The girl protagonists in Jean Kwok's "Girl in Translation" and Kelly Yang's "Front Desk" embody and reinterpret the notion of "guai" (loosely translated as "good") in their struggle to adapt to life in America. "Guai" is the most important concept governing childhood in Chinese societies. The word,…

The identity of a city matters in a global age. This article explores the discursive construction of the global city's identity in relation to semiotic landscape, using the construction of Shanghai as a global city as a case study. In this increasingly globalising world, Shanghai authorities have recently demonstrated the desire to establish…

This study explores how a transient community of Chinese visiting scholars in the US negotiates the language norms and identity in the transnational spaces. Transient communities, being different from diasporic stable communities in terms of flexibility and fluidity of movements, are subject to continuous negotiation of social or language norms.…

Classrooms tend to be absolute spaces, places where fluidity is rejected and nearly everything--from people, to ideas, to practices and policies--is viewed and organized through binary logic. Because binary logic is implicitly accepted as the natural order in schools and the structures resulting from it are highly unmalleable, individuals who…

This paper aims to contribute to the current debate on "interculturality" (IC) by investigating the process of language socialization whereby different generations of diasporic families negotiate, construct, and renew their sociocultural values and identities through interaction. Focusing on the use of address terms and "talk about social,…