A Tale of Two Cities

Diary Entry: January 13, 2025

llinois is a very international place, in the same way that an airport lounge is — lots of different people passing through, no one entirely sure why the carpet looks like that. The university sprawls across Urbana and Champaign, which are technically two towns but have, over time, fused together like a pair of old socks that went through the dryer one too many times. The university is the beating heart of the area, pumping tuition money and youthful energy through every street. Without it, the city would resemble a post-apocalyptic film set — except with worse lighting and more parking lots. I’ve been here over the holidays, when the students vanish, and the transformation is dramatic: locals drift down the streets like confused extras in a zombie movie, apparently wondering where all the noise went.

The largest foreign presence is, without contest, Chinese. In fact, if you woke up here with no prior context, you might think you’d been accidentally teleported to a well-organized, very polite parallel universe. The Chinese community blends in so seamlessly that sometimes I wonder if they’ve cracked the code to existing invisibly, except when they’re running excellent restaurants, driving spotless cars, or making property investments that could probably fund small nations. They’re unfailingly polite — no fuss, no disturbances, no loud midnight karaoke sessions in the quad. Other nationalities are here too, of course, but the Chinese presence is so pronounced it’s almost like the city itself is bilingual, but only in very specific neighborhoods.

Now, I don’t want to imply that international students are here solely to inject money into the local economy (though, to be fair, the economy does seem to enjoy it very much). The university’s internationalism leaks into everything — academic life included. Take the law program: a fair chunk of its most respected scholarship is imported, like an artisanal cheese selection. Alan Watson, a Scottish legal historian, writes about “legal transplants,” which is somehow less about organ donation and more about how one country’s laws sneak into another’s. Then there’s H. L. A. Hart, an English philosopher of law, who argued about the separation of law and morality with all the enthusiasm of someone discussing whether tea should be poured before or after the milk. And of course, Ronald Coase — a British-born economist who made the American free market sound like an exclusive members-only club you could actually afford to join if you played your torts right.

In the graduate law programs — LLM, JSD — you could spin a globe, jab your finger anywhere, and probably hit someone’s home country. I studied alongside people from Japan, China, Italy, France, Belgium, Ukraine, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Sweden, India, Pakistan — and, of course, me, proudly representing Georgia (the one with mountains and wine, not the peaches). The only group mysteriously absent? The English. Which is ironic, considering half the readings were written by them.