HAD never expected my first class at Yale to be this: a freshman counselor brandishing a fake penis, looking for a volunteer to demonstrate how to use a condom. I was 18 and from Shanghai. Some girls giggled. I turned my eyes away, unable to bring myself to look at it.

About 25 of us were sitting on an expensive-looking Oriental rug, surrounded by intricately carved wood paneling, at the safe-sex seminar required of all freshmen. The sun streamed obliquely through the stained glass, lighting up the painted figures on the windows: men with pointed hats and long beards. A red-haired boy named Trevor raised his hand, strolled to the center of the room and adroitly demonstrated.

I had imagined many times about my first class at Yale, and not even once had I conjured up this image.

Exactly one week earlier, the husband of my father's friend's friend had dropped me off at Yale. My parents had accompanied me as far as they could, to the check-in counter at the Shanghai international airport. My mother had packed everything she imagined I would need, from toilet paper to a silk, high-collared qipao, an elegant traditional Chinese dress. In the end, my luggage weighed 150 pounds.

It was the fall of 1994, and the campus was verdant. Ten of us were now sitting in a circle under the canopy of a thick oak tree. For orientation, we were supposed to get to know one another. But I couldn't understand much of what they were saying, which I realize now was probably because the word ''like'' was sprinkled into almost every other sentence -- ''I was, like, whatever.'' And that is when I started to panic.

The afternoon is now stored in my brain like scenes from a silent movie. I tried to look and sound cool, but it seemed impossible (admittedly, my oversize Snoopy T-shirt, popular in Shanghai back then, compounded the problem). A student from California cracked a joke, and the rest laughed, leaning backward and forward, unable to sit straight. I sat like a statue. Soon, people stopped talking with me. When the time came for hamburgers, everybody sprinted toward the grill, and I trailed behind, wondering what a grill was.

Soon, my panic turned into doubt. Why was I here? I had been perfectly happy in China. When night fell, I wanted to cry.

But there was no way back, not when my mother had spent a whole year's salary, $800, just to fly me here. The Cultural Revolution had closed all schools when my parents were teenagers, and neither finished high school. My dad was a government clerk, and my mom worked in a textile factory, bent over a sewing machine year after year in a thick soup of air filled with tiny cotton fibers. But she had a great passion for her only child's education.

In 10th grade, I had discovered from a pirated book about American college admissions that I could apply just like any American teenager, taking the Test of English as a Foreign Language and the G.R.E., the graduate admissions test (the SAT was not given in China).

''Lulu, this is your chance,'' my mother told me. Lulu is what my family calls me.

So on the nights when I didn't sleep at my high school dormitory (eight to a room), I stayed with my grandparents, whose one-room apartment was bigger than my parents', memorizing English words from vocabulary books. I would sit with my back facing the color TV, on which my grandmother watched sentimental novellas with earphones. On another side of the room, my grandfather sat in bed with earphones, holding a radio tuned to the BBC's Chinese-language programs.

Even when I was very small, my mother had told me that I could do anything and be anyone, and that smart people went abroad to study. I hadn't known there were many countries; I had thought there were only two: China and the Foreign Country. I remember wishing I had been born in the Foreign Country.

Now, here I was.

The Big Picture

My admission to Yale on a full scholarship was part of the larger trend to diversify American campuses (and I did score in the top fifth percentile on the G.R.E.). As Kingman Brewster, the former president of Yale, once wrote, ''An excessively homogeneous class will not learn anywhere near as much from each other as a class whose backgrounds and interests and values have something new to contribute to the common experience.''

Today, almost 8 percent of Yale's students come from abroad, and that figure is likely to grow. In 2000, Yale joined Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in admitting international students regardless of their ability to pay. For the class of 2005, Yale admitted nine freshmen directly from China, a record, and all with full financial aid. In 1994, I was the only one.

According to the Institute of International Education, close to 60,000 Chinese students study in the United States -- the largest number from any country for the third year, thanks to its enormous population. About 13 percent of the students are undergraduates, and the rest are pursuing advanced degrees. Students from China and India in particular excel in the sciences and technology.

Some critics, including the anti-immigration group the Federation for American Immigration Reform, have complained that Chinese students have no intention of returning home, instead acquiring work visas, perhaps citizenship, and settling in this country. While there is no reliable data, anecdotal evidence suggests this may be true, and the low ratio of return has been used as an argument for trying to reduce visas to the Chinese.

Since the revelation that at least one of the Sept. 11 terrorists had entered the United States on a student visa, the whole visa issue -- who is entering, where they are going and when they leave -- has been thrown into the national spotlight. As have foreign students themselves.

There is no small number of them: almost 550,000 attended American colleges and universities in the last school year. I imagine that many of these students plunked down across the United States have traveled a path similar to mine, filled with loneliness and confusion but also with ambition. And I imagine that, as they forge their future on American campuses, a dose of quixotic bravery helps sustain them. Culture Shock

I had acquired my English vocabulary by cramming for the G.R.E.'s as a 17-year-old. So when the dryer in the dorm broke, I screamed, ''I am indignant at the machine.'' When I grew frustrated with my inability to speak English well, I said, ''My English has regressed.'' When I met the father of a dorm mate, I asked, ''What appellation would you like me to call you?'' When I talked about the American public, I called them ''the plebeians.''

And when my classmates said they were dissed or screwed up, I asked them, ''What's said?'' or stared at them with a blank face.

One evening during my second month at Yale, the boys next door appeared in our suite and decided to give me a class on ''useful'' words. They rattled off a dozen words and phrases that are unprintable here.

''Now pronounce the word after me.''

''No, no, no, that's not right. You've gotta say this word with more force.''

They laughed so hard they almost had tears in their eyes. I thought they meant well, so I laughed with them. They also told me to grind my hips when I dance and to start eating pizzas.

One evening, my four American roommates and I decided to have dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant near our dorm. They put on makeup and perfume as I watched them in our bathroom. Neither item was familiar to me, because Chinese high schools did not allow them at the time. As we walked briskly along Chapel Street, they sang a song they had all learned as kids. I couldn't sing along, but when people smiled at us, I felt for a moment as if I belonged.

At the restaurant, I found the menu confusing, so one of my roommates ordered ravioli for me. But when it came, the first bite sent me sprinting to the bathroom. I wanted to throw up. I had never imagined that the harmless looking dumplings, filled with cheese, would make my stomach turn. And when the check came, it occurred to me that the meal I had hardly touched cost enough to feed my family for a week.

Later, even as I started to experiment with cheese and to curse occasionally in the American way, I found that I badly missed my high school buddies. Americans are different. For them, good friends are people who want to ''get together'' once a week or so, but the Chinese are always together. Maybe this is what people mean when they say Americans are more individualistic and independent.

All-Nighters with the Western World

In the grogginess at the end of a library nap, I wasn't sure where I was. I stretched out my arm to reach a human being, but what I grabbed was a used copy of ''The Odyssey,'' the book about going home. My heart ached.

It was 2 a.m. The library, flooded with white fluorescent light and reeking of musty books and sweaty sneakers, was eerily quiet. My readings seemed endless. I had been admitted into a three-course, yearlong freshman program called Directed Studies, dubbed Directed Suicide by Yalies. It was supposed to introduce us to ''the splendors of the Western civilization,'' in the words of the catalog, by force feeding the canons of philosophy, literature and history.

I wanted very much to study the Western canon, because I knew nothing about it. Yes, McDonald's ads and Madonna posters are plastered on Shanghai streets, but few Western ideas filtered through. We had been informed of Karl Marx's habit of sitting at the same spot in the British Library, for instance, but had read none of his original words. Western civilization was alien, mysterious and thus alluring. Besides, because I longed to be accepted here, I yearned to understand the American society. What better way to comprehend it than to study the very ideas on which it is based?

But at 2 a.m., I was weary of them all: Homer, Virgil, Herodotus and Plato. Their words were obtuse and the presentations circuitous. The professors here do not teach in the same way that teachers in China do. Studying humanities in China means memorizing all the ''correct,'' standard interpretations given during lectures. Here, professors toss out provocative questions and let the students argue, research and write papers on their own. At Yale, I often waited for the end-of-class ''correct'' answers, which never came.

Learning humanities was well-grounded repetition in China, but it was shaky originality here.

And it could be even shakier for me. The name Agamemnon was impossibly long to pronounce, and as a result I didn't recognize it when we were discussing him in the seminars. I had written my first English essay ever just a year earlier, when applying to colleges, and now came the papers analyzing the canons. And I simply didn't write in English fast enough to take notes in classes.

I hoped my diligence would make up for lack of preparation. On weekend nights, when my American roommates were out on dates, I would tell them I had planned a date with Dante or Aristotle. (They didn't think it was funny.)

On one of those weekend nights, I wrote a paper on Aeneas, the protagonist of ''The Aeneid,'' who was destined to found Rome but reluctant to leave behind his native Troy.

''Aeneas agonizes,'' I wrote. ''He hesitates. Natural instincts call him to stick to the past, while at the same time, he feels obligated to obey his father's instructions for the future. His present life is split, pulled apart by the bygone days and by the days to come.'' I saw myself in what I wrote.

During calls home every two weeks, my mother pleaded with me to take chemistry or biology. Science was the same everywhere, she said. And I, like everybody else from China, was well prepared in math, physics and chemistry. (To graduate from a standard six-year Chinese high school, one needs to take five years of physics, four years of chemistry and three years of biology.)

Instead, I visited the writing tutor -- there is one in every undergraduate residential hall -- for every paper I turned in. My papers were always written days before they were due. I lingered after classes to pester professors with questions. My classmates lent me their notes so I could learn the skill of note-taking in English.

By the time I missed home so much that soup dumplings and sauteed eels popped up in my head as I read, Nietzsche had replaced Plato on the chronological reading list and Flaubert Homer. And every paper of mine came back with an A.

Theory of Relativity

I had my first Thanksgiving dinner in Connecticut, at a friend's family house on the beach. I was surrounded by plump nuts, clinking wine glasses, a stuffed refrigerator and a greenhouse full of lush plants. In the background, I could hear the ocean licking the shore.

When the turkey came out of the oven, I was truly amazed by its size. The Chinese translation of turkey is literally ''fire chicken,'' and I thought turkey was really a breed of chicken. Minutes later, as I clumsily cut the white meat with the newly familiar knife and fork in the soft yellow light of a home -- the first I had seen since I left my own -- one guest denounced the Chinese one-child policy as a violation of human rights.

That wasn't the first time I heard such a charge. I am an only child, and so are the majority of my high school classmates. How could Americans idly excoriate this policy when they had never experienced the misery caused by overcrowding? How could they speculate that only children become psychologically damaged when my friends and I had grown up very happily?

''What alternative does China have?'' I shot back. ''Everybody does what he or she pleases, and then have a lot of people starve?''

Regardless of the consequences, the guest said, no one's right to family planning should be violated.

''But didn't Aristotle, one of your guys, say men are political animals?'' I was galvanized. ''Why shouldn't people make some sacrifices for their community? The individual good will not be realized without the collective good.''

I would defend my government's policies passionately many times, in front of friends, professors and classmates. Growing up in Shanghai, China's richest city, I had seen a society becoming only more prosperous. People moved to bigger apartments (my senior year, my parents moved from a single room to a two-bedroom duplex), earned higher salaries, wore more stylish clothes and ate more meat.

The wounds and scars of China talked about so often in the West were not mine to see.

But as I was being brainwashed -- in the words from back home -- I became unsure of my own possession of the truth as I learned in classes the idea of objectivity and theories of cultural relativism. Maybe there is no one single truth after all, I would come to think.

A New Tao

When I met Niping Wu in my freshman year, I knew instantly that my parents would like me to be like her. Niping, a Shanghai native who had graduated from Yale College, was starting her first year at Yale Law School, hoping to become a Wall Street lawyer.

By then, Wall Street had become the latest symbol of success for Chinese students in America. In the first 10 years after our government reopened the nation's gate in the late 1970's, most Chinese students who came to America chose careers in science and technology because of their good preparation in these fields. But many of the Chinese students of the 1990's, speaking better English than their predecessors, wanted to share the prosperity and glamour of Wall Street. And hadn't we come here to become more prosperous? My parents, rather typical of their generation, had endured the heartbreak of yielding their only child to an unfamiliar country so that I could live a more comfortable life eventually. A bigger apartment, maybe even a house; a car, hopefully even a Mercedes-Benz.

''If you study hard and get good grades, you can attend Yale Law, too,'' Niping told me as we nibbled on meatloaves at one of the Yale dining halls, her smile tinged with pride.

I was at a loss. In the high-minded way of a college student, I felt living one's life merely to be middle class was petty. Besides, I didn't need to cross the oceans to be comfortable. Shanghai has been on the upward swing since the beginning of the 1990's. But being a religious agnostic who grew up in a society where ideologies were de-emphasized, I wondered what there was in life besides making your family comfortable.

I met Mu Zhu, then a Harvard senior, at a gathering of Shanghai students in Cambridge, Mass., for the annual Harvard-Yale football game. Having arrived in the United States wishing to study business, he discovered that he loved tackling intellectual questions. One year after college, he abandoned a Wall Street career and followed his passion to the Ph.D. program in statistics at Stanford University. He now teaches this subject at a Canadian university.

''My dad laughs at me,'' he told me recently, ''because in dollar amounts, I make less than his secretary.'' His father is an executive at a telecommunications company in Shanghai.

But not being the statistical average, and not just for the sake of it, makes him happy. Of the roughly 30 students directly from China who graduated from Harvard and Yale in the last decade, more than half are working for investment banks, corporate law firms or management consulting companies.

The thought of Wall Street made the gray fall break of my junior year even grayer. I was practically the only one left in my dorm, since most people had gone home for Thanksgiving. On my to-do list was to order practice tests of the LSAT, the law school admissions exam. But I was depleted of the adrenaline and enthusiasm that had filled me when I was a high school senior applying to American colleges.

Unlike my American peers, I wouldn't have the luxury of indecision at the end of my senior year. I had to either continue my schooling or start a job right away, or I would have to leave the United States. I wasn't ready to take the flight back to Shanghai. Most of my friends in Shanghai still thought that only losers returned home, and I wouldn't have completed one of my own missions: to understand Western society.

Perhaps I couldn't imagine myself as a capitalist, which was my image of investment bankers and lawyers. But deep down I wanted very much to please my parents, completing their dream of their only child buying a grand house in an affluent suburb.

Drew Nuland, who had interviewed me so many years earlier for admission to Yale, happened to call the evening before Thanksgiving, back home in Connecticut from Shanghai. What were my plans, he asked. ''Law school,'' I said. But hadn't I told him I wanted to be a reporter when he first interviewed me?

''Yes, what happened to that?'' I asked myself.

I had wanted to be a writer since I was little, and I had indeed arrived at Yale wishing to become a journalist. But that dream had seemed preposterous when I arrived. ''You don't even speak English that well, and you want to make a living off writing?'' I thought. The editors at The Yale Daily News hadn't had the patience for my imperfect English.

But now, more than two years later, I spoke better English, and I had finally started to believe that I got good grades for my papers not because the professors had taken pity on that poor Chinese girl.

So I changed directions. During my senior year, I applied to graduate programs in journalism at Columbia and New York University.

Columbia required an entrance exam to test knowledge of current affairs and writing. Question No. 1 was to identify Alice Walker.

Because my history major had centered on works by dead white men, I had never heard of Alice Walker. Nor had I encountered anyone with the name Alice in the United States. Concluding that the name must be out of fashion, I inferred that Ms. Walker must be British. And who was famous in England? The Spice Girls. So I wrote in the blank space, ''Alice Walker is one of the Spice Girls.''

I still apparently had much to learn. Columbia rejected my application. I attended New York University instead, and stayed on course.

Now I have lived here for more than seven years, more than a quarter of my life. I have become as American to my own people as I am Chinese to the Americans, thanks in part to American heterogeneity on the one hand and Chinese homogeneity on the other. And I have grown fond of my adopted country, in particular its immigrant City of New York, where I am no longer a stranger.

On the nights when I miss my mom's sauteed eels, I can take the N or R train to Chinatown, whose slippery eels are good enough to fool my taste buds.

And, no small consideration, my work is protected here by the First Amendment.

I haven't ruled out returning to China, but I will not do so simply to follow or defy conventions. To learn to choose freely is what I -- and perhaps hundreds of thousands of other international students -- have come here for.

After receiving her master's degree in journalism from New York University, Yilu Zhao was an intern at The St. Petersburg Times in Florida. She is now one at The New York Times.