Finding Our Home
An interview with Lisa Chinn
Lisa Espineli Chinn is Director of
International Student Ministries for
InterVarsity/USA. She is a speaker at the
upcoming Urbana 06 Convention. Urbana.org
recently talked with her about ways international students and immigrant students
can find their home in their local churches.
U.O: What is the difference between an international student and an immigrant student?
L.C.: There are several differences. One is the kind of visa they carry. The immigrant will have a green card, which basically says you’re a resident alien. You can study here and live here. Obviously, you can’t vote. The international student will either have an F-1 visa or a J-1 – those are categories for scholars and students. Those visas say that you are enrolled in a particular school, with a limited time to stay.
The differences include the kind of visa, the length of stay, and pretty much how you get here. The immigrant often comes with family – a more settled social setting, with families in place.
International students come fresh from home, and really become the "newcomer." There are immigrants as well who begin life immediately with their students in school, in elementary school, and on to college.
The experience for both would be similar, but also different, because of what they have in place. For the newcomer, you don’t have your family, you don’t have your social network in place. The new immigrants might feel the same way, because they’re establishing themselves, but for those who come with families, it’s there. They’re adjusting together. You have a home. Of course, they go to college and still leave home.
Depending on the situation of the international student, if they are here for English-language learning, or if they are here for a degree, that will create an additional difference between the international and the similarity. The international student and the immigrant might fall in the same category.
It also depends on which countries they come from. How familiar they are with Western culture, or how distant home culture is from the local culture, will affect the kind of experience they have in the university.
Finally, international students are required to have an acceptable level of English proficiency, as demonstrated through a standardized test. Immigrants, on the other hand, are not required to speak English at the same level of proficiency as international students.
At first look, you will not notice the difference. Immigrant students may want to hang out with international students, because their experience is closer to that of international students, than anyone else on campus. You find that in different groups as well. At Berkeley, they have a lot of Filipino groups. Here at Madison we have Indonesian groups. Mostly these are international students. You don’t have a lot of immigrants joining the groups, even though there are some who become immigrants later on, because they stay to work, and get green cards.
U.O: How should each group - those who are hoping to stay, and those hoping to return to their country of origin – approach their time at the university?
LC: I belong to the second group. I came with the goal of going home, so my time was a precious time. You know that you are not here to stay, you want to absorb everything, you’re alert to things that could slip away at any time. So your friendships are precious – not that the others’ are not – but because you know your time has a limit to it. You really make the most of it. You’re thinking relevance. You’re always thinking transferability, “How will this fit in my Filipino culture.”
But if you’re not going home, there is a different attitude. You are asking, “OK, what will be my next move after I graduate?” “How do I get the right job, or get through the right doors, to a company that will petition for me to get a green card?”
In a few recent conversations, I’ve met one person who is certain about heading home, and about three who are staying here, because they have jobs. One student said, “I don’t want to go home,” another said, “I am applying to the top five accounting firms, because they give you a good opportunity in the job. Plus other people have been helped get green cards.” As far as career trajectory, it’s that. I’m surprised that there is less uncertainty than there used to be.
The way you assess your time – the way you value the relationships and the kind of people that you prioritize in your networking would be different, as well as the kind of people you hang out with.
For me, I hung out with people who were returning. All of us returned home – the people I hung out with, the internationals. Peter Kuzmic was my classmate. He went home. Another went home to Kenya, another to Canada. Those are experiences from my generation, which was a whole different generation of international students.
U.O: What then does “Home” mean?
L.C.: Home is continually being redefined by the globally mobile folks. At the beginning of the journey, home is the place you left. All your roots are there. As you begin to launch and venture into this new place, you put down roots there. Then you come to a place where you feel, “I have two homes.” Then you have an emerging bicultural identity. The more distant you are from the original home the more you feel like “That’s not really home anymore; I feel more at home with the current place I’m in.”
The more you move, and become mobile – whether it’s the experience of Missionary Kids, or State Department Kids, or Military Kids – the more you feel like “Maybe home is not really a location at all.” Home begins to be defined relationally, by who you’re with, defined communally. That’s when you say “I felt so at home, because I was with this group of people.” Then you move to another place, and you feel at home because you were with this group of people. So home varies in its definition, depending on where you are on the journey.
For the Christian – and I have to continually ask God to help me find my home – the question becomes, “What does it mean to find my home in God?” I am so portable; I need a permanent address. What is a more permanent address than God himself?
What does it mean to be comfortable in God’s presence? What does it mean to truly enjoy God in the midst of being rootless, with no place to land? This is by Craig Barnes. I like his definition. He says:
“We are all yearning for home. And home has nothing to do with how good the place is. It has everything to do with whether or not it is the right place. The right place isn’t something you choose, but a place that chooses you, molds you, and tells you who you are.”
Whether it is the place, or the community that tells you who you are, or it is God who tells you who you are.
More and more, when I speak to international students, I always want to address their sense of homelessness. For short-termers who have returned home, who feel like they have left a part of their hearts somewhere else, home is not really like home anymore. Or missionaries who have spent so many years overseas – there are a lot of mobile people in our transient society. How do we cultivate that sense of homelessness, and identify with Jesus, who said “Foxes have holes, birds have nests,” that sense of “I’m not planted in one place?”
In Jeremiah 29, the exiles are told by Jeremiah, “Settle down. This is your place. Get married. Plant a garden – make a difference where you are.” That’s how I would pursue finding the meaning of home. It’s a great evangelistic message as well. I encourage international students to come home.
U.O: Can you talk about the relationship between the individual and the church, when it comes to belonging?
L.C.: When we look at the Bible, the local church should be our home. It is our people, our family. Yet many people with the experience of international students and immigrants can quickly find in the local church a place they can call home. That’s true for everyone, not just internationals. Breaking into cliques and groupings – it takes a while to just find yourself at home in a local church.
But for those of us who have come from other countries, whom God has called to call a place our home, how do we then make a contribution? Or even to figure out how to feel at home in a place like that? I have come up with a definition. I will never really be at home. It’s OK. If I am looking to be 100% at home, I am looking in the wrong place. The only place I will fully be at home is God’s place, the place he has prepared for us.
In other words, when I come away feeling like, “I don’t feel at home,” I have to process that. What makes me say that? Is it because I don’t have friends? Is something telling me that I’m walking a different step? Still, I feel like I’m walking with people. That is what makes us unique. We’re not marching to the same drum. But in order to fit, you also need to know the steps. So you’re there but you’re not there. That’s the dissonance we have to face as people who are from another place. We will never feel at home, fully, yet we will feel at home in certain places.
Our contribution is in that place of dissonance. It is there that we see scripture differently. When scripture tells us that we are “in the world but not of the world,” you really know the offbeat sense of that. When Ephesians says “you are sojourners, you were once out, but now you are in,” it has a different ring to it. Sometimes it means physically being out, not just a social outcast.
Then you have to find a contribution. How do I contribute, knowing that my peace is so unique? So I either stay with my own people – “Hey, we’re all immigrants, we’re all international students” – and there is value to that. That support is very important. But we should not lose our voice. We should say, “This is how it feels to be on this end.”
We should find the courage to speak for others. That is our unique contribution. Then we open a part of the world that people don’t know about. So we become temporary ambassadors, as it were, of our home and culture, people who know God through different experiences, which we can share with the church.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
Print
Email
Comments
Be the first one to add a comment.
To post a comment, please login or register