Living both here and there: a study of identity construction among Korean-Chinese elites in an international metropolis

Abstract

This study explores how college graduates from an ethnic minority group, bilingual Korean-Chinese, negotiate and reconstruct their identities in the scale-changing process as they move from ethnic minority communities to an international metropolis in China. Drawing on the notion of scale, this study used data collected from semi-structured interviews with 24 bilingual Korean-Chinese participants in Shanghai to explore their lived experiences. Their language use in social media was also tracked and recorded over a period of four months. The findings reveal that most of the participating bilingual Korean-Chinese elites flexibly moved across the spatial–temporal scale and the social scale, situationally adapting their language use to the environment and for various communicative purposes. As such, they retained their ethnic identity while accommodating new identities, achieving a reconciled ‘amphibious identity’ by ‘living both here and there.’ The remainder of the participants chose to use either Chinese or Korean, under the influence of their monolingual language ideology, and developed a marginalised or replacement identity. This study contributes a more fine-grained and non-reductionist understanding of ethnic minority migrants’ construction of identity in a situation of mobility and its relation to their language practices across different scales.

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