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The Linguistics Journal – September 2009 Identity Change: Overseas Students Returning to Hong Kong Ruth M.H. Wong The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong Biodata Dr. Ruth M. H. Wong is an assistant professor in the Department of English of the Hong Kong Institute of Education. She obtained her doctorate degree in education from University of Durham (UK) and her thesis entitled “Factors affecting motivation to learn: The perspective of the newly arrived Hong Kong students”. Her research interests include second language teaching and learning, sociolinguistics, taskbased teaching and learning, language arts and learning motivation. Her publications include research articles in international journals, chapters in books, articles in professional magazines, textbooks and teaching resources for Hong Kong secondary schools. Abstract National identity is a problematic concept to many ethnic Chinese people in Hong Kong. It had been more than 10 years since HK had been returned to China, how would those HK people, who had received overseas education, view their national identity on their return? This paper focuses on investigating how 3 international students from HK viewed their national identity. Particularly, I attempted to explore (1) how the 3 international students from HK perceived their own national identity before they left for an English-speaking country to further their studies; (2) whether these HK Chinese had changed their perceptions towards their own national identity when they were abroad; (3) whether their perceptions towards their national identity could be sustained after returning to Hong Kong. Keywords: national identity; Chinese, overseas education The Linguistics Journal – Special Edition Page 36
1. Introduction The Linguistics Journal – September 2009 How people perceive their own identity depends on individual cultural background and upbringing. Identity is not static because of its association with the social environment and it changes and shifts over time as people grow older. Meanwhile, stereotypes that society places on a particular group of people can be a great contribution to their sense of pride or shame about their national identity, and can be a source for identity conflicts. Most people in HK are ethnic Chinese. However, Hong Kong’s legal system, economic system, financial system and political system were all different from Mainland China when it was under British colonial rule from 1898 to 1997. Therefore, identity has always been an ambiguous issue for HK people to actualize, internalize and self-categorize. Interestingly, whenever there are international events like the World Cup or the Olympics, people in HK feel that they are “Chinese”. However, when it concerns human rights, people will perceive themselves less associated with China. This “national displacement” also occurs in some other regions or nations. For example, a similar phenomenon happened to Germans. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, nearly 3 million ethnic German returnees came to Germany from the former Soviet Union. These “returnees” suffered from national identity crisis (Ortoff & Frey, 2007). HK Chinese who were born during the British colonial period had been suffering “identity crisis” for a long time. However, it was recognised that people who had received education overseas perceive this problem as being less difficult to handle. Doubts over their national identity faded away after several years of staying in a foreign country then returning to Hong Kong. Little research has explored the complex interactions between international education and the negotiation of identity of overseas students. Even though there have been public opinion polls conducted to investigate how HK people categorise or The Linguistics Journal – Special Edition Page 37
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