What it feels like: Chinese in American Greek life

Feng Yuan woke up groggy at six in the morning from a king-sized bed in a fancy Boston hotel, with her two new friends still asleep beside her. She shook them awake, washed herself up, and spent her next 40 minutes in front of the mirror. Eye shadow, mascara, lip gloss, and a new black dress she had just bought the day before -- she put them on carefully. It was her third day of rushing for Tri Delta, one of the most famous American sororities, and she had a one-on-one chat event waiting for her.

Rushing is where freshmen take part in various events to get to know as many members of the sorority as possible to get into the next round of selection. For Feng Yuan and her freshmen sisters, they had to get up early every morning to dress up for the events because they had daily different dress codes to follow.

“Before I came to the US, I learned everything about sororities from American movies,” said Feng Yuan, who joined her sorority for a year when she was an undergraduate at Boston University. “I was very curious about it.”

American Greek organizations originated in the early 19th century as secret clubs founded by US college males. The historically white Greek system has brought a great imbalance in ethnic diversity, especially for some traditional fraternities and sororities. Tri Delta as one of them has 63.8% of white girls in one of its chapters at the University of Southern California, while Asians only took around 6%, according to their Chapter Demographics.

Like Feng Yuan, there were a few Chinese students who previously studied in US colleges who went through rigorous selection processes to be admitted to fraternities and sororities to experience this very-American college life.

“Crazy” and “special”

Yu Lin, 26, described his experience with Pi Kappa Phi, also known as Pi Kappa, a social fraternity in the US, as “the craziest thing” he had ever done. He joined the fraternity in his freshman year at the University of Arizona.

“But I didn’t expect my crazy party college life would make me look special during my Ph.D. law school interview,” he said. “The admission officers were surprised that a non-local student would accept the way it works.”

After rushing, freshmen had to go through three more steps to become an official member: bid night, an event in which the recognized freshmen will receive an invitation from the brotherhood and become “pledges”; pledging, where the pledges need to pass a series of “tests”; and initiation, to mark that new members are officially on board. For Yu Lin, his pledging was the most memorable part.

“Different fraternities pledge differently. My pledging was like hell,” said Mr Yu.

In addition to memorizing the fraternity history, creeds, and the names of each member -- which you’ll be drinking to “death” if you couldn’t, according to Mr Yu -- they had to go through “hazing”, where some insulting pranks and activities occur.

“People may die in hazing if it goes wrong, which is happening every year actually,” Mr Yu said. “So many fraternities now ban hazing.”

Mr Yu insisted on not revealing what exactly happened in his experience. He said that keeping it confidential is a rule that every fraternity member should follow. This not only applies to Pi Kappa but all the other fraternities.

“Anyway, drinking five beers within a minute, eating the kind of thing you don’t even know what it is, cleaning up vomits... these things were a piece of cake for me,” said him. “I remember once I puked for half an hour at midnight in the woods after they plied me with Vodka and then got up like a mess at 7 on a weekend morning to set up for a football game.”

Mr Yu said, he couldn’t imagine himself doing any of these before he went to the US, and many of his Chinese friends were shocked by what he was doing.

“They would ask me questions like ‘Are those American crazy?’ ‘What’s the point?’,” he said. “You’ll understand why Americans have the ideas that we find strange when you join them.”

“Unconvinced” and “discriminating”

Zhang Yichi became the first Chinese to be one of the presidents under Phi Gamma Delta (also known as FIJI) in 2012 when he was a junior at the University of Richmond.

“Sounds cool, right? But it was not that easy,” said Mr Zhang.

FIJI had traditionally been privileged white-only, with over a hundred years of history. It was the first time that a Chinese has been a president. The University of Richmond was a 75% white liberal arts college in the southeastern United States, and many white people were unconvinced that he could be the president.

“When I was attending meetings with other presidents, I could occasionally hear them mocking about Chinese and Asians,” Mr Zhang said. “My personality is tough, so for those with malicious intent, I usually strike back without hesitation.”

Mr Zhang had his freshman pledging during the Chinese New Year. When some senior members came to him for his pledging tasks on New Year’s Eve, he told them that he couldn’t do it immediately because he had to call his family for the festival.

“One of them picked a fight and said, ‘You shouldn't even be here!’. I said okay, if you don't respect my culture, then I don't need to be nice to you either,” said Mr Zhang. “It’s really important to defend yourself when you feel your bottom line is violated.”

After successfully being admitted to Tri Delta, Feng Yuan found that discrimination was happening among and within chapters.

“Tri Delta of our school has a low ‘reputation’ and few students were willing to join,” said Ms Feng. She explained the “reputation” here as the overall appearance and the personality of the girls.

“To put it bluntly, the more blondes with big boobs in a chapter, the higher reputation they will have,” Ms Feng said. “Our chapter had some girls who would be called ‘nerds’.”

Tri Delta at Boston University got 73.4% of the overall rating and only 52% of popularity on Greek Rank, a platform for students to rate fraternities and sororities from multiple aspects.

“This kind of ‘discrimination’ was more obvious in my chapter,” Ms Feng said. “Pretty girls were in groups, and they would never hang out with ‘nerds’. And due to the competitive joining process, some girls showed a sense of superiority to mock girls outside the sorority.”

In addition to the discrimination, Ms Feng found it was too money-and-time consuming, so she dropped out of her sorority after joining for a year.

“I had to pay around $300 for membership every semester, and if you were absent from the weekly meeting, you would be fined a few dozen dollars,” said Ms Feng. “I don’t think it makes any sense because their meetings usually took around two to three hours talking about nonsense.”

Feng Yuan concluded her experience as “buying friends with money”. She recalled having some girls in her sorority unfriended her on Facebook immediately after she left the group, even though they had parties together before.

“The only close friend I had from my sorority was my big, who took care of me when I was a freshman and whom I could have real heart-to-heart talks with,” Ms Feng said. “As for the sorority thing, it can happen anywhere. It’s just a bunch of rich girls doing everything together every day.”