  Information seeking is crucial for people's self-care and wellbeing in times
of public crises. Extensive research has investigated empirical understandings
as well as technical solutions to facilitate information seeking by domestic
citizens of affected regions. However, limited knowledge is established to
support international migrants who need to survive a crisis in their host
countries. The current paper presents an interview study with two cohorts of
Chinese migrants living in Japan (N=14) and the United States (N=14).
Participants reflected on their information seeking experiences during the
COVID pandemic. The reflection was supplemented by two weeks of self-tracking
where participants maintained records of their COVIDrelated information seeking
practice. Our data indicated that participants often took language detours, or
visits to Mandarin resources for information about the COVID outbreak in their
host countries. They also made strategic use of the Mandarin information to
perform selective reading, cross-checking, and contextualized interpretation of
COVID-related information in Japanese or English. While such practices enhanced
participants' perceived effectiveness of COVID-related information gathering
and sensemaking, they disadvantaged people through sometimes incognizant ways.
Further, participants lacked the awareness or preference to review
migrant-oriented information that was issued by the host country's public
authorities despite its availability. Building upon these findings, we
discussed solutions to improve international migrants' COVID-related
information seeking in their non-native language and cultural environment. We
advocated inclusive crisis infrastructures that would engage people with
diverse levels of local language fluency, information literacy, and experience
in leveraging public services.
