This is a continuation of my family’s immigration story originally written by my dad in Chinese. For more of my dad’s narrative see the category marked Fifteen Years in America. If you can read Chinese you can read the original at my dad’s Yahoo blog. He has just finished Chapter 8. Enjoy!
When I meet students from China these days, most of them are financed by their families, and almost none of them work in restaurants now. Near my house there is a Chinese restaurant that I visit quite often. In the end of the last century I could still meet a few students from China working there, but lately there are no longer any Chinese students. Instead, all the workers are either Mexican or Chinese immigrants not here for school. When I think about this I think Chinese parents should learn from the Americans and let their children work in addition to going to school. My daughter started a blog a month after reading my blog. Her main goal is to educate her generation and popularize the idea of living beneath one’s means. In about two months she wrote about sixty blog posts and one particular post is titled, How I Saved Over $30,000 While in College and What I Did With the Money. Those of you young people who can read English might as well head over and read her post.
She wrote about how she used different methods such as working at school, contracting, selling books, and entering sweepstakes to earn money. I am very glad that she inherited the Chinese traditions of diligence and frugality. At the same time she learned a lot from the Americans. For example, she donates a good amount of her income and volunteers. I thought to myself, when we were in Hawaii we experienced quite a bit from working in America, and the hardships of that time is quite worthwhile.
In January of 1993, I became a full time student at Kapiolani, so I no longer had time to work at Duke’s Lane. On my first day at school, I went to the library to borrow books and I passed by the student cafeteria. At the door of the cafeteria I saw a wanted ad that read, “The cafeteria needs three student workers to help the chefs prepare lunch. The pay is $6.75 per hour and lunch is free.”
When I saw this ad I was quite happy, because I figured that I can solve my problem of losing my job and spending money for tuition. This job has fairly flexible hours and I can work there for two hours after my morning classes and also get a free meal. I no longer needed to pack lunch, and this was awesome. Packing lunch may seem like a joke to modern day international students, but at that time I remember we would always spend three dollars to buy a 10 pound pack of chicken drumsticks. After we cook it with soy sauce, we would make chicken sandwiches with some bread and tomatoes. We ate like this for several years. After that, I didn’t want to touch chicken drumsticks anymore because I have eaten way too many of them.
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5 comments ↓
This is true that more and more family in China are wealthy enough to support their children to study abroad. However, I don’t think see Chinese international students working in a restaurant is a good thing, regardless what the reason might be. First of all, it is illegal for international students with F-1 visa to work off-campus and majority of international students from China are on F-1 visa. I think that it is good to see that much fewer Chinese students work illegally in the states. Second, I have read somewhere before that it is much easier for reasonably smart Chinese students to obtain scholarship or fellowship in universities nowadays. Third, we have more and more “schools” and “agencies” in China helping students applying for US universities and financial aids. Forth, I do observe that there are more Chinese students come to US to pursue bachelor degree, which offer less opportunities for research-based fellowship or scholarship. Quite a few of them are solely sponsored by their family in China. However, I also observed that undergraduate international students from China are much more smarter at getting funding or jobs on campus and make their own living legally. I think that this is because the change of our culture and quick adaption to new culture among younger international students. In general, I think that seeing less Chinese students working in restaurant illegally is not a bad thing at all. However, I cannot deny that there are a lot of Chinese students are living on their family’s support from China.
To work in student cafiteria is on campus job, which is totally legal. Any international student can apply for such kind of job on campus. Besides, a F-1 student can work out of campus as long as the student gets a work permit. Usually if a student does not have any income, he can get a work permit. That is about more than 15 years ago.
Now most Chinese students do not need to do it any more–their families have money to support them.
Yup, working on campus is completely legal, and a work permit is attainable if the student can prove that he or she needs the income. So I wouldn’t say that the students working in restaurants are illegally working. What my dad means is that young people should learn to work on their own and not depend on their families so much.
[…] Baglady’s dad writes the latest segment about his first years in the U.S. We can learn so much about frugality from […]
[…] Continued from Part 1Â […]
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