LEFT BEHIND: Amid COVID-19 lockdowns, mental health problems among Asian international students exposed gaps in universities’ care

This is my thesis story for my master’s degree at the Columbia Journalism School. I am sincerely grateful for all the great support from my advisor, Andrew McCormick, who is an adjunct professor specializing in international reporting.

1 p.m. — In the spring of 2020, that’s the time every day that Iris Huang woke up after her university shut down due to COVID-19. Then a junior finance major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Huang, an international student from Suzhou, China, had always been an early bird. She even chose classes starting at 8 a.m. to help get days off to an energetic start. Not anymore, amid the coronavirus.

Most days, she left her bed unmade. Beside her bed, there were empty beer cans and unfinished wine bottles. In a corner near her desk, clothes piled up like a hill. Then there were the takeout boxes, both finished and unfinished, stacked haphazardly on her table: green pepper with pork, sour sliced potatoes, and beef noodle soup were her staples.

Before the pandemic, Huang considered herself a healthy eater. Every day after the shutdown, she only ordered delivery from the same Chinese restaurant near campus. She had begun eating a lot, she said, to avoid thinking too much about the virus, her loneliness, her future, and her home thousands of miles away. The food helped her feel numb.

“That was the only taste I got of the city and of my life,” Huang said.

……

For everyone, the COVID-19 pandemic presented life-altering challenges. This was true not least for university students, whose youthful momentum and professional ambitions seemed suddenly to smack into a wall. For international students, the challenges were multifold. As many of their American counterparts returned to hometowns across the country, their own travel was stymied by fast-changing border control regulations. And as classes shifted to online-only, face-to-face meetings with professors and friends, which previously were essential to many in surmounting language difficulties, became impossible.

Asian international students, in particular, grappled with a chilling rise in anti-Asian sentiment, stoked in part by then-president Donald Trump, who repeatedly called COVID-19 the “China Virus” and responded apathetically to a spate of hate crimes targeting ethnic Chinese and others with Asian heritage.

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