Recent inquiry has shown that raising the number of international students and staff in universities does not inevitably make the campus more ‘international’. Ladegaard and Cheng (2014) found that local and non-local students live totally separate lives on campus and do not collaborate, let alone socialise, unless compelled to do so by their teachers. This paper claims that one of the chief impediments for effective integration between local and non-local students is negative outgroup stereotypes and prejudice. It reports on an ongoing study of international students’ experience of sojourn in Hong Kong. The paper explores examples from informal group discussions amid non-local students, and the examples display that for some students, meeting ‘the other’ has been linked with disquieting tension more than anything. Notwithstanding their commitment to the intercultural aspiration, they feel their integration has been prevented by their own or other students’ prejudice. The paper proposes that intercultural dialogue, which handles taboos and painful issues and seeks accommodations, and the dare to censure our own and other people's ethnocentric discourses, should be the way forward if local and non-local students are to integrate and collaborate in meaningful ways.