Following in the footsteps of Vanessa Fong's book Paradise Redefined (2011), in Ambitious and Anxious Yingyi Ma describes the experiences of Chinese students who attended college in the United States in the 2010s. She argues that Chinese students’ desire for American college education is rooted in the increasing affluence of Chinese nationals and their movement from the periphery to the centre of transnational privilege. However, Ma highlights the relative loss of social status and cultural capital for many Chinese students after arriving in the United States. Some are caught amidst the cultural clashes between China and the US, which leads to tensions with parents and further fuels their anxiety. Others find ways to succeed. She paints a complex picture of these students as both ambitious and anxious, privileged and diverse, insecure and competent for a variety of reasons that have to do both with their formation in the Chinese educational system, their classed family backgrounds and sometimes also their specific personalities and forms of personal transformation. Drawing mainly on sociology, political science, cultural studies and to some degree anthropology, she manages to balance both the insights derived from macro data enabling certain generalizations without losing sight of the intricate differences within individual biographies.
When Ma uncritically quotes Geert Hofstede and Gert Jan Hofstede's much-cited work on the divide between Western individualism and Eastern collectivism, I immediately became suspicious. But as the book progresses, she in fact moves beyond and behind such cultural stereotypes by analysing some of the paradoxes at play in this cultural encounter. For example, she argues that while many Chinese students themselves emphasize a major cultural difference between the Chinese educational system's reliance on test-taking and rote-learning, as opposed to the American emphasis on creativity and critical thinking, this dualism cannot in fact stand alone. Chinese students often consider American education to be better than Chinese education for cultivating creativity and critical thinking. However, she argues that while these words are closely related and used interchangeably, on a closer examination, “creativity is an end, and critical thinking provides the means to achieve that end” (p. 85). For instance, even though many Chinese students lashed out against their prior education in China as stifling their creativity, they at the same time felt grateful for their solid foundation in technical skills, which paved the way for technical innovations.
Another interesting argument is what she calls a paradoxical attitude towards effort in Chinese and US education: the Chinese believe effort drives learning, while Americans believe talent drives learning. However, the Chinese educational system does not give people as many second-chance opportunities as the American system does. This, she argues, is mirrored in the American context where “math is a killer of confidence” (p. 97). As a result, a cultural anxiety in the US revolves around the concern that American science is in decline and may be taken over by Chinese youth, who are taught to work hard and to valorize math: “an old Chinese saying goes: ‘Mastering math, physics and chemistry, you are fearless wherever you go’” (p. 99). Some Chinese students take advantage of this situation, since they can get jobs more easily in a math-intensive field in the US than in a humanities-related field. Meanwhile, some Chinese students experience a sense of loss and bewilderment in the US, and this is aggravated if their American college is located in a small town or rural area, since the new wave of Chinese students almost all come from large cosmopolitan cities. Just as highlighted by Vanessa Fong ten years ago, for many Chinese students “paradise is redefined.”
Another quandary faced by Chinese students is the American cultural norms of being assertive and speaking in public, which clashes with their deep reluctance to speak before thinking. Ma explains the reticence of many Chinese students in the classroom as being rooted in Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism, where actions speak louder than words. Chinese students are often unprepared for the American tradition of oral eloquence and they are afraid of making mistakes and feel disoriented by open-ended discussions. On another level, Ma questions the idea that American education has become a form of soft power. She concludes that while some students describe personal transformations along the lines of changing from being passive to proactive and from being obedient to rebellious, paradoxically Chinese students also learn to think for themselves and this also sometimes means that their attitudes toward the United States changed from a romanticized perception to a more critical one. Her survey shows that over 60 per cent of Chinese students intend to return to China after graduation. And the increasingly unfriendly attitude of the Trump administration towards immigrants and foreigners – in particular the labelling of Chinese students as spies and a national security threat – has had a chilling effect on Chinese international students’ perception of their prospects in America.
Ma skilfully combines in-depth interviews and data derived from quantitative surveys in a nuanced work that makes a significant contribution to the field of China studies and the sociology/anthropology of education. Furthermore, the final chapter has clear policy implications. Her compelling account of what it is like to come of age in the two most powerful countries in the world can be seen as a window to the broader cultural anxieties that are at the heart of today's changing global landscape.
