By Qianyu (Margaret) Chen
Hi everyone! Welcome to the ISSS blog again! :) This week I'll be talking about my experience as an international student of going through homesickness. Now I am okay with the balance of school and contact with family, but when I first came to U.S., after a period of excitement, I started to feel a sense of homesick. After some time to adjust, I overcome most of it and I would like to share with you all.
First of all, it was hard for me to figure out the time differences. There are 13 hours differences from my hometown to United States, so normally when it was afternoon and I wanted to chat with my parents or friends in my high school, they were all sleeping since it was early morning for them. And when my parents got up and was ready to call me, it was time for me to do homework. At first I didn't make many friends, so it felt a little lonely when I wanted to call someone but were not able to. However gradually, I figured it out by setting up time every week to call my parents, or leave a message for them to reply me later.
The second issue is about food. I grew up eating my parents cooking, but now I had to deal with a completely different system of food. I had American food in my home country several times per year, but now I am having it every day, three times per day. At first I really liked it, since it's a new type of experience and dining hall's food is really good. But when the time went on I got tired of the food and missed the homemade food so much that I couldn't eat much. Later on, me and my friends discovered a variety of ways to eat food in dining hall. Like add sugar on sliced tomatoes or add ice cream in coffee and so on. Although I still miss homemade food from where I grow up, I am more adapted to the food here and find it interesting to know new way to eat.
Last but not least, I missed everything about my home town. I grew up in Hangzhou and had been there for 18 years before I studied abroad in United States. So when I first came, I really missed landmarks in Hangzhou as well as my high school friends and my family. The city of Urbana and Champaign are really beautiful too, but I dreamed of my home every night while I was in the opposite end of earth from it. However, I set up my wallpaper using a photo of West Lake, a famous sightseeing location in Hangzhou, and I put up my family's photograph on my desk. Once I feel homesick and want to go back home, I would look at the family photo and picture of Hangzhou, then I had power and energy to work harder.
Eventually, I get used of being away from home and I am happy to go back home every year during break, but I am also okay to be in anywhere in the world. One of my roommates said: "With a credit card, cell phone, as well as a burning passion for the future, I can go to everywhere on the earth." That's so true. Some of the international students have experience of being alone, some of us are ready to go anywhere. But for some of us, the study abroad experience is the first time for us to leave our parents and to be mature in a short period of time. It took time to get through homesick, but eventually you will be there, and after this experience, you can go anywhere fearlessly.
Thank you for reading this post! This is Qianyu, if you have similar experience or thought or anything, feel free to tell me :) Thank you and see you on the next post!
