Being CBC: The Ambivalent Identities and Belonging of Canadian-Born Children of Immigrants

Abstract

Immigrants from Hong Kong are one of the largest recent cohorts of newcomers in Canada. We examine the processes through which the children of Hong Kong immigrants construct a sense of belonging in Canada, their only home. In focus group discussions, the participants express an unequivocal sense of Canadian citizenship and belonging. Yet their identities project an idealized Canadian body that wears “Canadian” clothing, plays “Canadian” sports, and, above all, speaks “Canadian” English. The projection is always relational and spatialized, variable according to place, and especially according to whether the other is viewed as family, as another “Canadian-born Chinese” (CBC), as a recent Chinese immigrant, or as a dominant Canadian. Often viewed as not Chinese enough by recent immigrants, in turn, they denigrate recent immigrants as not Canadian enough and resent them for reinforcing a concept of otherness held by dominant Canadians that often includes CBCs. Many participants feel more “Chinese” in family settings where parents uphold Chinese traditions. Their sense of belonging is a set of paradoxes, of between-ness, that they negotiate through a sense of place-ness: place as the homes in which they belong but also as a set of shifting public and private contexts in which they express their identities and relationships in variable ways.