I showed up in Ghana cocky.
I expected to touch down and adjust immediately to my semester-long University of California Education Abroad Program at the University of Ghana.
But as I traveled around Accra by tro-tro, I collected instances of men following me down alleys, grabbing me in markets and yelling “Hong Kong girl” and “ching chong” from their cars.
I found myself feeling jumpy, paranoid and frustrated at my inability to untwine race-based misogyny and simple cultural warmth. Many things I totaled as bad experiences were actually situations I had misunderstood.
One evening, I came home to my all-girls dorm being “raided” by the boys’ dorm from up the road. The boys came into the courtyard, made a lot of noise, shot off rifle blanks, played music and some wore very little clothing. I walked into the swarm at around 9 p.m., alone. As I wove through the crowd, a gun went off beside me. I shrieked. The boys laughed and jeered. When I reached my room, I burst into tears.
As I calmed down more, I realized that, though I had felt at risk of assault, I hadn’t been at all. This was their space, their home. This “raid” was a tradition of theirs, an event with dancing and cheer.
I also began to doubt if I would have felt so unsafe had those been white people instead of black people. I was constantly worried I was plagued by confirmation bias, influenced by broad-stroked stereotypes of Africa.
I was going on month six of traveling – I had taken spring quarter off from UCLA to hop around Asia and spent the summer working in Australia.
With these solo travel experiences under my belt, I thought I’d leave the program fading in the red dust, taking long-haul transportation to the mountains or savannah.
I slept through the comprehensive orientations our advisors prepared for us, preferring to catch up on jet lag. I didn’t bother befriending my UCEAP peers, who I assumed would slow me down as I flitted around Ghana, leaving town every weekend for a new adventure, just as I saw my peers do in Europe or South America on Instagram.
I did no flitting. Instead, I crawled inside myself in a way I never had before.
By the end of the program, I only left my dorm to attend my classes, grab a bite or disappear for long, undisturbed walks on the jungle-laced campus farm.
I attracted male attention without fail. In Ghana, I witnessed men hit on women casually and often and was told it was a sign of friendliness.
Still, I could not adjust to what I perceived as the touchier, more romantic Ghanaian culture, which, in my experience, often felt racialized.
The worst incidents always happened when I was alone.
Once, a Ghanaian taxi driver took me on a circuitous route home at night and started telling me all the sexual things he’d like to do to me. This was harassment.
Without friends to witness, I could not gauge if I was ever in danger or if I was just suddenly visibly different for the first time, and reacting exactly like someone who has gone her entire life not knowing what that is like.
I began aggressively yelling at every man who approached me instead of utilizing humor to redirect the conversation as the UCEAP therapist advised. Irritable and paranoid, when another taxi driver later attempted to overcharge me the Ghanaian equivalent of 20 U.S. cents, I threw the money down and slammed his door.
Only months before, I could never have imagined myself treating someone else like that, much less someone in a country in which I was a guest.
I chose to act like an entitled American, not yet realizing that I was an entitled American – having the power of the U.S. dollar, U.S. consulate and an entire program dedicated to making my experience good.
If I really hated Ghana so much, why didn’t I leave?
Somewhere in the crosshairs of race, gender and nationality, I lost the will to continue exploring. I could not appreciate the bright professors I learned from and fragrant jollof and crispy fried fish I ate. I no longer noticed the gorgeous, towering cathedrals and Empire State Building-like termite hills that shot up along my path to class nor the tropical heat that warmed each day.
Instead, I fixated on the limits of my mobility. Could I really go wherever I wanted?
As I started speaking to my American peers in Ghana about mobility, I slowly grasped that being unable to do what I wanted whenever I wanted was not novel to many of the black and Latino people around me.
Some of them expressed to me that the alienation I felt looking around my lecture halls and not seeing another face the same skin tone as mine is pretty run- of-the-mill for a student of color attending a school like UCLA or UC Berkeley, at which black or African American students make up less than 5% of the population.
One of my black friends said offhandedly that he chose not to study abroad in Spain because it was “not for someone like him.”
Meanwhile, on social media, I saw my UCLA friends enjoying baguettes under the Eiffel Tower, eating tzatziki in Greece and indeed, drinking sangria in Spain.
So I wondered, who gets to go where and in what capacity?
A continent away, Sue Han, a third-year linguistics and Spanish student, was grappling with similar questions in Santiago, Chile.
Born in the United States, raised in Korea and now attending UCLA, Han found herself fitted into a Chilean racial calculus different than any she’d experienced.
Han said in Chile, Asian immigrants make up much of the economic underclass, often doing manual labor, like working in restaurants and grocery stores. One of Han’s friend’s homestay parents once told her to leave a chore, saying “That’s work for the chinos.”
She said her appearance sometimes attracted sexual exoticization and prolonged looks as she moved around Santiago, a lively Andean city in a tiara of snowcaps.
Then the protests broke out. According to The Guardian, in October 2019, protests over a rise in subway prices escalated into a national uprising demanding structural political and economic changes.
Tear gas spread. The metro burned down. Several people died, countless more were arrested. Han had to orient herself within a rapidly evolving social movement – as an American, but also as an Asian American, and as an Asian American only in the country for a matter of months at that.
What was a foreigner’s place within the protests? At the time, Han told herself it was to learn as much about what was going on as possible, raise awareness and add to the count of protesters.
At the same time, she realized her limitations as a visitor. She looked different from the rest of the crowd. When the protests grew dangerous and nationalistic, Han said people around her would see her and her friends and tell them to “Leave right now,” almost as if they were saying “This isn’t your place.”
Maybe it wasn’t her place among body-armored military and college students trying to ease a boa-constrictor-tight government. Han still doesn’t know.
Studying abroad – dipping into another country’s educational system for only a few months – is wrapped in privilege.
“Traveling isn’t something my family really does, like that’s a really white thing to do, a really rich thing to do,” said Maripau Paz, a Latina fourth-year political science and global studies student.
That’s why she felt so lucky to fund her study abroad program through scholarships and aid, she said. She spent the summer traveling around Shanghai on a bullet train and eating soup dumplings.
Though 50% of UCEAP students were on some kind of financial aid last year, studying abroad can tend to attract financially privileged students who can afford to go in the first place.
While in China, Paz could only afford to splurge on one short trip to the Great Wall of China, while others in her program went somewhere splashy each weekend.
“You’re most likely with people in a high-income tax bracket who have traveled before,” she said. “Whereas for me, it was my first time leaving the country.”
For some, a Western passport and study-abroad program create a very specific type of travel experience.
In Ghana, I had an insurance-covered UCEAP-approved therapist. I had capable and kind advisors who took students sick with malaria to the hospital in the middle of the night without complaint. There was a UCEAP-designated van. There were special information sessions about culture shock with snacks.
But that does not invalidate the unique difficulties students of color face going abroad, who make up nearly 64% of the more than 2,000 Bruins who go each year, even though some of those students certainly have advantages because of their American citizenship.
What – if anything – could be done by UCEAP to prepare them for the realities of traveling as a minority?
Mia Glionna, a third-year African American studies and American literature and culture student, studied abroad in Europe two summers ago.
Traveling in Spain for her program and later Italy afterward, Glionna, a half African American, half white student, said, because of her appearance, she was not subject to overt racism. However, she still felt she was susceptible to racial microaggressions.
For example, in Italy, people would tell her she takes more after her black mother than her Italian father. Glionna said from the looks on their faces she knew this remark had negative connotations. Glionna did, however, want to be clear that just because she primarily experienced microaggressions does not mean that more virulent racism cannot happen to other people of color in Europe.
These racial microaggressions were sometimes second fiddle to Europeans’ overall reaction to her as an American.
“When you’re an American there, period, they have a certain image of you,” she said.
The stereotype, according to Glionna, is that Americans are loud, kind of careless and sometimes dumb.
Though she said nationality often took precedence over race in people’s treatment of her, Glionna still would have liked for her professors to bring up race in her orientations or have had more guidance counselors on-site.
“They don’t prepare you for the minority experience of studying abroad,” Glionna said. “And I think they should.”
Mauricio Cobian, associate director of UCEAP programs, said he would love to discuss with students how their identities might manifest abroad, but this is often stymied by the fact that students rarely give feedback when they return to UCLA.
“I’m going to say nine out of 10 times, ... once a student returns, they don’t come back and talk to us,” Cobian said. “It’s rare that we even hear any kind of story, whether it’s good or bad.”
Further, each society is accordion-folded with nuanced histories of colonialism and immigration. For example, being of mixed-race descent is different in Brazil than it is in Britain than it is in Westwood – how could study abroad advisors know which future students to give a warning to?
“I can’t sit in an advising session and go, ‘You kind of look like a student of color, you might want to consider these things,’” Cobian said. “It’s ultimately up to the student to engage.”
UCEAP cannot control every factor of every students’ abroad experiences, but Cobian said he immediately put conversations about this topic into motion in his office after our interview.
I wish I had known more about what Ghana might be like for me, how deep unwanted sexual attention might cut into my mental state. Maybe UCEAP could have foreseen that, maybe not.
Despite this, I miss Ghana now, especially the friends who helped me when I was most upset about the worst incidents of harassment.
Glionna, too, used community to round a corner. She said she and other students of color made it their mission to seek out black neighborhoods in each new city. In Madrid, her professor offhandedly mentioned that one neighborhood they visited on an excursion was in the flux of gentrification. The enclave’s Senegalese restaurants, beauty salons stocked with black hair products and the higher number of people who looked like her helped Glionna grow more confident and comfortable in Spain.
Han found her own way of moving through Chile as an Asian American. She couldn’t imagine the people coming up to her with wide smiles but racially off-color words actually meant to offend her. She said she knew each interaction was in the context of good-natured curiosity.
But Han still needed some pointers on how to react best. So she looked online.
“I ended up researching by myself after a month or so of being in Chile how to deal with subtle racism in Latin America – and there were actually a lot of YouTube videos,” she said.
Han learned to take seemingly racist comments as opportunities for a good conversation about race or friendship.
Soon, she stopped getting angry at every single interaction. She began to understand that the reality is that most of the world may greet her with some preconceived notions, but she has the power to shift these notions through her own actions.
Han is beamingly glad she chose Chile as her study abroad location.
“It taught me more than I lost.”
For students of color who might be thinking about studying abroad, I say go.
Go, but be aware of how your identity may manifest in your semester-long home.