“She’s like a window,” Ms. Li says. “I can watch her and see what Americans are like.”

As a freshman at Central Michigan University, Qi Fan realized that even Americans come from different cultures. His roommates — one black, one white — spoke to him in different accents and had social circles that largely matched their own skin color. Sometimes they would grab him out of bed and drag him to parties where beer pong was played all night.

Mr. Qi had learned of Central Michigan from a Chinese friend who went there, and it was talked up by a company in China that recruits students. Originally he had considered Britain or Germany, but his parents decided there was little point in paying for college in “second-tier” countries, and they would send him to the United States “no matter what, because it’s the super power.”

But the American myth faded once he settled in. He disliked a campus culture that “was all about drinking,” and wanted a high-profile school closer to New York’s finance world. In his sophomore year, Mr. Qi transferred to the University at Albany, of the State University of New York. He says he is happy there, makes trips to New York City in the car he just bought, and avoids any drinking culture by living with other Chinese off campus.

Partying is an American college rite of passage, but socializing in China is usually conducted around the table, where close friends cook, eat and play games together. The fun in standing around a dark room filled with strangers, speakers blaring, is often lost in translation.

Frances Liu, a Yale sophomore from the bustling city of Tianjin, remembers one night freshman year when friends started smoking marijuana. And then offered her the joint. “They were like, ‘Frances, come on,’ ” she says, rolling her eyes. She declined, but the pressure to fit in meant plenty of late nights. “I don’t want to be in a bar drunk and grinding with someone I’ve never met and will never see again,” Ms. Liu says. “I’ve tried that. I went to parties every single weekend freshman year and realized it’s not for me.”

Ms. Liu found refuge in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the towering cube of translucent marble at Yale that holds thousands of the world’s most precious written originals. Last summer she worked there as a page, bringing requested items to researchers. But more satisfying than the $12 an hour was discovering treasures like the original manuscript of Edith Wharton’s “Age of Innocence” in the stacks and leafing through illuminated parchment from the ninth century. The experience has given her a deep appreciation for the West’s values of transparency and access to information. “In China, I’m used to secrecy, so being 18 and able to touch history with my bare fingers really impressed me,” she says.

After a year, Ms. Liu believes she is less of the quiet-Asian-nerd stereotype that she had felt followed her through Yale’s Gothic hallways. Now she wears makeup, raises her hand in class, and has a different perspective than her friends in China, according to whom “I’m contaminated by American culture and not Chinese anymore.”