Focusing on the GRE-related experiences for elite Chinese international students in the U.S., this project aims to explore the educational dynamics among these highly ambitious and affluent migrant youths in American prestigious colleges and universities. I attempt to investigate why, how, what do they study for the GRE exam in the contexts of transnational migration and educational linguistics. In this thesis, I demonstrate that instead of simply embracing their new identity in U.S. higher education, these students use the experience of studying for the GRE to recuperate the value of their past Chinese education in order to retain their Chinese upwardly mobile, educational elite identities and desire