Siqi Tu (Alum) 

Siqi’s research was featured in Sixth Tone: Dropping in on China’s ‘Parachute Generation’

 

The summer Zhang Lingli turned 14, she left her family in the southern city of Guangzhou behind and began a new life at a private high school in Virginia.

It didn’t go according to plan. Zhang — to protect the identities of my research participants, I have given them all pseudonyms — quickly found that making friends with Americans was not as easy as she’d hoped, and that she had no interest in the parties or American football games enjoyed by her classmates. The scope of her social life soon shrunk to the classroom, dorm, and canteen, broken up by the occasional jailbreak-like trip with her Chinese friends to New York City for bubble tea and manicures.

From 2005 to 2015, the number of Chinese teens attending American high schools soared, from 637 to over 46,000 a year. In the United States, they’re sometimes referred to as “parachute kids,” separated from their parents, and dropped by plane onto unfamiliar territory.

Read more: http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006184/dropping-in-on-chinas-parachute-generation