The multicultural identity of Chen is a result of her various interests developed during her up-bringing, and it partly accounts for her self-identity as a “messy” girl. According to her, she always has a habit of reading, and she reads widely from Chinese to western literature. Because of this, she identified herself as a literary and artsy youth. Apart from literature, she became interested in the Japanese cartoon culture, the ACG (Animation, Comics and Games) culture, during the middle school years, and identified herself as a proud ACGer. In our second interview via WeChat, she told me that she has acquired a passion for the Chinese pop culture and became a passionate fan of some pop stars in China.
[Chen] Excerpt 1
[00:01:52] C: Um……. I think I am very messy. I actually enjoying being alone though I love talking. Before I fell in love with the ACG culture, I was a really artsy person (Laugh), and I read a lot of books, many literatures. So I felt that I have a literature sense, and I was good at writing. [Interview Part 3(translation)]
[Chen] Excerpt 2
[00:12:03] C: I feel I can identify with them.
[00:12:07] L: Identify with the Japanese community, the culture?
[00:12:09] C: No no no. I don’t identify with the Japanese culture, I mean I can identify with people who share the same interest with me, the people in the ACG community. [Interview part 3 (translation)]
[Chen] Excerpt 3
[53] L: Thank you HAHA. So you are mainly following the pop stars now?
[54] C: Yes, I do, because the new-released cartoons are not very good, at least I don’t like them. So I mainly follow celebrities now. You know, I used to think the pop culture is boring, and that being a crazy fan of somebody is really stupid, as many others think. But now I can understand the fun of it, they are sending out positive energy to us.
These three interview excerpts are Chen’s presentation of the three interests and her thoughts on them. As shown in Excerpt 1, Chen first talked about her personalities when asked about her self-understanding. Then I tried to elicit more of her self-
reflections by encouraging her to think about aspects of her identity that people cannot easily feel or understand. This inspired her to reflect on the evolution of her interests. According to the interview, she acquired different interests during her youth.
quite different from each other, but Chen developed interests in them without any difficulties. I believe this is owing to her open attitude towards different cultures. This tendency to draw from different cultures can also be verified by her attitude about the pop culture as presented in line [54] in Excerpt 3. Chen admitted that she used to have negative opinions about this culture, but she didn’t reject it, and once she familiarised herself with it, she became a passionate fan.
Chen herself interpreted her willingness to take in different cultural ideologies as the desire to be connected with a bigger world and the desire to share her ideas with more people. In our WeChat interview, she elaborated on her various group identities, suggesting that it is not what she identifies with that matters, it is the fact that she can identify with different communities and groups that matters. The strong desire for connectedness reminds me of her self-description as a “talkative” person at the very beginning of the first interview, so it is highly possible that the desire to talk with people originates from the desire to be connected and to exchange ideas with different people. This self-understanding explains the excitement about going abroad that she revealed in the interview, as she commented “I guess people who go abroad really think
differently, they are more free and open-minded, unlike most people in our country”. It also partly explains her future aspiration to major in the media. As she said in the interview, being in the media industry will enable her to hear various voices and at the same time have her own voice heard. The excerpt below is her elaboration on her desire for connectedness.
[Chen] Excerpt 4
[86] C: Um…I think I am this kind of person. I hope there are someone who can share my interests, discuss with me, and acknowledge my ideas. [87] L: So you prefer to be identified with a group, you cannot be the only one in the world.
[88] C: Yes, exactly. You can alone sometimes, but you cannot be lonely.
[89] L: So which group do you like most?
[90] C: There is actually not a particular one. No matter what I identify with or how I identify with them, I feel good. The important thing is that we share something in common.
[91] L: Um…yes, that is how you connect to the world.
[92] C: Yes, exactly. I even believe that my value system is shaped by this.