With a modest accent and big smile, Li Qi '03 tells the story of his childhood as matter-of-factly as if he were an average kid from American suburbia.
Raised in China, Li's parents sent him away from home to circus school when he was 8 in hopes that he would have a better life. The grueling schedule of training and performing on the unicycle allowed little time for schooling, and by the time he turned 15, he realized the only way for a real future was to run away.
During a six-month Chinese circus team tour of the United States, Li's parents arranged for a friend of a friend to meet him after a performance in Boston, and he defected.
But it was not the life he had hoped for.
With no education, no English-language skills and no green card, Li ended up spending the next two years working in a string of Chinese restaurants. He had nearly resigned himself to a life no better than the one he had left in China, when one day a restaurant patron asked him why he never pursued an education.
After stumbling through an explanation, he found himself a few months later sitting in a counselor's office at the Buxton School in Williamstown, Mass. The patron, who has become Li's sponsor, enrolled him in the school where, at the age of 17, he started his formal education.
Li spent the next three years making up for lost time and, incredibly, is now an economics/world politics concentrator at Hamilton and the recipient of a Levitt Fellowship. He and Government Professor Cheng Li are using the funds to examine the economic and political impacts made by Chinese students who return home after study in the United States.
"Students returning from the United States are bringing back the democratic ideas of free elections, free speech and freedom of religion," Li said. "We want to learn how returnees share with other Chinese citizens the principles of Western education and democracy."
By examining Chinese newspapers and books by returning scholars, and by conducting interviews with returnees in a wide range of fields, Li hopes to develop a better understanding of the motives, ambitions, challenges and opportunities for the growing numbers of Chinese studying in the United States. "They reflect an increased integration — at commercial, intellectual and cultural levels — between the U.S. and China," Li added.
Like the subjects of his study, Li has first-hand evidence of the life-altering effects of education.
"I can see my future. I know how to take chances and know what I want and don't want," said Li, who plans to pursue a career in business and return to China some day. "I saw these people in the circus, 30-years-old, drinking and smoking, whose careers were over; it's a terrible life. I saw people in the restaurant business working 12 hours a day, earning little money, but with no life. I appreciate this country and know what it has to offer and what I have to give."
