COMPARISON OF THE NEPALESE AND INDIAN KIDS

From our findings, despite difference in Cantonese proficiency, both Roka and Nandan identify themselves as Hong Kongers. For Roka, Cantonese is his preferred language in most aspect of life, and he claims to be a native speaker of Cantonese. Contrastingly, for Nandan, her preferred language is English in all scenarios. Her proficiency in Cantonese is limited to easy, short phrases such as “Yau Lok(I am getting off this station)” and “Nei Ho (Hello)”, and she only uses it for fun occasionally.

From this comparison, we can observe that there are factors other than language proficiency that contributes to a person’s personal identity. We are proposing the following factors.

Social Context

First, their self-identity can be explained by Third Culture Kid Phenomena. A third culture kid (TCK) is a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside their parents’ culture (Pollock & Reken, 2009). A TCK frequently builds relationships to all the cultures they are exposed to, while tends not to fully dedicate themselves to one.

Although elements from multiple cultures are assimilated into a TCK’s life experience, a TCK compensates the loss of cultural sense of belonging with the sense of belonging from relationship with others. Thus, social context can be one of the factors that explain Nandan’s personal identity as a Hongkonger instead of an Indian, a cultural identity that failed to pass down from her parents.

For both the interviewees, they spent their development years in Hong Kong and were immersed deeply in Hong Kong culture. They are also constantly exposed to a large group of Cantonese speaking people who mostly identify themselves as Hong Kongers. For example, Roka is studying in CMI school where the majority of his peers are Cantonese-speaking locals. This may influence his identity construction, since peers in his social circle are born in Hong Kong, are studying in a local school and are speaking essentially the same language. This environment can be said to have homogenized him with the local kids and made him identified himself as a Hong Konger.

Furthermore, despite living in a Cantonese-dominant community, TCKs could remain flexible in their choice of language, demonstrating a high level understanding of intercultural communication and interaction thanks to their high adaptability and cultural awareness. For Roka, he communicates with Nepalese peers in English whilst interacts with ethnical Chinese using Cantonese. He seldom uses Nepali, but when he does, it is to satisfy the expectation of the elders from the Nepalese community, for example his parents. Similar phenomenon can be observed in Nandan’s case, as she states in the interview that she choose which language to use according to the circumstance and  “when I speak to a cab driver, it’ll be in Cantonese”.

Hong Kong’s colonial history also facilitate this aforementioned flexibility, as most people in Hong Kong are capable of basic communication in English, which undermines the need for tp speak proficient Cantonese, as they can resort to using English. This convenience reduces the necessity for TCK to speak cantonese and thus provided opportunity for TCKs like Nandan to identify herself as Hong Konger despite not learning “Hong Kong’s language”.

Thus, these implies that the fluency of Cantonese does not cause major obstacle for them to identify themselves as Hong Kongers, since their linguistic flexibility combined with Hong Kong’s multilingual society minimizes the significance of Cantonese in cultural assimilation. Their social circle on the other hand, accounts for greater influence in their identity construction.

Place of Birth Matters

A second factor can be the place of birth. From the interview, the interviewees seem to demonstrate a certain degree of affinity to the place they were born. As Roka and Nanda were both born in Hong Kong, they have Hong Kong citizenship. Furthermore, they both have a chinese name. Furthermore, they share the nationality of Chinese with other Hong Kongers. These minor elements can initiate their construction of Hong Konger identity before their acquisition of the Cantonese language. Nandan said in the interview that “When people ask where I come from, I always say Hong Kong - but that is because I live here.” We find it contradictory to the notion that language constructs identity. Instead, one’s identity may influence one’s language preference. For instance, despite having learnt Nepali first, Roka said that he sometimes feels weird to speak Nepali and rarely uses Nepali even with his Nepalese friends, and Nanda learnt some basic Cantonese despite it is not essential for her to do so.

Second, interview participants appeared to have some affinity to their roots because they think they are born here;thus they are Hongkongers. Since they are given birth in HK, they have their own Hongkong citizenship card and Chinese names. Also, their nationality in passport is same as other HongKongers which is Chinese. These tiny stuffs may construct their identity before they establish a well-understanding of using Cantonese to communicate.