Jiewu@ would have been her e-mail address. And she would have called 257 Forbes College home. But Wu Jie, a Chinese student who gained international recognition as the first female winner of the Singapore Mathematical Olympiad, was not able to join her fellow freshmen for orientation week.
"If not for the series of nightmarish events," Wu wrote in an email to The Daily Princetonian last week. "I should be packing and getting ready to start my most exciting journey to Princeton at this very moment. However, I am here in Singapore, struggling to control my feelings and carry on with life in a different university."
Anu Godishala '07 was supposed to be Wu's roomate in Forbes.
"No one told me anything about my roommate not being able to come," said the freshman from upstate New York. "I was just really surprised. I was really excited because I figured to come from China she was really extraordinary. I was really excited to meet her and learn about her culture."
University administrators said Wu's visa applications were denied four times by U.S. consular officials in Beijing this summer because officials thought Wu, 20, who comes from a working-class family, would illegally stay in the U.S. after completing her education at Princeton.
Wu is the only undergraduate international student who was unable to enter Princeton this fall; however, three graduate students, including two from China and one from Russia, have not been issued visas. Their applications are still under review.
University Vice President for Public Affairs Bob Durkee '69 said he has been in close contact with officials at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and said Sen. Jon Corzine, D-NJ, and Rep. Rush Holt, D-NJ, have written letters on Wu's behalf.
Durkee said Wu might have complicated her situation by allegedly giving consular officials the impression during the first of four application meetings that she had no intention of returning to China.
"She presented a very compelling case that she would not return to China. I don't think it was her intention to present that case," Durkee said, referring to his conversations with officials at the U.S. Embassy. He added that Princeton alumni in Beijing coached her for her last two meetings, but that the damage to her case had already been done.
During her first visa interview in Beijing, Wu wrote, the officer asked her if she planned to obtain a Ph.D. She said yes. She thought that answer, combined with her studying abroad for high school and her boyfriend's living in Singapore, ended up being a major reason for her rejections.
"I answered the questions the visa officer asked me directly and truthfully. Of course, how would a girl, who received the country's top physics prize at age 19 not want to study for a Ph.D. degree? But only after my third rejection did I learn that that accounted for my reason of rejection: intention to immigrate to US," she wrote.
State Department spokeswoman Kelly Shannon said that "the onus is on the individual applicant to prove that the applicant will return." Familial ties to the home country can assist in obtaining a visa, she said, but cannot guarantee that a person will not emigrate.
"Had she come from a family where there was property or wealth, that might have helped," Durkee said.
But Wu maintained that the officers were brisk and didn't give her enough time to explain her intentions.
"I really do want to go back to China and to my parents," she wrote. "I have been away for too long and I have feelings for [the] place I grew up at. But I never had the chance to talk about this with the visa officer. He was done with me, but I was still trying to talk. So he shut the microphone; on two sides of the glass panel, we could no longer communicate."
The rejections leave Wu in an international education limbo. Knowing that Princeton was her goal, Wu never took the tests required to matriculate in China's university system. She applied ito Yale, Cambridge, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton, and turned down offers from all except Old Nassau. When she got her 'likely' letter from Yale, she wrote, her "heart was waiting for something more."
"In the midst of a total frenzy of examinations, SATs and essay writing, I remembered how Princeton's application form touched me in such a special way," she wrote. Like many of her classmates, Wu was drawn to Princeton for its personal take on the college process.
"Joy bubbled up inside me," she said of the day she received the YES! by FedEx. With the multiple visa rejections this summer, Wu "felt dead and hopeless."
Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States has reduced the number of student visas issued, from 226,465 between October 1999 and August 2000 to 174,479 between the same period in 2002-2003, according to figures provided by the U.S. State Department.
President Tilghman said Wu's situation is part of that clamping down. "As you know, this is a problem affecting many foreign students throughout the country," Tilghman wrote in an email. "What is a little surprising about this case is that it involves an undergraduate. Most of the cases involve graduate students who are concentrating in the sciences."
Now beginning studies at the National University of Singapore, Wu will defer her acceptance to Princeton and apply again for a visa next year.
"But who will know for sure that I won't end up shedding tears in the embassy again next year?" she said.
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