It involves feeling isolated, lonely and marginalised [ 4.15 ]

Isolation, loneliness and even marginalisation emerged as a significant and omnipresent feature of these participants’ lives in the UK. This was a troubling finding, although not unexpected: Chinese students are

often peripheral to life on campus (Cheng et al., 2018). Although more, and more frequent, contact between international students and home students would be welcomed (Wu & Hammond, 2011), especially since the more contact international students have with home students, the less likely they are to suffer from acculturative stress (O’Reilly et al., 2010), Chinese students have reported that home students sometimes act as if they "don't want to know at all" (Liu & Winder, 2014:56), are superficial (Yeh & Inose, 2003; Spencer-Oatey & Xiong, 2006) or even “rude, strange and a bit arrogant” (Durkin, 2011:283). As a

consequence, the participants felt like outsiders looking in on a world to which they did not fully belong. Sophie encapsulated what many of the participants felt when she said, candidly,

“you can easily feel like a nobody” [4.16_{]. For these}

participants, feelings of isolation, loneliness and marginalisation were new and raw, given that they

belonged to established social groups and communities in China. 50% of the participants

[4.15_{] It was hard to listen to}

accounts of homesickness, loneliness, and depression in the participants’ accounts. It has been tricky not to let these experiences lead me to rail at a system that allows this to happen. I tried, as Hedges (2010) advises, to make my emotions less of a limitation and more of a potential source of insight.

[4.16_{] Sophie’s words were so}

powerful that I took them for the title of this thesis.

reported feeling lonely at some point in their sojourn, and four explicitly referred to having had depressive episodes (three of them requiring professional intervention) because they felt alone and unsupported (see 4.4.3). Some of Yvonne’s friends suffered from such dreadful homesickness in the UK that they took every opportunity to return “really quick” to China (Yvonne, 1:228).

A significant contributory factor to these feelings was the lack of contact with other students, above all home students. Although all the participants had come to the UK expecting to make a host of UK and international friends, this was rarely the case: rather, they found students from the UK to be aloof, even unapproachable. Tina indicated how her relationships with home students were shallow and unfulfilling, because “they may smile at you, but they

do not want to be your friend. It's very hard to get close to them” (Tina, 2:139-141), and

Sophie concluded that such behaviour is part of a national psyche:

British people are not personally targeted to […] international students: they are not very easy to be friends with […] and I think you have to put extra effort in to make friends with British people. (Sophie, 1:31-32)

The “universality hypothesis” (DiTommaso et al., 2005:57) posits that loneliness can occur in all contexts and settings. However, feelings of isolation, loneliness and marginalisation are more common among international sojourners (Ramachandran, 2011), and do not improve in the same way that other types of acculturation, such as linguistic acculturation, do (Lu, 2001, in Hunley, 2010). These feelings occur when the sojourner is removed from familiar and established support networks (see 4.5.7) and is not (yet) attuned to the local context (Hunley, 2010). That international students have few, if any, local friendships is not necessarily because they are a “poor people person” or “lacking sociability” – they are simply, as Hedges (2010) points out, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Feelings of isolation, loneliness and marginalisation can be triggered by the way others interact with us (Berry, 1997), and Huiling had experience of the outcome of this: “I think it's

much easier for us to stay with Asian people, because […] European students are not willing to work with [us]” (Huiling, 2: 119-121). Such attitudes can lead to unwitting and unwilled

segregation if the marginalisation is “imposed” by members of the dominant culture, leading segregated individuals to form bonds with others who have similarly been alienated by

negative treatment or prejudice. This is not at all uncommon: Pandit (2007), for instance, recounts her own experience as an international student, in which she had no interaction with home students for the whole of her first year; Spencer-Oatey & Xiong (2006), in their study of Chinese students in a post-1992 institution in the UK, found that only 7% had UK friends; and Leask & Carroll (2011) found that some international students finish their course of study without making a single local friend. This is problematic, since friendships between home and international students has been shown to lead to much more successful acculturation than spending time only with co-nationals (Yan & Berliner, 2011).

One reason why some of these participants had not forged relationships with home students appears to be because doing so would have required them to adopt new and uncomfortable behaviours. Chief among these was the expectation to frequent pubs and bars in order to make and maintain friendships. This is where much

student socialising takes place [4.17], so individuals

who do not feel comfortable in such places are

immediately restricted in their options for forging new friendships (see 5.5). Huiling reported that her “foreign friends are more likely to go to a bar” whereas Chinese students preferred to go “to the park, or go on a trip, or go for dinner” (Huiling, 2: 134-135), and Poppy said she had “never been to a bar or a pub here” (Poppy, 1:152). Daisy recounted how going to the pub was “embarrassing” for her because she did not know how to behave (Daisy, 1:46), whilst Sophie found it to be an isolating experience: others were having fun, but she stood alone, clutching a glass:

[In China] we don't spend a long time talking to people at the pub. You know, holding a drink, standing there talking to people. I'm the only one standing there lonely. So I don't go to those kind of parties, you know the Bop, the College Bop.

(Sophie, 1:236-238)

When groups do not gel, it is typically the international students who are considered to be the cause, due to their “foreign studentness” (Killick, 2015:161). For example, Harrison & Peacock (2007:5) found that international students who were prepared to “come out and get drunk” were accepted by home students, whilst students who did not drink alcohol were viewed as awkward, and consequently excluded from their circles. However, these participants’ revealed that, in fact, it is the behaviours of home students which limit

[4.17_{] Note how many student}

intercultural interaction. It may be that navigating the internationalised campus is more of a challenge to home students than international students – contrary to what we might imagine – since the latter are aware before they arrive that they will be outsiders in some respects, and can prime themselves psychologically and socio-culturally for what this might entail (Jones & Killick, 2007). Conversely, university may be the first prolonged exposure that some home students have to other people and cultures, and some may find this a threat to their identify and established world view. It could be that forging cross-cultural friendships is therefore more onerous for home students than international students because some are “unwilling to explore perspectives other than their own” (Bowl, 2001:157). In addition, home students may feel resentful towards international students as they perceive them to receive more attention and to access extra provision (Gabb, 2006). Finally, it may also be the case, as Leask & Carroll (2011) point out, that interacting with speakers whose first language is not English requires discourse management skills such as grading of language and checking

understanding, which home students may not be able, or willing, to employ: cross-cultural working is “psychologically intense” (ibid., p648), and is therefore perhaps demanding for some home students (see 5.4). This is frustrating for international students, who feel that one purpose of their sojourn is to gain new cross-cultural experiences. It is also a wasted

opportunity, since international students contribute to the development of home students’ intercultural learning and “tolerance of diversity” (Jin & Cortazzi, 2017:246), and can, in this way, be a valuable resource. That said, a lack of contact with home students was seen by some participants to offer opportunities to broaden their understanding of, and friendships with, people from other parts of the globe. Yvonne, for example, had expected to make friends with students from the UK, but instead made friends from other locations. She said “I

don’t feel disappointed because I also met many students from other countries; not just from China or Asian region. Yes, so I think, it’s good for me” (Yvonne, 2:49-50).

It seems, then, these participants’ experiences bear out other studies which also found that international students appreciate the multi-cultural experience of university life, but tend not to integrate fully into the life of the institution (McClure, 2007; Gu, 2009; Gu et al., 2010). That a lack of meaningful relationships led these

Chinese post-graduate students to feel isolated, lonely

and marginalised is a cause for concern [4.18], and

whilst institutions have laudable policies in place

[4.18_{] So, although}

internationalisation claims to enhance the campus and the curriculum, it also leads to silos of home and

international students. This speaks to my neo-Marxist critique of the neoliberalised tertiary sector.

promoting tolerance and diversity, it appears that these policies do not necessarily play out in practice.