Chinese students flocked to Central Illinois. Their food followed.

Boston Globe

6 days ago

For the more than 6,000 students from China in Urbana and Champaign, the wealth of products and dishes from back home can make the two cities seem like a mirage rising from the plains of central Illinois.
Surrounded by miles of flat, green fields of soy and grain corn, the cities have a combined population of about 127,000 people and a skyline that rarely pokes above 15 stories. The area isn't anybody's idea of a major metropolitan center. It certainly isn't the first place you'd think to look when you are in the mood for serious Chinese food.
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After a quick walk from the university's main quad, though, you can sit down to a faithful rendition of spicy bullfrog hot pot in a Sichuanese broth studded with green peppercorns. A nearby restaurant serves yangrou paomo, a Shaanxi lamb soup with floating scraps of flatbread that is a favorite in Xi'an. If you are struck by a late-night craving for stinky tofu in the style of Changsha, you can get it after 8:30 p.m. from a chef who dresses fried black cubes of fermented bean curd in a glistening orange chile oil, the way vendors do on the streets of Hunan's capital city.
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You'd have to hunt to find these dishes in a major city like Chicago, 135 miles away, but they have become a fixture of life in Champaign and Urbana. At least two dozen Chinese restaurants, bakeries, bubble-tea shops and Asian grocery stores are clustered close to the campus. Along a five-block stretch of Green Street, the main commercial strip in the part of Champaign known as Campustown, window posters and sidewalk sandwich boards advertise dumplings, noodles and stir-fries in larger-than-life color photographs captioned in Chinese and usually, but not always, English.
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The Golden Harbor restaurant, which has more than 1,000 items on the menu, in Champaign. Like many college towns, the area around the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has been transformed by a surge of foreign students, but visa clampdowns could threaten that.
ANJALI PINTO/NYT
Most of these places are quite new. Almost all have opened in the past 15 years. Dai Shi, a local pastry chef originally from Fuzhou, first visited Champaign in 2010, when her parents owned a Chinese restaurant in town. They had only a handful of competitors, she said.
At the time, about 1,100 students from China attended the university. Now there are more than five times as many, and the campus area has become a little Chinatown on the prairie.
New York University enrolls more Chinese students than any other school in the United States. But the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is in a virtual tie for second place with the University of Southern California, according a New York Times analysis of 2023 visa data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
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Urbana and Champaign are not the only places where the surge in international students has changed the local culture and economy. But the area's rural isolation and unusually large population of Chinese students make it a striking example of that change.
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In the coming months or years, they may also make it something of a laboratory for the effects of the Trump administration's cuts to research budgets and clampdowns on visas for international students, especially those from China.
Feast in a cornfield
College-age students in China have a nickname for the University of Illinois:
yu mi de
. It means the Cornfield. The university is better known there for its surrounding farmland and its strengths in STEM fields like engineering and computer science than for its proximity to crunchy Northern-style stir-fried pork intestines. Each August, hundreds of new Chinese students show up with no inkling that the Cornfield is full of foods they grew up on.
More than 270,000 students from China attended American colleges and universities last year. Restaurants catering to them represent a new wave in Chinese dining in the United States. In Manhattan, the blocks around NYU and Columbia, which 20 years ago held little appeal to fans of Chinese food, have become troves of Shanghai drunken crab and Hong Kong-style barbecue pork buns. You can find high-level Chinese cooking near campuses in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Iowa City, Iowa.
They are more cosmopolitan than the linoleum-floored joints in the old urban Chinatowns that started out feeding home-style cooking to villagers from Guangdong in the early 20th century. They are more up-to-date than the palaces of aristocratic Chinese cuisine overseen by highly trained chefs who fled the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and '70s. Aimed at younger customers whose memories of China are still fresh, they tend to be informal, fairly inexpensive if not rock-bottom cheap, and faithful in recreating true regional cuisines.
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Dishes at Northern Cuisine include crispy pork in sweet and sour glaze, stewed pork belly in a toasted bun and wok-fried crispy pork intestine with dry chili, in Champaign.
ANJALI PINTO/NYT
Students in Urbana and Champaign trade intel on regional dishes in group texts in Chinese on the social-media apps RedNote and WeChat. The most useful sources for exploring menus around the Cornfield are the Asian-food-delivery apps Hungry Panda and Fantuan, whose vehicles, bearing a logo of an anthropomorphic dumpling, are as common on the streets as red-and-blue Domino's cars are in other American college towns.
The drivers 'are all Chinese people,' Qian said. 'When they reach my apartment, they call me and speak Mandarin right away.'
'Everyone is buckled up'
A year ago on the campaign trail, President Donald Trump proposed that all international students who graduated from U.S. colleges be granted green cards 'automatically.'
After taking office in January, Trump chose a different path. His administration froze applications for student visas in May. When the process started up again a month later, the State Department put out new orders for stricter vetting of applicants' 'online presence' — looking for, among other things, signs of 'hostility' toward the United States.
Consulates were told to give priority to applicants bound for schools where international students make up less than 15% of the total. That statistic at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is above 20%.
Chinese nationals, who made up more than a quarter of the 1.1 million international students in the United States last year, face extra scrutiny. In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the government would 'aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students.'
Whether tighter screening and delays will cut into the number of international students at the University of Illinois in the coming academic year won't be clear until September, said Robin Kaler, an associate chancellor.
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Until then, faculty, administrators and local businesses are bracing for the impact. A significant drop could have a major economic effect on college towns like Urbana and Champaign. International students in Illinois spend $2.4 billion a year and support more than 23,000 jobs in the state, according to a 2024 analysis by NAFSA, a professional association for international educators. Tuition is the biggest expenditure, but real estate, car dealerships and other businesses also benefit.
Diners at Northern Cuisine in Champaign. New York University enrolls more Chinese students than any other school in the US, but the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is in a virtual tie for second place with the University of Southern California.
ANJALI PINTO/NYT
As more Asian businesses crowd in, the struggle for survival becomes increasingly Darwinian. Restaurants along Green Street can come and go in the span of a year. Now, their owners are anticipating fewer students from other countries, especially China, said Tim Chao, who owns three cafes with his wife, Shi.
Until recently, Chao said, many restaurateurs aimed their offerings squarely at those students. If significant numbers of them aren't allowed into the United States, or decide to study in a country that feels more welcoming, 'the general consensus is that they'll need to change the flavors, change the menu and how they present themselves,' he said.
For instance, the noodle shop that sells Changsha stinky tofu just added grilled meat skewers and other, more entry-level items to its late-night menu.
'Everyone is buckled up right now,' Chao said.
Many long-term residents are hoping that their favorite restaurants stick around and stay interesting.
'This cultural richness enhances us all,' said Leslie Cooperband, a retired cheesemaker who lives in Champaign, after we shared some very good three-cup chicken at Golden Harbor, a Taiwanese and Chinese landmark so celebrated that an indie-rock band wrote a song about it.
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'It's like, wow, look at what we have here in this town of 100,000 people,' she said. 'And we're all better for it.'
This article originally appeared in
.