For Winter Break his freshman year, Weinberg junior Dennis Loh stayed in Evanston for some of the time and then visited the San Francisco Bay area.
His sophomore year, he visited Vancouver, Canada; Whistler, Canada; and California.
This year, he plans to leave North America and fly to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
The total flight time will be 20 hours and 45 minutes, and the trip will cost about $1,500, but this year he’s going home.
For Loh, one of the more than 2,300 undergraduate and graduate international students at Northwestern, Winter Break has always involved traveling with family. When he lived in Malaysia year-round, his family traveled to Australia, New Zealand and England during breaks.
Although Loh and his immediate family do not celebrate Christmas, they attend relatives’ and friends’ Christmas and New Year’s festivities, he said.
“We attend other festivities, such as Eid festival from our Muslim family friends and Diwali festival from our Indian family friends, given that Malaysia is a multiracial country,” Loh said.
Weinberg sophomore Debbie Yip, an international student from Hong Kong, said she typically celebrates Christmas with her parents and her 16-year-old brother. They vacation or have an elaborate dinner at home, Yip said.
And this year, like Loh, Yip said she plans to take a 16-hour flight to Hong Kong to be with her family.
“I’m super excited about going home this Christmas,” she said. “Since I don’t go home during spring break, if I don’t go home over Christmas, I won’t get to see my family until June. Not being with family during parents’ weekend is already depressing.”
Yip said she especially looks forward to New Years’ Eve in Hong Kong.
“Everyone crowds around a district because there are just so many people,” she said. “You’ll have three other people glued to your sides because it’s so squishy.”
Out of the three weeks of Winter Break, Yip said she will stay in Hong Kong only for 11 days. She also plans to travel to Shangai, China, and the Maldives, which are an island nation in the Indian Ocean.
Medill freshman Clarissa Nebuya also said she is glad to be going home during the break, she said. She plans to fly to Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, where her parents moved to this past summer from Tokyo.
“My brother’s coming back as well,” she said. “It’s my first Christmas in this new place.”
But not all international students can return home. McCormick sophomore Sim Kwang, who is from Singapore, said that high ticket prices will keep him from home.
“It costs a little over a grand to fly home and that makes for quite a traveling budget,” Kwang said.
Instead, Kwang said he plans to travel in Morocco and Spain. He said he looks forward to seeing new places and making new friends.
“I will be going home in the summer, so I don’t really miss (it),” he said.
Reach Dana Molina at [email protected].
