Introduction

The cross-border movement of international students, as a vibrant ingredient of transnational migration, has experienced significant growth in recent decades. Globally, the number of tertiary students studying outside their countries of origin surged from 1.3 million to 6.1 million between 1990 and 2020 (The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2022). Among these cross-border students, the U.S.A. has consistently been one of the most sought-after destinations. Despite being adversely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the population of international students in the U.S.A. surpassed 940,000 during the 2021–2022 academic year, following an average annual growth rate of 3.1% over the past 20 years (Institute of International Education, 2022). Accompanied by the increasing presence of international students in U.S. colleges and universities, issues surrounding their identities and experiences have drawn academic attention, largely influenced by an enduring emphasis on facilitating the students’ adjustment and adaption to the host society (for review, see Araujo, 2011; Khanal & Gaulee, 2019; Zhang, 2018). This dominant research paradigm of adjustment and adaption, however, has been progressively challenged by pioneering scholars like Simon Marginson, Alexander Gamst Page, and Sobh Chahboun. In both of their work, Marginson (2014) and Page and Chahboun (2019) have argued that the concepts of adjustment and adaption fall short of capturing the complexities and nuances embedded in the agentive process through which international students make sense of who they are and give meaning to their lived experiences. Building on the critiques of the adjustment- and adaption-focused paradigm, this study aims to advance the development of a non-essentialist and non-reductionist perspective on international students and their cross-border movement through a detailed examination of the process of identity construction among Chinese international students in the U.S.A.

I begin with a discussion of the problematic nature of the adjustment- and adaption-focused paradigm. This discussion is situated in relation to scholarly voices calling for a paradigm shift toward perceiving international students as agentive subjects whose lived experiences are open-ended and encompass a multiplicity of space–time configurations. To reveal the configurations of space and time associated with the students’ cross-border movement, I take up the notion of scale theorized in the social sciences (Blommaert, 2015; Canagarajah & De Costa, 2016; Gal, 2016; Herod & Wright, 2002; Moore, 2008; Wallerstein, 2001). The notion of scale foregrounds the spatial–temporal underpinnings of meaning-making in human interactions. In relation to the notion of scale, scaling refers to an active and discursively structured process whereby individuals draw on spatial–temporal patterns of meaning-making to (re)negotiate their subject positions vis-à-vis others (Canagarajah & De Costa, 2016). Informed by the scale-oriented lens, this study attends to how international students discursively index multiple spatial–temporal contexts and make those contexts relevant to the process of their identity construction. As a crucial part of my interpretation of international students’ scaling practices, I borrow the borderland trope developed in Anzaldúa’s (1987/2012) work to highlight a dynamic relationship between the students and their home and host societies. Following Anzaldúa’s (1987/2012) work, the idea of borderland is understood in this study in terms of a liminal state of consciousness, which challenges rigid identity categories and raises transformative possibilities of cultural hybridity (Keating, 2008). Put differently, the borderland trope contributes to demonstrating the importance of taking into account the concepts of home and host while transcending a simplistic home–host dichotomy in investigating the process of identity construction among international students.

By combining the notion of scale with the borderland trope, this study exemplifies a mode of inquiry that seeks to illuminate the transformative and fluid underpinnings of international student migration (ISM). In particular, drawing on ethnographic data, the study presents a critical approach to understand the lived experiences of international students as dialogically mediated at the intersection of their identification with their home and host societies and creatively articulated across multiple scales of space and time. In doing so, it offers valuable insights into the agentive roles played by the students in negotiating and making sense of their identities, experiences, and aspirations in a transnational milieu.

Identity-related research on international students: A call for a paradigm shift

As critiqued by an emergent strand of scholarship (Marginson, 2014; Page & Chahboun, 2019; Tran & Vu, 2018; Vasilopoulos, 2016; Yu, 2021), identity-related research on international students has long been influenced by an assimilation-oriented framework of adjustment and adaption. In this framework, the students have been treated as passive and deficit others facing persistent difficulties adjusting and adapting to the new academic and sociocultural environments since their arrival in the host society. Page and Chahboun (2019) pointed out that the assimilation-oriented framework conceived “the international student experience in terms of a predetermined set of expectations and subsequently framed their sojourns [in terms of the extent to which they failed] to live up to these expectations” (p. 875). Along this line of thought, the assimilation-oriented framework gives rise to an ahistorical and essentialized “problem-solving approach” (Vasilopoulos, 2016) to think and talk about international students. Considered through the lens of the problem-solving approach, the negotiation of the living and learning experiences of the students is expected to rigidly follow a linear and unilateral process of socialization regulated by the dominant norms rooted in the host society. Consequently, the potential of the students to envisage alternative ways of being and becoming is either downplayed or completely ignored.

To challenge the assimilation-oriented framework and its tendency to pathologize the population of international students, Marginson (2014) drew attention to a critical understanding of international education as “self-formation.” From this perspective, the students were seen as agentive subjects consciously (re)negotiating their identities and piloting the course of their lives in cross-border environments. Of note, Marginson (2014) highlighted that the process of self-formation was mediated by the “times and places in which it occurred” and was “often active in more than one place–time simultaneously” (p. 14). In a similar vein, Tran and Vu (2018) suggested that international students were capable of exercising varied forms of “agency in mobility” that both shaped and were shaped by the possibilities and conditions associated with their cross-border movement. These forms of agency, as characterized by the students’ changing and situated connectedness with their home and host societies, manifested themselves in the potential of the students to resourcefully construct their transnational “life-course in the interplay with influences from the past and orientations toward the future” (Tran & Vu, 2018, p. 175, see also Page, 2019). For international student-related research, the concepts of self-formation and agency in mobility embody a paradigm shift toward seeing the students “from numerous perspectives and thus seeing them as more complete human beings” (Page & Chahboun, 2019, p. 880). Taking Marginson’s (2014) and Tran and Vu’s (2018) work as a starting point, I argue that a fundamental yet underexplored aspect of the paradigm shift is concerned with developing nuanced understandings of the spatial–temporal dynamics embedded in ISM, which involves engaging with experiences and practices of multiple spatial and temporal scales.

Scales, scaling, and borderland subjectivities

Originating in the fields of human geography (Herod & Wright, 2002) and political science (Wallerstein, 2001), the notion of scale has gained prominence over the last few decades in social science research. It serves as a robust theoretical lens to study the complexities of meaning-making in human interactions, particularly mediated by the processes of globalization and transnational migration (Blommaert, 2015; Canagarajah & De Costa, 2016; Catedral, 2018; Gal, 2016; Lempert, 2012). Conceptually speaking, the notion of scale emphasizes that social activities take place along both spatial and temporal dimensions. Scales are concerned with how varied spatial–temporal configurations are brought to bear as “contextualization cues” (Gumperz, 1982) in negotiating norms, expectations, and categorizations within and across societies (Carr & Lempert, 2016). Underpinned by a dynamic structure of power relations, scales have a dual nature. On the one hand, scales denote the institutionalized ordering of space–time domains “within the uneven networks and vertical hierarchies of globalization” (Bailey et al., 2016, p. 315). Such institutionalized ordering results in stratified relations among discourses, practices, and values circulating at various spatial–temporal, sociocultural, and geopolitical scopes. As a consequence, certain groups, positions, and resources, such as developed nations, Western academia, and native-speaker models, are systemically privileged over their counterparts considered to be located on the margins of globalization, including developing nations, non-Western intellectual histories, and non-native forms of language use (Blommaert, 2007, 2010). When interpreted in relation to identity-related research on international students, the scalar hierarchies discussed here mirror the aforementioned politics embedded in the assimilation-oriented framework of adjustment and adaption, which triggers a pathologized portrayal of the students.

On the other hand, notwithstanding the institutionalized ordering involved therein, scales are not reducible to a fixed hierarchy of power relations. To foreground the non-deterministic characteristics of scales, Moore (2008) framed scales as “epistemological” realities that were sociohistorically constructed and continuously (re)negotiated through enduring sociopolitical struggles. Hence, scales can be perceived as being organized around permeable boundaries. The recognition of the permeability of scalar boundaries suggest that meaning-making activities situated within particular space–time contexts are not necessarily channeled in a hierarchical top-down manner. As pointed out by Canagarajah and De Costa (2016), these activities may resemble a network of “rhizomatic relations” in which scalar influences on meaning-making were “nonlinear, unpredictable, layered, and multidirectional” (p. 3). In line with the departure from a deterministically oriented approach to depicting scales, a number of scholars advocated an understanding of scales as a “category of practice” (Canagarajah & De Costa, 2016; Moore, 2008) that captured how people “engaged with scales [and] the dynamic nature of this engagement” (Catedral, 2018, p. 27). Building on the interpretation of scales as a category of practice, this body of scholarship defines scaling as an active process whereby social actors discursively invoke certain space–time contexts in their everyday endeavors to (re)position themselves vis-à-vis others. It emphasizes the agentive potential of individuals to negotiate and challenge existing power structures and dominant ideologies. For example, based on the analysis of a video documentary project in a U.S. high school class, Lam et al. (2021) demonstrated how a group of students engaged in scaling practices by making reference to and juxtaposing multiple spatial–temporal contexts in narrating their experiences of immigration and deportation-based immigration policies. The findings of the study suggested that through their scaling practices, the students demonstrated strengths to cope with trauma and adversity caused by a broken immigration system. Similarly, drawing on interview data collected from three migrant Uzbek women living in the U.S.A., Catedral (2018) called attention to the entanglements between a cluster of space–time configurations and the Uzbek women’s narratives of their mobility. Her work illustrated that the Uzbek women utilized scaling practices to justify their moral choices and construct moral coherence amidst a complex and transnational web of competing moral norms.

Informed by the conceptualization of scales as a category of practice, this study attends to Chinese international students’ engagement in scaling practices through which scales are “renegotiated…and taken up in diverse competing social groups and institutions” (Canagarajah & De Costa, 2016, p. 3). In my examination of the students’ scaling practices, I aim to bring to light how the students draw on language and other semiotic resources to index and connect multiple spatial–temporal contexts, which constitute an integral component of the students’ identity construction against the backdrop of their cross-border movement. Given the effects of scalar hierarchies mentioned above, the students’ scaling practices are considered in this study a contested terrain subject to both agentive contingencies and institutionalized normative forces. For the process of identity construction among the students, this study focuses on the ways in which the students navigate their relationship with their home and host societies, as two major transnationally oriented “social fields” (Tran & Vu, 2018) that shape the subject positions of the students. Building on the borderland trope developed in Anzaldúa’s (1987/2012) work, I investigate the positionings of the students with reference to the concept of borderland subjectivities, which highlights the unique process of identity construction experienced by cross-border subjects who navigate their lives “between two countries, two social systems, two languages, [and] two cultures” (p. 7). As theorized by Anzaldúa (1987/2012), the concept of borderland subjectivities embodied a liminal state of consciousness. This liminal state of consciousness allows individuals living in the borderlands to develop a tolerance for contradictions and ambiguity, giving rise to creative forms of resistance and resilience to established binary categorizations, such as us versus them and insider versus outsider (Anzaldúa, 2009, 2015). In other words, inhabiting the borderlands represents an agentive process of navigating a power-imbued yet potentially transformative space of in-betweenness that challenges restrictive identity politics (Keating, 2008). Therefore, when the students are perceived as borderland subjects, inquiries on their subject positions should correspondingly underscore a shift of focus from the conventional home–host dichotomy to the emergence of fluid and hybrid positionings (Appadurai, 1996; Bhabha, 1994) mediated by the students’ scaling practices across various spatial–temporal and institutional scopes.

The study

This study was part of a larger multi-sited ethnographic project investigating the learning and living experiences of nine undergraduate Chinese international students in the U.S.A. The project was conducted between February 2019 and May 2021. A multiple case study approach was used to organize ethnographic data collected from the students. In the multiple case design, each student was treated as a single “case,” bound together to investigate issues of concern (Yin, 2003). This design provided a constructive lens for the researcher to see the students as distinctive individuals with unique experiences and perspectives, while at once taking into account their shared background as undergraduate Chinese international students in the U.S.A. In this study, I focused on two cases featured in the larger project—Yi and Tong (see Table 1). The rationale behind the selection of these two cases was twofold. First, these cases contained representative examples that can be used to examine and demonstrate the key characteristics associated with the students’ scaling practices and the formation of their borderland subjectivities observed across the scope of the nine cases. Second, the selected cases, in a general sense, reflected participant diversity (gender and fields of study) that was likewise emphasized in the larger project.

Table 1 Demographics of the focal students
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The data set of this study was drawn from 14 ethnographic interviews I conducted with Yi and Tong, respectively. Each interview lasted between one hour and one and a half hours. The interviews were conducted in Chinese and subsequently translated by the researcher into English. Throughout the conduction of those interviews, I employed the method of narrative inquiry that encouraged the practice of storytelling and accentuated “the experiential, affective, and subjective ways in which people made sense of their [selves]” (Georgakopoulou, 2015, p. 257). Accordingly, except for a handful of background-related questions, most of the conversations I had with Yi and Tong during the interviews were open-ended, touching upon various aspects of their everyday experiences both before and after their relocation to the U.S.A. The analysis of the interview data was guided by an iterative process of coding and analytic memoing grounded in the tradition of qualitative thematic analysis (Boyatzis, 1998; Braun & Clarke, 2006). The data analysis consisted of two rounds of coding. In the first coding pass, I focused on identifying the scaling practices of the participants, with specific regard to the affordances and constraints manifested in Yi’s and Tong’s endeavors to construct their personal narratives across space and time. In the second coding pass, I brought in the borderland trope, which served to situate the students’ scaling practices in relation to how they positioned themselves vis-à-vis their home and host societies. The coding activities were consistently accompanied by the writing of analytic memos (Heath & Street, 2008). In the analytic memos, I paid particular attention to (1) detecting the intertextual links behind the participants’ narrative accounts recorded in outwardly separate interviews and (2) comparing and structuring the coded data between the two cases (Stake, 2006).

A note on researcher positionality

Conducting research with undergraduate Chinese international students required balancing my roles between a “xué zhǎng” and a researcher. “Xué zhǎng,” which meant a senior fellow student in Chinese, was the term used most frequently by the students to address me on various occasions. As an international student from China, I had the privilege of being treated as a member of their group and establishing a genuine rapport with them. The establishment of this interpersonal rapport was attributable to my commitment to involving myself in the everyday lives of the students, which included and went beyond the time we spent during interviews. Despite my relationship with the students as a “xué zhǎng,” I made a purposeful decision to maintain a researcher role throughout my fieldwork period. This researcher role can be explained from two main aspects. First, by assuming the role of a researcher, I made it explicit to the students that my relationship with them was consistently governed by ethical principles related to consent and confidentiality. Second, informed by my role as a researcher, I kept an eye on potential sources of researcher bias. To alleviate this concern, I made deliberate efforts in my data analysis and interpretation to prioritize the authentic voices of the students, instead of arguments based on my own assumptions.

Findings

Based on the thematic analysis of the interview data, two prevalent and recurring themes emerged.

  1. (1)

    An unbounded process: Identified through a scale-oriented lens, this process captures a characterization of Chinese international students as borderland subjects who are socioculturally fluid and ideologically unconstrained.

  2. (2)

    A sedimented process: In line with the scale-oriented standpoint, this process highlights an understanding of the students as borderland subjects whose lived experiences continuously intersect between the here-and-now (the present time and space) and there-and-then (past/imagined time and space).

While presented sequentially, these two processes should not be treated as mutually exclusive. Instead, they are best perceived as two interrelated yet distinguishable angles for studying the students’ formation of borderland subjectivities and the scaling practices involved therein. In the current study, I sought to exemplify these two processes using the cases of Yi and Tong, respectively.

An unbounded process

Yi’s story: Navigating the feelings of foreignness In a conversation I had with Yi during the summer of 2020, he used the term “fú píng” (duckweeds) to describe how he felt about his life as a Chinese international student in the U.S.A. In Chinese, “fú píng” is commonly used metaphorically to convey a sense of rootlessness and precariousness, akin to floating duckweeds whose movement is predominantly determined by external forces, such as wind and waves. When I asked Yi to elaborate on what he meant by “fú píng,” he shared his experience of feeling like a “bù shòu dài jiàn de wài guó rén” (an unwanted foreigner) vis-à-vis both China and the U.S.A.

At that time, I felt great anxiety upon learning about the directive issued by ICE, which would prohibit international students from remaining in the U.S.A. to take online courses. However, getting flight tickets to China was equally challenging due to the country’s flight bans. It was during this period that I felt alienated from both countries, treated by both as an unwanted foreigner. Yet, I must clarify that the pandemic is not solely responsible for the awkward conditions faced by Chinese international students. There have always been claims in the U.S.A. that international students from China are spies and job-takers. Similarly, whenever Chinese students encounter violent incidents in the U.S.A., their stories circulate on Chinese social media like Weibo, where they are often met with hundreds and thousands of insults from Chinese netizens, such as “because those students fawn on Westerners and Western cultures, they bring those troubles on themselves” (Ninth Interview, 07/14/2020).

Yi’s narrative began with a dilemma he faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, triggered by two factors. First, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a directive ordering international students to depart the country if they planned to receive online-only instruction in the fall of 2020. Although the directive was eventually rescinded by the federal government, it caused severe anxiety and concern among international students (Castiello-Gutiérrez & Li, 2020), particularly at the time when I had that conversation with Yi. Second, due to China’s zero-tolerance policy on COVID-19 infection, tight curbs on overseas flights were imposed, coupled with stringent viral testing requirements for China-bound passengers. These two factors combined to give Yi the impression that the U.S.A. wanted him to leave, while China didn’t allow him to return, leading to his self-perception as “an unwanted foreigner” vis-à-vis both countries. Of significance to Yi’s narrative was that he extended the discussion of his foreigner identity beyond the pandemic, as he asserted that the dilemmatic situation confronting Chinese international students represented a microcosm of long-standing hostile attitudes toward them in both Chinese and the U.S. societies. Yi supported his assertion with examples that aligned with existing scholarship on stereotypes of Chinese international students in both countries. Specifically, his statement about the students being treated as spies and job-takers in the U.S.A. was echoed in studies that questioned xenophobic and racist sentiments targeted at those students in U.S. news media and political discourses (Yao & George Mwangi, 2022; Yin, 2023). Likewise, his reference to the students being seen in China as individuals who “fawned on Westerners and Western cultures” was reminiscent of what Bieler (2004) called the patriots versus traitors debate embedded in the history of student migration from China to the U.S.A.

In this excerpt, Yi consciously took up a scalar perspective to interpret the imposed sense of foreignness he encountered in both his home and host societies. For the manifestation of Yi’s scalar perspective, a relatively lower, localized spatial–temporal context was indexed through his mentioning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which captured an issue-specific and transitory phenomenon. In contrast, a higher, trans-localized context was reflected in his description of the persistent hostile attitudes toward Chinese international students in the broader public spheres of China and the U.S.A. His understanding of the nested relationship between the two contexts was evident in his explanation that the COVID-19 pandemic was not the cause of his feelings of foreignness but rather an example of the double-bind dilemma he faced. In her work, Gal (2016) introduced the concept of fractal recursivity to illustrate the presence of “self-similar categories of contrast” (p. 92) across scales institutionalized in sociopolitical and ideological domains. Yi’s narrative showcased the forcefulness of a specific category of contrast, namely, foreigner versus non-foreigner, to which he was subjected in various spatial–temporal contexts. Based on his narrative, it can be also learned that, in his view, the foreigner category served not as a neutral or technical descriptor but as a power-imbued classifying mechanism driven by ideology.

If the above excerpt can be considered an illustration of Yi’s scalar-informed awareness of his feelings of alienation from both China and the U.S.A., what he shared with me afterward demonstrated how he attempted to make sense of his foreigner identity through scaling practices. First, during our ensuing conversation, Yi replied the following to my question about feeling like a foreigner vis-à-vis both China and the U.S.A.

It is frustrating. But I do not have to let that dilemma define who I am. Being a foreigner can be a personal choice, right? When I say that I perceive myself as a foreigner in both Chinese and the U.S. contexts, it does not mean that I do not care about these two countries. What is important is that when talking about them, I do not have to pick sides (Ninth Interview, 07/14/2020).

While Yi admitted that being treated as an unwanted foreigner by both China and the U.S.A. was “frustrating,” he refused to be trapped by this condition. He emphasized that instead of solely embodying a hegemonically imposed category, the foreigner identity can be regarded as a “personal choice.” The self-motivated basis behind the development of his foreigner identity was evident in Yi’s use of the active voice when expressing, “I perceive myself as a foreigner,” which contrasted with the passive voice he used in his previous complaints about being “treated as a foreigner” by both countries. Of note, in close connection with the formation of his borderland subjectivities that will be discussed further below, Yi implied at the end of his response that the foreigner identity should not lead to apathy toward his home and host societies. Instead, it served to index the possibility of navigating his relations with them without feeling obligated to “pick sides.”

Concerning how he fashioned his foreigner identity, Yi spontaneously shared a case in point during a subsequent interview when he introduced me to an image of a Nazi poster (see Fig. 1) he had come across in a history class he took that summer, and which he had saved on his laptop. As a propaganda tool used by the Nazi Party during the Second World War, the poster featured two catchlines: “Hass und Vernichtung unseren Feinden” (Hate and Destroy Our Enemies) and “Freiheit, Recht und Brot unserem Volk” (Freedom, Justice, and Breed for Our Nation). To help me understand the layout of the poster, Yi explained that in class, they had discussed how the tension between our nation and our enemies was figuratively conveyed through the central drawings of the poster, which portrayed a fight between a heroic Nazi solider and four dragons representing the evil enemies of “Judentum” (Jewry), “Plutokratie” (Plutocracy), “Kapitalismus” (Capitalism), and “Bolschewismus” (Bolshevism).

Upon seeing that poster, I immediately wondered whether it could be applied to China and the U.S.A. I would not have had that little flash of inspiration had I not actively perceived myself as a foreigner vis-à-vis both countries. While the poster seems obsolete, the binary thoughts rooted therein have persisted and adapted to various forms of expression across space and time. Both China and the U.S.A. have their versions of this kind of poster. Even if we just focus on the contemporary era, I can easily see an anti-difference stance propagated in their posters. China is fraught with issues of ethnicity, featuring a divide between the Han majority and ethnic minorities. The U.S.A. grapples with issues of race, with a divide between White and racial minorities. Their respective attitudes toward Chinese international students, as we talked about before, constitute another example (Tenth Interview, 08/19/2020).

According to Yi, the enactment of his foreigner identity was discernible through a thought process he immediately engaged in when introduced to the Nazi poster in class. This thought process was motivated by the idea of whether the information conveyed in the poster could be applied to China and the U.S.A. When trying to clarify the emergence of that idea, he attributed it to his active positioning of himself “as a foreigner vis-à-vis both countries.” As further illustrated in the excerpt, Yi stated that his foreigner positioning allowed him to recognize that while the Nazi propaganda tool seemed outdated, the dominant ideologies embedded therein persisted across “space and time.” From Yi’s viewpoint, these ideologies consisted of what he called “the binary thoughts” and “an anti-difference stance,” which penetrated contemporary Chinese and U.S. societies. Such ideologies manifested themselves in the ethnic (“the Han majority versus ethnic minorities”) and racial (“White versus racial minorities”) divides in the two societies, as well as in the double-bind situation confronting the Chinese students, as he had described in our previous conversation.

Fig. 1
figure 1

The Nazi poster

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The notion of scaling was clearly embodied in Yi’s thought process, guiding his (re)interpretations of the Nazi poster. Accompanied by his scaling practices, Yi traversed the boundaries of multiple spatial–temporal contexts to illustrate how he agentively navigated the feelings of foreignness vis-à-vis both China and the U.S.A. By drawing my attention to the poster, Yi strategically brought in a specific spatial–temporal context that captured the ideological war initiated by the Nazi Party during the Second World War. This spatial–temporal context was then connected with two other spatial–temporal contexts related to China and the U.S.A., respectively. To establish connections among these different contexts, Yi first identified the underlying “us versus them” mentality embedded in the Nazi slogans. Following this line of thought, he re-introduced his foreigner positioning and highlighted how it enabled him to recognize the perpetuation of the “us versus them” mentality within contemporary Chinese and U.S. societies. The formation of Yi’s borderland subjectivities was indexed through his critiques of the divisive mentality. Along with his critiques, Yi set himself apart not only from the image of Chinese international students as staunch nationalists (cf. Dong, 2017; Jiang, 2021) but also from the representation of the students as individuals who desperately sought to gain a full and legitimate sense of membership in the Western world (cf. Fong, 2011). Instead, based on his scaling practices, Yi stressed the affordances of thinking and talking about both his home and host societies through a self-cultivated foreigner lens, characterized by fluidity, in-betweenness, and a desire to transcend a nationalistic and ethnocentric approach to defining personal identities.

A sedimented process

Tong’s story: Re-articulating the meanings behind “coming from Shanghai” In the autumn of 2019, during an icebreaker activity organized by a student group of which Tong was a founding member, I noticed that whenever she was asked the question “where are you from?”, Tong consistently and promptly replied, “I come from Shanghai.” On occasion, she would follow up with the word “China” to clarify when her interlocutors were unaware that Shanghai is a city in China. After repeatedly observing this kind of exchanges in which Tong engaged on numerous occasions, I asked her about it.

  1. R:

    When you are in the U.S.A. and someone asks you the question “where are you from?”, how would you normally respond to that question?

  2. T:

    I usually say “I come from Shanghai.” Most people I meet are aware of Shanghai’s location. If they are not, I might add something like “yeah, Shanghai, China.” I prefer not to simply say “I come from China.” When we are overseas, we are all Chinese, but China is such a vast and diverse concept. There are significant cultural differences among people from different regions within China (Sixth Interview, 12/02/2019).

Consistent with the impression I gained from my participant observations, Tong’s response indicated that she deliberately emphasized her self-identification as someone from Shanghai. As illustrated through her reply, Tong differentiated the expression “I come from Shanghai” from the broader term “I come from China.” To her, China served as an overarching label that was widely applicable but failed to acknowledge the heterogeneous nature of people living in different Chinese regions and areas. Therefore, in her response to the question “where are you from?”, she consciously chose to underscore her specific connection with her hometown, Shanghai, rather than a more generalized association with China.

Nonetheless, such compelling recognition of herself as a Shanghainese person didn’t come naturally to Tong. During our conversation, she shared a major struggle she had experienced concerning her Shanghainese identity before arriving in the U.S.A. This struggle was caused by a perceived lack of proficiency in using the Shanghai dialect. Despite being born and raised in Shanghai, her parents were not Shanghai natives and didn’t speak the Shanghai dialect; they communicated with each other in Mandarin. Tong developed an interest in learning the Shanghai dialect at a young age because she noticed that it was intriguingly distinct from her home language and frequently used by the locals, especially the elderly Shanghai natives, in their everyday lives. However, her efforts to use the Shanghai dialect and embrace her Shanghainese identity faced strong objections during her time in Shanghai.

Although I wanted to identify myself as a Shanghai native, I struggled with that sense of belonging. This was mainly because I didn’t feel like I had a good grasp of Shanghainese culture, especially when it came to the Shanghai dialect. This was significant because claiming to be from a specific area also meant embracing and using the unique dialect of that region. However, I hesitated to speak the Shanghai dialect when I was in Shanghai because I had been ridiculed several times by elderly natives who said, “you spoke a pidgin language” (Sixth Interview, 12/02/2019).

Echoing a widely shared understanding that dialect use in China functioned as a salient identity marker for people from certain regional backgrounds (Liang, 2015), Tong highlighted that the Shanghai dialect was crucial to one’s self-identification as a Shanghai native. She confessed ambivalent feelings toward her Shanghainese identity due to her use of the Shanghai dialect being repeatedly judged by elderly Shanghai natives as “a pidgin language.” In her original words, Tong employed reported speech (Goffman, 1981) by switching from Mandarin to the Shanghai dialect, namely, “nóng gāng de yáng jīng bāng” (you spoke a pidgin language), when denoting the comments made by those elderly natives. In our follow-up conversation, Tong informed me that while the term “yáng jīng bāng” originally referred to Chinese Pidgin English used as a trade language in Shanghai during the settlement period, nowadays, locals used it in a more general sense to express negative evaluations of things and behaviors deemed as neither fish nor fowl.

Despite having unpleasant memories, Tong managed to develop a strategy to combat the stigma attached to her use of the Shanghai dialect and her Shanghainese identity after arriving in the U.S.A. This destigmatizing process was largely facilitated by an overseas hometown network comprising both international and immigrant students she met on campus. During our interview, she mentioned that she primarily used the Shanghai dialect in the U.S.A. during hometown club gatherings. When describing the reasons behind her changed perspective on using the Shanghai dialect, she emphasized the inclusive atmosphere of the hometown club. That is, instead of being evaluated based on a native-speaker model, the use of the Shanghai dialect in her club was unanimously cherished for its role in engendering meaning-making activities associated with the objective of community building. Moreover, she stressed a distinctive pattern of language use in the club, which involved a regular switch between the Shanghai dialect and English to accommodate the club members from different ethnolinguistic backgrounds.

It brought back memories of when my Shanghai dialect was referred to as a pidgin language by people back home. As you may know, the term “pidgin” originated from the use of a code-mixed language during the settlement period. Admittedly, the settlement period was entangled with a colonial history, but it also played an important role in driving the development of Shanghai. Unfortunately, many people seem to have forgotten that Shanghai’s prosperity was closely connected with its history as a city where the East met the West (Sixth Interview, 12/02/2019).

Tong stated that the mixed use of the Shanghai dialect and English brought back memories of a comment she had once received in Shanghai: “you spoke a pidgin language.” Following this statement, she offered an interpretative lens to deconstruct the meaning of the term “pidgin language,” tracing its origins back to Shanghai’s settlement period. Despite the involvement of colonial regimes of power during that time, Tong perceived the settlement period as embodying a fundamental, albeit seemingly outdated, conceptualization of Shanghai as “a city where the East met the West.” In this vein, the term “pidgin” served as a cue to signify such unique historical properties of Shanghai.

The notion of scaling was well reflected in Tong’s efforts to tackle the stigma attached to her use of the Shanghai dialect and her Shanghainese identity. Through her scaling practices, Tong challenged the native-speaker model of the Shanghai dialect and advocated the adoption of a “more dynamic, relational, and negotiated orientation” (Canagarajah, 2016, p. 47) to define what constituted a legitimate way of utilizing the Shanghai dialect on a trans-local scale. The example she offered of her shuttling between the Shanghai dialect and English in the overseas hometown club mirrored what García and Li (2014) called “translanguaging,” suggesting that languages should not be treated as separate linguistic systems but as assemblages of discursive resources embedded in language users’ communicative toolkits and meaning-making strategies. By doing so, Tong tacitly proposed an alternative way to claim her Shanghainese identity associated with the translingual use of the Shanghai dialect characterized by “diversity and plurality and not homogeneity and uniformity” (Canagarajah, 2016, p. 50). This kind of rescaling of her Shanghainese identity was also evident in her reflections on the term “pidgin.” Informed by her translingual use of the Shanghai dialect, she situated her interpretation of the term “pidgin” in relation to a spatial–temporal configuration of Shanghai during the settlement period. By invoking this spatial–temporal imagination of Shanghai, Tong effectively transformed the pidgin label from a negative sign of one’s failure to articulate their Shanghainese identity into a positive indicator of one’s legitimacy in expressing their Shanghainese identity rooted in an arguably forgotten history of transnational and cosmopolitan interactions.

Accompanied by her enunciation of a reclaimed Shanghainese identity, Tong once mentioned another reason behind her insistence on using the expression “I come from Shanghai” while living and learning in the U.S.A. This reason was linked to her attitudes toward the classification of Asians in U.S. society.

Before coming to the U.S.A., I had heard the term “Asian,” but I had never considered whether it applied to me. It was only after arriving in the U.S.A. that I realized I was being identified as Asian. Whenever I need to fill out a form that includes questions about my race and ethnicity, I find myself confined to checking that one box. It feels like something imposed on me because the category of Asian is too vague (Seventh Interview, 02/10/2020).

As Tong explained, although she had been aware of the pan-national term “Asian” before her journey to the U.S.A., she had never considered this term meaningful to her sense of identity. The situation changed after her arrival in the U.S.A. Tong recounted how she felt that she “was being identified as Asian,” a feeling that was specifically reinforced during moments when she had no choice but to check the “Asian” box to address standard form-filling tasks that requested information on her race. By describing the Asian category as “vague,” she emphasized her frustration with the U.S.-centered process of racial classification that homogenized the Asian group, erasing differences among people from varied ethnonational backgrounds (Omi & Winant, 2015). Thus, Tong’s decision to accentuate her Shanghainese identity can be considered a strategy for rejecting an imposed racial positioning.

As time passed, however, Tong began to display a more nuanced perspective on the term “Asian,” which cannot be simply interpreted as a resistant attitude. During the subsequent interviews conducted throughout my fieldwork, Tong occasionally shared her views on topics related to race and pan-Asian identification in the U.S.A., which had been influenced by sociology classes she took in her sophomore and junior years. While remaining critical of the vagueness of the term “Asian,” Tong gradually shifted her focus toward the structural inequalities confronting the Asian population in the U.S.A. During a conversation in the spring of 2021, Tong even expressed her commitment to considering herself as part of the Asian community and fostering a collective voice to combat anti-Asian sentiments fueled by fears surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. The process by which Tong made sense of her Asian identity was of significance to the present study because it was shaped by her (re)scaled attachment to Shanghai.

To provide you with an example, I recently came across a book through a podcast I really liked. The book was titled “Shanghai Splendor,” and it traced the development of Shanghai from the Opium War to the founding of New China. Although this was not explicitly mentioned in the podcast, I felt it was implied in the narrative. During that period, it was perhaps the first time that people in Shanghai learned they could be grouped into a category called “Asian.” Unfortunately, many of them were treated as second-class citizens in their own land. However, the dedication and toughness of our ordinary Shanghainese people were vital in propelling Shanghai to its status as the leading metropolitan region in the Far East. This resilience can be seen in the Asian population in the U.S.A. as well, who have made invaluable contributions to U.S. society despite facing hardships caused by racism and social injustice. This is one of those moments when I feel a more meaningful connection to the term “Asian,” not simply because I have an Asian face (Twelfth Interview, 03/30/2021).

In Tong’s example, she illustrated how her sense of belonging to Shanghai fostered a heightened awareness of her connection with being “Asian.” To elucidate this connection, Tong referred to a book she discovered through a podcast. The book, titled “Shanghai Splendor,” covered the history of Shanghai’s modernity shaped by the period of foreign settlements following China’s defeat in the Opium War. Expanding on the information from the podcast, Tong crafted a portrayal of ordinary Shanghainese people during the settlement period. She foregrounded that despite being arbitrarily labeled as “Asian” and “treated as second-class citizens in their own land,” these people demonstrated an exceptional degree of resilience that epitomized the ethos of Shanghai’s modernity and laid the groundwork for its social development. Drawing on this sense of resilience, Tong established an analogy between the Shanghainese people and the Asian population in the U.S.A., exemplifying a subtle lens through which she interpreted pan-Asian identification.

The notion of scaling resurfaced in Tong’s efforts to navigate her relationship with the term “Asian.” Through her scaling practices, a spatial–temporal configuration of Shanghai, reminiscent of the one she had previously mobilized to destigmatize the pidgin label, was re-purposed to conceptualize her Shanghainese-ness. Unlike the earlier scene where the spatial–temporal imagination of Shanghai highlighted the cosmopolitan underpinnings of Shanghainese identity, her scaling practices in the current scenario brought to the fore a tradition of resilience intrinsic to Shanghai’s modernity ethos intertwined with its colonial history. For Tong, this resilient spirit rooted in Shanghainese culture served as a symbolic bond of solidarity between herself and the seemingly distant Asian population in the U.S.A. Taken together, it can be argued that the scaling practices Tong engaged in indexed her positioning as a borderland subject. These practices, which reflectively informed her understanding of the pidgin label and pan-Asian identification, were a strong indication of her potential to agentively cultivate a layered and spatial–temporally contingent connection with her home and host societies.

Concluding thoughts

The analysis of the interview data exhibited the intricacies involved in Yi’s and Tong’s negotiation of their subject positions vis-à-vis their home and host societies. Based on the presentation of these two illustrative cases, I proposed a critical conceptualization of international students as borderland subjects, embracing a liminal stance to (re)articulate their multiply located senses of self mediated at the intersection of where they are from and where they are at. As a robust response to the critiques of the assimilation-oriented framework of adjustment and adaption, the borderland trope emphasized the potential of the students to agentively and “consciously position themselves in disequilibrium with their origins and the host country” (Marginson, 2014, p. 12). In this light, the borderland trope suggested that traditional dichotomies such as home/host, local/newcomer, and insider/outsider were insufficient for capturing the complex realities of living and learning as cross-border students and the affordances of their cross-border mobility. Echoing arguments of scholars in the broader field of migration studies (Wortham et al., 2020), the findings of this study conveyed a clear message that research on international student identities needed to seriously engage with the concept of in-betweenness (Dai, 2022). As illustrated through Yi’s story of navigating his feelings of foreignness and Tong’s story of making sense of her Shanghainese-ness, these students actively nurtured a critical and creative state of in-betweenness, wherein “outsiderness and insiderness were not dichotomous, but were instead heterogeneous and blurred, with porous boundaries” (Perrino & Wortham, 2018, p. 2).

To unveil the process through which the students agentively constructed their borderland subjectivities, I introduced a theoretical lens grounded in the notion of scale. Focusing on the students’ scaling practices, I demonstrated how the becoming of borderland subjects was tightly intertwined with activities of “virtual space–time ‘movement’ and ‘travel’” (Lempert & Perrino, 2007, p. 207) that underpinned the lived experiences of the students. As revealed by the investigations into the unbounded aspect of identity construction in Yi’s case and the sedimented aspect of identity construction in Tong’s case, the students made vigorous endeavors to juxtapose, de- and re-contextualize various spatial–temporal configurations to dynamically position themselves vis-à-vis their home and host societies. By shedding light on the formation of the students’ borderland subjectivities, the scalar perspective also foregrounds an important recognition that space and time are not external and static backdrops against which ISM takes place. Instead, they are integral to the meaning-making repertoires of the students, pervading the process of their identity construction that shapes and is shaped by their cross-border movement. In this sense, the students’ scaling practices can be seen as manifestations of their agency, generating new conditions and possibilities for them to express aspirations and desires tied to their past, present, and future selves and to transform their relationships with the people and communities they interact with within and across contexts.

Nevertheless, it is vital to note that the agency of the students should not be romanticized. As pointed out by Page and Chahboun (2019), international students were perennially “susceptible to laws, policies, regulations, as well as cultural and societal idiosyncrasies of both sending and receiving societies” (p. 881). In Yi’s case, his feelings of foreignness mainly stemmed from alienating forces perpetuated by dominant discourses aligned with established political–ideological boundaries, which led to an imposed portrayal of himself as an undesirable other vis-à-vis both China and the U.S.A. Likewise, in Tong’s case, the roles played by the pidgin label and the Asian category in informing the developmental trajectory of her Shanghainese identity highlighted the constant interplay of unequal power relations within broader Chinese and U.S. societies, which chaotically affected her sense of belonging as a cross-border student. Thus, it is essential to reiterate that despite the focus on identifying the students’ scaling practices and their borderland subjectivities, this study is not intended to celebrate a utopian understanding of the students as fully empowered individuals with absolute freedom to regulate the scope and implications of their identity construction. Instead, it calls for recognizing the self-(trans)forming potential of the students to negotiate, subvert, and even transcend certain structural and value-laden constraints surrounding their cross-border lives. By promoting a heightened awareness of the subtleties concerning the strengths of the students, along with the challenges and opportunities they encounter, I hope this work contributes to advancing an emerging avenue of research that aims to unveil the transformative and fluid underpinnings of ISM.