Virginia Museum show features glass art pioneer Dale Chihuly_美文

Virginia Museum show features glass art pioneer Dale Chihuly

Sun Wei is an environmental engineering student at USC. He says he has not met a lot of Americans because there are so many students from his own country. But he says there is a positive side to this.

“The benefit is when I arrived, it doesn’t take much adjusting -- it’s all Chinese,” he says. But adjusting is not so easy for all students from China. An Ruopeng is a doctoral student at the Pardee RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica. He says being away from family is difficult for him and his wife.

“We are the only child in both families and, you know, when your parents got older they tend to miss you a lot and miss your grandson a lot.”

But he says he has enjoyed experiencing a different culture.

Ferdinando Guerra is an economist with the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation. He says Chinese students put more than one hundred million dollars into the local economy last year. And he says they added more than four and a half billion dollars to the national economy.

“The number of Chinese students studying in the United States has almost tripled in the past decade and has more than quadrupled since nineteen ninety-five.”

Jim Hosek is an economist at the RAND Corporation. He says China’s strong economic growth is the main reason for the big increase.

“There are a lot of Chinese entrepreneurs, businessmen of all sorts, business leaders, who are simply wealthier today, and they can afford to send their sons and daughters abroad.”