Identity Conflicts and Negotiations: Narratives of Asian International Students’ Experiences in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

This study draws on a narrative-based multiple case study approach to investigating three Asian international students’ experiences in a Hong Kong university, with a focus on their identity conflicts and negotiations. Informed by a poststructuralist perspective on identity and the Bakhtinian notion of dialogical self, the study found that the international students’ identity conflicts appear to be complex and varied and relate to different aspects of their identities, including their national, ethnic, academic and ‘non-local student’ identities. The findings suggest that their identity conflicts seem to arise primarily from a mismatch between their desired identities and the identities imposed by others. The findings also reveal that when dealing with identity conflicts, these students exercise their agency through (i) entering into an internal dialogue in response to others’ positioning of themselves in order to (re)interpret the self–other relations and (ii) taking strategic actions to contest the other-imposed identities and construct new and alternative identities. Taken together, the findings suggest that international students’ identity conflicts can be a potential avenue for identity transformation and (re)construction. The findings also call for the need to attend to the dialogical nature of identity and the role of agency in understanding international students’ identity conflicts and negotiations.

KEYWORDS:

• International student
• identity conflict
• identity negotiation
• agency
• Hong Kong

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 According to Taylor (2004, p. 23), a social imaginary refers to ‘the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’.

2 All the extracts have been taken directly from the interview transcripts.

Additional information

Funding

The research study described in this paper was supported by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee [project number 23600416] and City University of Hong Kong [project number 7005165].

Notes on contributors

Chit Cheung Matthew Sung

Cheung Matthew Sung is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong. He holds a PhD from Lancaster University, UK. His research interests include language and identity, global Englishes, and international education. His recent publications have appeared in international journals, including English Today, Lingua, Compare, Applied Linguistics Review, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Journal of Gender Studies, Language, Culture and Curriculum, Linguistics and Education, and Journal of Language, Identity and Education.