Anju is a Hong Kong born Japanese. Though she knows how to speak Japanese, she is unfamiliar with Japanese Culture since she has never lived in Japan. Hence, she does not strongly recognize herself as a Japanese. One might think Anju recognizes herself as a Hong Konger as she is raised up in Hong Kong. However, this is not the case. Anju thinks that she can hardly become a Hong Konger without knowing Cantonese as most of the locals speak Cantonese. The language barrier she confronted makes her difficult to intergrate into the local community. As a result, she faces dilemma in recognizing her identity.

 

Although she is a native speaker of Japanese, she is more capable of speaking English than Japanese. Therefore, when she is angry, she will use English to express her anger rather than using her native language Japanese. This shows that she can better express her feelings or thoughts in English. She even claims that even if her parents know English, she will use English to communicate rather than Japanese. It can be seen that not only language will greatly influences one’s identity recogniztion, culture and living environment also play important role in affecting identity recognition.

 

Apart from struggling between being a Japanese and being a Hong Konger, Anju is confused about her personal identity because she experiences changes of personality when speaking different languages. When she is speaking Japanese with her grandparents or friends, she becomes quiet and shy. However, this does not happen when she uses English to talk with her friends and siblings. We can see that language not only affects people's recognition of master identity but also personal identity. She explained that this situation happened might because Japanese are more shy and polite. This culture can be shown in langauge as Japanese has a lot of polite jargons and words.