you to [*blank*] for sharing your stories with me. Thank you to Jenny J. Lee for letting me use her interview which was originally aired on FreshEd. Thank you to Burcu Seyben for making this project possible. And thank you to Tom Loubet for guiding me in crafting the story. I’m Lushik Wahba, thank you for listening