These past few days, the Xiaohongshu influencer who pretended to be in LA while actually checking in at a Shanghai Costco has gone viral both in China and abroad, leaving California international students utterly baffled.
Nowadays, if you want to attract traffic on Xiaohongshu, topics related to "studying abroad" are a must-grab. At some point, Xiaohongshu quietly became an essential app for contemporary international students.
Whether you want to look up nearby restaurants, find out how to roast Thanksgiving turkey, check if that hyped shampoo is really worth it, discover trendy Instagram-worthy spots, or review quarantine guides for traveling back to China... the app you open is usually Xiaohongshu.
This generation of international students may skip Yelp, Expedia, or cooking apps, but when it comes to tips and guides, Xiaohongshu is the go-to.
It’s undeniably convenient—but some of the study-abroad influencers on Xiaohongshu seem to live in an entirely different dimension.
You’ll see young girls celebrating birthdays with brand-new Rolls-Royces and Hermès bags; boys who barely reached adulthood buying houses in North America and achieving financial freedom; academic prodigies double-admitted to MIT and Harvard, or casually collecting offers from all ten Ivy League schools…
We all understand peer pressure, but the international students on Xiaohongshu take it to an absolutely brutal level.
All Kinds of Flaunting: Everyone Has a Hermès or a BBA
An 18th birthday isn’t just a river-view yacht party—it’s a gala at the Ritz in London, and the Dior queen celebrates hers in the VIP Room.
While you were still buying skins in the game at 18, someone else already bought a house in North America and earned a net profit covering their tuition.
Others post about the "empire" they’ve built during years overseas—dozens of Hermès bags in different colors. You look at it and realize that buying all the Monchhichi charms on their bags would already be a stretch for you.
Even during the pandemic, nothing stops a Hermès girl from shopping globally. Whether she buys it herself, her boyfriend buys it, or her parents do, she must collect Hermès until she’s 100.
The first car for a student abroad is a standard BBA; Lamborghinis and Ferraris are standard fare for rich kids. Hands gripping a Ferrari steering wheel, the caption is modestly understated:
"Daily life studying in country X: basically just gaming, online classes, racing, poker, and drinking."
After reading this, you seriously suspect you’re a fake international student.
Countless luxury cars, with Maseratis making up half of them. After all, who can resist the trident of the sea god? The supposed motto: What you want at 18 becomes meaningless if you only get it at 30.
You agonize over what to wear when stepping out; they agonize over which car to drive. They can rattle off luxury car models faster than you can list lipstick shades.
This kind of brainwashing literature is truly intoxicating, not unlike Guo Jingming’s “A love without material foundation is like a pile of loose sand.” After hearing it, you’ve heard nothing at all.
In The Unbeatable, Chow Yun-fat says that out of a million people, only one is the protagonist. But under Xiaohongshu’s algorithmic recommendation mechanism, posts flaunting wealth are amplified again and again until you can barely see any other lifestyle. If you don’t own a luxury car, a designer watch, a G-Wagon, or a Maserati by 20, you might feel you don’t even deserve to be on the street.
You want to check out rental tips, but it pushes you “how to buy a 2,600-square-foot Versailles estate” and “how to purchase a million-dollar mansion just like in The Penthouse.” You can’t help but fire back: Is it a guide I lack? No, it’s the balance in my bank account. Thanks.
Flaunting wealth is bad enough, but what’s worse is coming across posts from these rich guys and gals complaining about being broke. After a full course of spiritual baptism on Xiaohongshu, you almost start sympathizing with the socialite who had to grow up without Louboutins.
Academic Gods Everywhere: A Screen Full of HYPSM
If the Rolls-Royces, Lambos, BMWs, and Maseratis don’t cut you deep, then the flood of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT admissions will absolutely slay you.
As soon as the school year starts, Xiaohongshu is littered with Harvard and MIT acceptance posts. It’s either a beautiful, fair-skinned Harvard senior sharing her wisdom, or someone who “messed up” the college entrance exam and accidentally ended up at Harvard.
You browse orientation tips, and the feed is all Ivy League student ID cards. The official admission rate is 6% for Ivy schools, but on Xiaohongshu, it feels like at least 60%.
Some even flaunt a Harvard + MIT double buff. You glance at your own Top 30 student ID and suddenly feel too embarrassed to show it.
You’d think Xiaohongshu recommendations would advise against attending no-name schools, but no—the only universities that make the “don’t bother” list are top-tier ones like MIT and Harvard.
You recall spending a whole year on applications, retaking standardized tests multiple times, revising essays until you went bald, visiting campuses across half the country, and working almost without sleep or food during the final sprint. In the end, the dream school you got into turned out to be a level that’s too embarrassing to post about or even mention on Xiaohongshu.
Regular folks work their butts off for a CS degree over 4 years of undergrad plus 2 years of master’s, but the gods on Xiaohongshu seem to pivot into tech with zero background in just a few months.
How do you get a “strong hire” when switching to coding? It relies on something you definitely don’t have—“luck.”
Oh well, the joy of lying flat—only those who lie flat truly understand. Anyway, not everyone has to change the world; the happiness of a Top 50 school perfectly suits us mid-tier students from elite high schools.
Study Abroad Emo with No Social Life, Yet Time Management Masters
There’s also a group of emo international students on Xiaohongshu—busy to the point of burnout, anxious from studying, depressed from living, yet somehow painful and joyful at the same time.
Studying abroad means no social life, but staged photos are a must, and Xiaohongshu must be done. Besides, as everyone knows, Xiaohongshu doesn’t count as a social platform.
The pressure of studying abroad is so overwhelming, I really can’t hold on, nearly shouting for help from mom and dad. But summoning the energy to make a Xiaohongshu post? I can still manage that if I hold it in.
Then you look at those study-abroad vloggers and wonder how they manage filming, editing, packaging, and promoting their content all in one seamless flow while supposedly studying abroad.
Then you think about yourself, nearly suffocating every finals season, staying up all night to meet deadlines, juggling internships and research, with zero time to post updates—and you realize you’re not just lacking intelligence but also efficient time management skills.
You envy every master of time management, along with their seemingly endless emo moods and abundant energy.
You’d think the world quieted down during the pandemic, but as soon as you open Xiaohongshu, you discover you’re the only one actually staying at home. And even those staying at home managed to do ten times more things than you did in the same period.
Scrolling further, you finally realize how far behind society you’ve fallen, because your peers have already perfected their life plans and are now sighing, “A six-figure salary straight out of college in North America still makes you bottom-of-the-barrel in Silicon Valley.”
Turns out the world of studying abroad really is straight-up emo!
I Don’t Deserve to Be Called an International Student on Xiaohongshu
One writer once summed up the criteria for a model life on Xiaohongshu:
At 20, make your first million, buy a villa, drive a luxury car.
At 25, reach the pinnacle of life and achieve financial freedom.
At 28, have an epiphany and finally live the way you’ve always wanted.
At 30, become a life coach and give twenty-somethings a list of ten earnest pieces of advice.
There’s a wall between people. But the wall between international students on Xiaohongshu is at least as wide as the Pacific Ocean.
Accepting your own ordinariness isn’t bad at all. Everyone has their own way of studying abroad. Not every international student is at the top of the pyramid; it’s just that Xiaohongshu, through a survivor bias effect, amplifies the probability of certain events until you believe that a 1% chance is a 100% guarantee.
It’s hard to say whether Xiaohongshu itself is peddling anxiety, or whether today’s social climate has driven countless show-offs into an insane competition. But whether it’s the stereotype of international students or the rigid definition of success, if you force yourself into becoming someone else’s praised template, aren’t you just limiting yourself? And if it causes you pain because you can’t achieve it, then it’s truly not worth it.
I believe that the original intention of studying abroad was never about social comparison, but about personal growth. Cracking a tough problem and earning a professor’s approval; making a few genuine friends and simply hanging out; learning to cook a dish that rivals a restaurant’s; landing an internship offer that, while not at a top firm, comes with decent conditions. These are the little bits of happiness in life.
As for the moments of breakdown, when you look back later, the things that benefited and made you grow the most often came from those very setbacks.
Whether it’s the one million successful personas on Xiaohongshu, or the real-life rich-kid influencers around you, none of them should affect the simple joy of your current study abroad life. If it really gets too anxious, just stop scrolling Xiaohongshu or WeChat Moments. Ah Q’s spirit of self-victory—Mr. Lu Xun never fails us.
Whether you scroll Xiaohongshu or not, if someday you feel beaten down by life, don’t lose heart. The art of lying flat may be shameful, but it works. Once in a while, lie flat and look at the world; you’ll find that many things you’re agonizing over now really won’t matter that much in the grand river of life.
As for those who are not directly involved in studying abroad, you can all disperse now. The world packaged by Xiaohongshu’s algorithm and MCN companies really shouldn’t be overgeneralized—they cannot represent each and every international student.
Even if you’re just an NPC in this world, who said you aren’t the protagonist of your own life?
