Julia Sun, a law student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who spent the first 10 years of her life in Shanghai, was shopping at an Asian grocery store half a mile from campus last year when a package in the snack aisle made her do a double take.

朱莉娅·孙（音）是伊利诺伊大学香槟分校的一名法学院学生，10岁之前生活在上海。去年，她在离校园不到一公里的一家亚洲超市购物时，零食区的一个包装让她眼前一亮。

“They had this waffle-biscuit thing that I ate in second grade,” Ms. Sun said. It had been so long since she had seen the waffle-biscuit thing that she was sure it was extinct.

“那是一种华夫饼干，我二年级的时候吃过，”朱莉娅·孙说。她已经很久没见过这种饼干了，还以为它早就停产了。

“I thought I was dreaming,” she said.

“我还以为自己在做梦呢，”她说。

For the more than 6,000 students from China in Urbana and Champaign, the wealth of products and dishes from back home can make the two cities seem like a mirage rising from the plains of central Illinois.

对于厄巴纳市和香槟市的6000多名中国学生来说，丰富的家乡特产和菜肴让这两座城市仿佛成了从伊利诺伊州中部平原上升起的一场“海市蜃楼”。

Surrounded by miles of flat, green fields of soy and grain corn, the cities have a combined population of about 127,000 people and a skyline that rarely pokes above 15 stories. The area isn’t anybody’s idea of a major metropolitan center. It certainly isn’t the first place you’d think to look when you are in the mood for serious Chinese food.

这两座城市被绵延数公里平坦的、绿油油的大豆田和谷物田环绕，总人口约12.7万，天际线最高的建筑也很少超过15层。这一地区并非人们印象中的大都会中心，按理说，想吃到地道的中餐，这里绝不会是首选之地。

去年，伊利诺伊大学香槟分校招收了6000多名中国大陆学生，还有数百名台湾学生。

After a quick walk from the university’s main quad, though, you can sit down to a faithful rendition of spicy bullfrog hot pot in a Sichuanese broth studded with green peppercorns. A nearby restaurant serves yangrou paomo, a Shaanxi lamb soup with floating scraps of flatbread that is a favorite in Xi’an. If you are struck by a late-night craving for stinky tofu in the style of Changsha, you can get it after 8:30 p.m. from a chef who dresses fried black cubes of fermented bean curd in a glistening orange chile oil, the way vendors do on the streets of Hunan’s capital city.

然而，从大学主校区出发，步行一小段路，你就能坐下来享用一顿正宗的川味麻辣牛蛙火锅，汤底里满是青花椒。附近还有一家餐馆供应羊肉泡馍——这是陕西的一道羊肉汤，里面漂着掰碎的馍，是西安人喜爱的美食。如果深夜突然想吃长沙风味的臭豆腐，晚上8点半之后也能吃到，厨师会把炸好的黑色发酵豆腐块淋上亮晶晶的橙色辣椒油，和湖南省会街头小贩的做法一模一样。

You’d have to hunt to find these dishes in a major city like Chicago, 135 miles away, but they have become a fixture of life in Champaign and Urbana. At least two dozen Chinese restaurants, bakeries, bubble-tea shops and Asian grocery stores are clustered close to the campus. Along a five-block stretch of Green Street, the main commercial strip in the part of Champaign known as Campustown, window posters and sidewalk sandwich boards advertise dumplings, noodles and stir-fries in larger-than-life color photographs captioned in Chinese and usually, but not always, English.

在200公里外的芝加哥这样的大城市，你得费一番功夫才能找到这样的菜肴，但在香槟市和厄巴纳市，它们早已成为生活的一部分。校园附近聚集了至少20多家中餐馆、面包店、珍珠奶茶店和亚洲超市。在香槟市被称为“校园镇”的主要商业街格林街，短短五个街区的范围内，橱窗海报和人行道上的夹板广告牌上满是饺子、面条和炒菜的大幅彩色照片，配有中文说明，通常也会有英文（但并不是都有）。

Most of these places are quite new. Almost all have opened in the past 15 years. Dai Shi, a local pastry chef originally from Fuzhou, first visited Champaign in 2010, when her parents owned a Chinese restaurant in town. They had only a handful of competitors, she said.

这些店大多是今年来新开的，历史几乎都不会超过15年。石黛（音）是当地的一名甜点师，老家在福州，她2010年第一次来到香槟市，当时她父母在这里开了一家中餐馆。她说，那时候竞争对手寥寥无几。

At the time, about 1,100 students from China attended the university. Now there are more than five times as many, and the campus area has become a little Chinatown on the prairie.

那时约有1100名中国学生就读于这所大学。如今，中国学生的数量是当时的五倍多，校园周边也成了草原上的一个小小唐人街。

与其他有众多留学生的城镇的餐馆一样，伊利诺伊州香槟市的御膳房代表了美国中餐业的新浪潮。

New York University enrolls more Chinese students than any other school in the United States. But the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is in a virtual tie for second place with the University of Southern California, according a New York Times analysis of 2023 visa data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

纽约大学的中国学生数量在美国各高校中位居第一。但根据《纽约时报》对美国移民与海关执法局2023年签证数据的分析，伊利诺伊大学香槟分校与南加州大学几乎并列第二。

Urbana and Champaign are not the only places where the surge in international students has changed the local culture and economy. But the area’s rural isolation and unusually large population of Chinese students make it a striking example of that change.

国际学生数量的激增改变了许多地方的当地文化和经济，厄巴纳和香槟市并非个例。但这一地区地处乡村、相对偏僻，且中国学生数量异常庞大，使其成为这种变化的一个鲜明例证。

In the coming months or years, they may also make it something of a laboratory for the effects of the Trump administration’s cuts to research budgets and clampdowns on visas for international students, especially those from China.

未来数月或数年，这里或许还会成为一个实验室，可以用来观察特朗普政府削减研究预算、收紧留学生签证（尤其是中国学生）所带来的影响。

Feast in a Cornfield

玉米地里的盛宴

College-age students in China have a nickname for the University of Illinois: yu mi de. It means the Cornfield. The university is better known there for its surrounding farmland and its strengths in STEM fields like engineering and computer science than for its proximity to crunchy Northern-style stir-fried pork intestines. Each August, hundreds of new Chinese students show up with no inkling that the Cornfield is full of foods they grew up on.

中国的大学生们给伊利诺伊大学起了个昵称——“玉米地”。这所大学因其周边的农田，以及在工程、计算机科学等STEM领域的实力而闻名，而不是因为它附近可以吃到北方风味的爆猪肚。每年8月，数以百计新来的中国学生来到这里，完全没想到这片“玉米地”里竟有他们从小吃到大的食物。

Only occasionally do recruiters for the school try to tempt prospective scholars with visions of dumplings. “When I was applying, I Zoomed twice with my adviser and he told me, every time, ‘The Chinese food here is fabulous. You’re going to love it,’” said Scarlett Qian, a native of Shanghai who is in a doctoral program at the university’s Gies College of Business.

学校的招生人员偶尔会用饺子之类的美食来吸引潜在的学生。“我申请的时候，和导师Zoom视频了两次，每次他都告诉我，‘这里的中餐太棒了，你一定会喜欢的’，”来自上海、正在该校吉斯商学院攻读博士学位的斯嘉丽·钱（音）说。

In June, I had dinner with Ms. Qian and two of her Chinese-born classmates in their favorite Green Street restaurant, Northern Cuisine. We sat down right away, something they said is rare during the school year, when there are almost always lines at the door.

6月，我和钱女士以及她的两位华裔同学在她们最喜欢的格林街餐厅“北味轩”共进晚餐。我们很快就落座了，她们说，这在学年期间很难得，这样的时候，门口几乎总是排着队。

香槟市渔满楼餐厅的菜单上有1000多种菜品。干煸肥肠是北味轩餐厅的特色菜之一。

Northern Cuisine opened two years ago, with slate-gray floor tiles, midcentury-modern furniture and graphite-colored pendant lamps above the tables. The lighting makes it easy to get crisp, social-media-ready pictures of dishes like guo bao rou, a specialty of Harbin: strips of pork fried twice to create a pale golden shell filled with tiny pockets of air that keep it from getting soggy in the nearly transparent sweet-and-sour glaze.

北味轩是两年前开业的，店内铺着青灰色地砖，摆放着中世纪现代风格的家具，餐桌上方悬挂着石墨色的吊灯。在这样的光线下，拍出来的菜肴照片清晰，很适合发社交媒体，比如哈尔滨特色菜锅包肉：猪肉条经过两次油炸，形成浅金色的外壳，里面布满细小的气穴，裹上近乎透明的糖醋汁也不会变软。

“That’s very comparable to what I had in China,” said Xuanyi Li, who grew up in Shandong province.

“这和我在国内吃的很像，”在山东长大的李轩逸（音）说。

More than 270,000 students from China attended American colleges and universities last year. Restaurants catering to them represent a new wave in Chinese dining in the United States. In Manhattan, the blocks around N.Y.U. and Columbia, which 20 years ago held little appeal to fans of Chinese food, have become troves of Shanghai drunken crab and Hong Kong-style barbecue pork buns. You can find high-level Chinese cooking near campuses in Lincoln, Neb., and Iowa City.

去年，有超过27万名中国学生在美国高校就读。为他们服务的餐馆代表了美国中餐业的新浪潮。20年前在曼哈顿，纽约大学和哥伦比亚大学周边的街区几乎没有像样的中餐，现在已经成为上海醉蟹和港式叉烧包的宝地。在内布拉斯加州林肯市和艾奥瓦城的大学校园附近甚至也能吃到高水平的中餐。

They are more cosmopolitan than the linoleum-floored joints in the old urban Chinatowns that started out feeding home-style cooking to villagers from Guangdong in the early 20th century. They are more up-to-date than the palaces of aristocratic Chinese cuisine overseen by highly trained chefs who fled the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and ’70s. Aimed at younger customers whose memories of China are still fresh, they tend to be informal, fairly inexpensive if not rock-bottom cheap, and faithful in recreating true regional cuisines.

与20世纪初为广东移民提供家常菜、铺着油毡地板的旧城区唐人街餐馆相比，这些新餐馆更具国际化气息；与20世纪60至70年代因躲避文化大革命而来的那些训练有素的厨师经营的贵族式中餐厅相比，这些新餐馆更加与时俱进。它们面向的是离开中国不久的年轻顾客，往往氛围轻松、价格适中（虽然并非极低），且忠实地再现了真正的地方菜系。

Students in Urbana and Champaign trade intel on regional dishes in group texts in Chinese on the social-media apps RedNote and WeChat. The most useful sources for exploring menus around the Cornfield are the Asian-food-delivery apps Hungry Panda and Fantuan, whose vehicles, bearing a logo of an anthropomorphic dumpling, are as common on the streets as red-and-blue Domino’s cars are in other American college towns.

香槟分校的学生们会在小红书和微信等社交媒体的中文群聊里交流各地菜肴的信息。在这片“玉米地”点餐时，最有用的工具是亚洲外卖应用“熊猫外卖”和“饭团”，它们的配送车上印有拟人化的饺子标志，在街头很常见，就像其他美国大学城的红蓝色达美乐披萨车一样。

The drivers “are all Chinese people,” Ms. Qian said. “When they reach my apartment, they call me and speak Mandarin right away.”

“司机都是中国人，”钱女士说，“他们到公寓后，会打电话给我，直接说普通话。”

‘Everyone Is Buckled Up’

“所有人都绷紧了神经”

A year ago on the campaign trail, President Trump proposed that all international students who graduated from U.S. colleges be granted green cards “automatically.”

一年前，在竞选活动中，特朗普总统提议，所有从美国大学毕业的国际学生应“自动”获得绿卡。

After taking office in January, Mr. Trump chose a different path. His administration froze applications for student visas in May. When the process started up again a month later, the State Department put out new orders for stricter vetting of applicants’ “online presence” — looking for, among other things, signs of “hostility” toward the United States.

今年1月上任后，特朗普选择了另一条道路。他的政府在5月冻结了学生签证申请。一个月后签证流程恢复时，国务院发布了新指令，对申请者的“网络活动”进行更严格的审查——其中包括寻找对美国表现出“敌意”的迹象等内容。

Consulates were told to give priority to applicants bound for schools where international students make up less than 15 percent of the total. That statistic at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is above 20 percent.

各国领事馆被告知，应优先处理那些前往国际学生占总人数不到15%的学校就读的签证申请。而伊利诺伊大学香槟分校的这一比例超过了20%。

Chinese nationals, who made up more than a quarter of the 1.1 million international students in the United States last year, face extra scrutiny. In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the government would “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students.”

去年，在美国的110万名国际学生中，中国公民占超过四分之一。他们正面临额外的审查。今年5月，国务卿马可·鲁比奥宣布，政府将“大力撤销中国学生的签证”。

Whether tighter screening and delays will cut into the number of international students at the University of Illinois in the coming academic year won’t be clear until September, said Robin Kaler, an associate chancellor.

副校长罗宾·凯勒表示，更严格的审查和签证延迟是否会影响伊利诺伊大学在新学年接收的国际学生人数，要到9月才能看出结果。

北味轩这样的餐厅主要面向的是离开中国不久的年轻食客。

Until then, faculty, administrators and local businesses are bracing for the impact. A significant drop could have a major economic effect on college towns like Urbana and Champaign. International students in Illinois spend $2.4 billion a year and support more than 23,000 jobs in the state, according to a 2024 analysis by NAFSA, a professional association for international educators. Tuition is the biggest expenditure, but real estate, car dealerships and other businesses also benefit.

在此之前，教职员工、校方管理层以及当地商家都在为可能带来的影响做准备。国际学生人数的大幅下降可能会对厄巴纳和香槟这样的大学城产生重大的经济影响。根据国际教育者协会(NAFSA)2024年的一项分析，国际学生每年在伊利诺伊州的支出高达24亿美元，支持了该州超过23000个就业岗位。学费是其中最大的支出项，但房地产、汽车经销商以及其他类型的商家也都从中受益。

New five- and six-story apartment buildings surround Green Street in Champaign, many of them with fitness centers, fire pits and even swimming pools. Ms. Shi, the pastry chef, and her husband own a patisserie and cafe in a building in Urbana that rents almost all its 400 bedrooms to students. By her estimate, about a third of them are Chinese.

香槟市的格林街周边新建起了许多五六层高的公寓楼，其中很多配备了健身中心、露天火炉，甚至还有游泳池。甜点师石女士和她的丈夫在厄巴纳市拥有一家法式甜品店兼咖啡馆，店铺所在的大楼几乎将其400间卧室全部出租给学生。根据她的估计，其中大约三分之一是中国学生。

The presence of thousands of students from China and India and hundreds more from South Korean and Taiwan has caught the eye of national food businesses. In January, the Korean supermarket H Mart came to Urbana. Ten Seconds Yunnan Rice Noodle, which dishes out crossing-bridge noodles at hundreds of locations in China, arrived in Champaign last year, and a branch of Lao Sze Chuan, from the Chicago chef Tony Hu, has been making beef tongue with peppers and other Sichuan dishes in Urbana since 2018.

数以千计中国和印度学生、数百名韩国和台湾学生的到来引起了全国各大餐饮企业的关注。今年1月，韩国超市H Mart进驻厄巴纳市。主营过桥米线的“十秒到云南过桥米线”去年也入驻香槟，在中国拥有数百家门店。而由芝加哥名厨胡晓军创办的“老四川”自2018年起就在厄巴纳市开设分店，供应椒香牛舌等四川菜肴。

Jack Hsiao opened a location of his Taiwanese bubble-tea chain Latea in Campustown in 2016. He’d spent time in the area as an undergraduate at nearby Purdue University, so he bet that the area’s Asian students would appreciate the housemade boba sweetened with roasted-sugar caramel that follows his Taiwanese grandmother’s recipe.

2016年，杰克·萧（音）在香槟大学城开设了他创办的台湾珍珠奶茶品牌Latea分店。他曾在附近的普渡大学就读本科，对该地区颇为熟悉，因此他相信，这里的亚洲学生会喜欢他自家制作的珍珠奶茶——采用他台湾祖母的配方，珍珠用烤糖焦糖调味。

“As soon as we opened the door, we already had customers,” Mr. Hsiao said.

“我们一开门就有客人了，”他说。

御膳房的特色是港式茶点。

As more Asian businesses crowd in, the struggle for survival becomes increasingly Darwinian. Restaurants along Green Street can come and go in the span of a year. Now, their owners are anticipating fewer students from other countries, especially China, said Tim Chao, who owns three cafes with his wife, Ms. Shi.

随着越来越多亚洲商家涌入，生存竞争变得愈发残酷。格林街上的餐馆可能一年内就开开关关。与妻子石女士共同拥有三家咖啡馆的业主提姆·赵 （音）表示，现在店主们预计来自其他国家，尤其是中国的学生会减少。

Until recently, Mr. Chao said, many restaurateurs aimed their offerings squarely at those students. If significant numbers of them aren’t allowed into the United States, or decide to study in a country that feels more welcoming, “the general consensus is that they’ll need to change the flavors, change the menu and how they present themselves,” he said.

赵先生表示，不久之前，许多餐馆老板的产品主要针对这些学生。如果大量学生无法进入美国，或者选择去更友好的国家留学，“普遍的看法是，他们将不得不改变口味、调整菜单以及改变经营方式，”他说。

For instance, the noodle shop that sells Changsha stinky tofu just added grilled meat skewers and other, more entry-level items to its late-night menu.

例如，那家出售长沙臭豆腐的面馆最近在其宵夜菜单中新增了烤肉串和其他更为大众化的菜品。

“Everyone is buckled up right now,” Mr. Chao said.

“所有人都绷紧了神经，”赵先生说。

Many long-term residents are hoping that their favorite restaurants stick around and stay interesting.

许多长期居民希望自己喜爱的餐馆能够继续经营下去，并保持特色。

“This cultural richness enhances us all,” said Leslie Cooperband, a retired cheesemaker who lives in Champaign, after we shared some very good three-cup chicken at Golden Harbor, a Taiwanese and Chinese landmark so celebrated that an indie-rock band wrote a song about it.

“这种文化的多样性让我们大家都受益，”退休奶酪制造师莱斯利·库珀班德在香槟的渔满楼餐厅和我们一起品尝了一道非常美味的三杯鸡后说。渔满楼是一家著名的台湾和中国餐馆，甚至有一支独立摇滚乐队为它写过一首歌。

“It’s like, wow, look at what we have here in this town of 100,000 people,” she said. “And we’re all better for it.”

“就像是——哇，看看我们这座有10万人口的小城里有什么，”她说，“我们因此过得更好了。”