Navigating Boston as an International Student: Insights From Your Fellow Journalist
Being an international student and a journalist at the same time can be challenging yet rewarding. Here’s how Cici Yu’s reporting and a social media platform helped her engage the communities better.
Imagine starting your freshman year in a foreign country, how would you figure out where to go and what is happening around you? Cici Yu, a senior studying journalism and public policy analysis at Boston University, came to the States from China at 16. Having lived in Sacramento, Philadelphia and Boston, Cici has developed her own ways of navigating places over the years.
As an international student, her host families and high school friends helped her familiarize with the new environment. As a journalist, her reporting brought her to more discoveries — from local basement venues to the nearby Allston, “whenever there is news happening around the city, you need to go there. And oftentimes when you go there, you will explore a new neighborhood.”
The Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu is popular among international students, on which Cici shares her internship experiences. Currently a newsroom fellow at WBUR, she also used Xiaohongshu to reach out to sources for interviews for her recent podcast on the Lunar New Year.
In terms of your trajectory as an international student, how did you navigate Boston when you first arrived? And what’s that like today?
I was in China for a year doing online classes. I didn’t feel any connection with the campus because I was far away with the 12-hour time difference. But when I came back to Boston, everything started to get better. I think the most important part is that my middle school friend came with me. We’re roommates now. She is a junior, and I’m a senior, we navigate it together. Luckily we found a group of Cantonese friends. We were able to bond together and cook together, which was helpful for building up our little friend group in the new city. And also I was living in the dorm, which helped me to connect with other friends as well. They had been here for a year, although they couldn’t really go out because of COVID, but you know, at least they were here. They were really helpful in terms of helping me get around the city and figure out my life here. So I think it’s all about the friends.
How has being a journalist helped you navigate Boston then?
There was a class called “Reporting in Depth” that required students to focus on community stories. That class brought me to Newton, Massachusetts, which is a town near Boston, but a little bit distant from the area that I live in for college. People there were really friendly. I remember I was reporting on a high school music program that was almost being canceled. I went to the school and participated in their music rehearsal and performance. That was the moment when I found out that if I didn’t go there I wouldn’t meet these people and wouldn’t be able to enjoy the music they produced. I also realized how important this music program meant to the students over there. After that, I was able to write a really good story for the Boston Globe, and I think because of my piece and the efforts from the student advocates and parent advocates, they were able to save the program at the end of the day.
It’s so nice to hear that. Nowadays many international students from China use the social media platform Xiaohongshu to look up information, like where to eat and hang out. Do you use Xiaohongshu to help with your reporting?
I use Xiaohongshu to find sources to talk to. For example, I was working on the Lunar New Year episode for my podcast and was looking for lion dance troupes in Chinatown. I used Google to search first. I sent out emails but only one club got back to me, so I knew that I needed to use other social media platforms to reach out to people. I remember people sharing content of being in the lion dance troupes on Xiaohongshu last year, so I searched, “Boston Chinatown lion dance”, and I found someone from the Boston Wong Family Benevolent Association who commented under a post, saying, “oh that’s me”. So I DMed him and asked whether I could interview the troupe members. Fortunately, he got back to me, said he would ask his coaches first and see if they were available. We coordinated over Xiaohongshu and finalized the time for me to go there and visit the team in person.
You also post some of your internship experiences on Xiaohongshu. What is it like to share and interact with people online? How have you been making use of this platform overall?
People are nice. People sometimes ask, how did you get there and how did you get your internship and stuff, and I’d try to respond. In terms of why I use a platform like Xiaohongshu, I think it’s a good way to communicate with others and find people who share the same interest or who are in the same industry. There are really cool Chinese journalists on this platform. I thought I could use it as LinkedIn to DM them, and then ask for a coffee chat or whatever, but it didn’t work. Xiaohongshu is less of a networking platform — sometimes people just ignore your message. Overall, I pretty much use Xiaohongshu as Google in Chinese. The combination of Google rating plus Xiaohongshu review can really find me and my friends a good restaurant to hang out at when we need.
