Photo by Megan Williams
Being a third culture student, senior Nicole Wong has grown more confident in opening up about her cultural upbringing through her journey of personal identity and growth.
Wong — a Liberal Arts for Education major and Multimedia Design minor — grew up facing cultural differences between Hong Kong, Shanghai and America. She was born in Hong Kong (soon after it ceased to be a British territory) and raised in Shanghai since she was 4. Her spectrum of schools include a Communist Chinese public school, an English-speaking international high school that emulated American culture and a private American university.
As Wong’s college journey progressed, her ability to express her cultural heritage grew.
“If you don’t understand the fact that I’m Chinese, it’s so hard to understand that I’m Nicole,” Wong said. “It’s such a big part of me.”
During her first year at Pepperdine, Wong said she was more shy about sharing her ethnic background.
“I appeared trying to be more ‘whitewashed’ than I seemed to be in order to fit in,” Wong said. “But I feel like spending the year in Shanghai my junior year during the pandemic really made me a lot more connected to my family and roots of where I come from.”
Wong said her first-year roommate Valerie Lam, another international student from Shanghai, encouraged her to be more open in sharing her unique cultural practices and to use her cultural identity as a social asset rather than a social barrier.
“I think that was really inspiring to me to see that it’s OK to ‘rep’ your unique cultural identity and to be OK that you’re so different from other people,” Wong said.
Wong found ways to use her cultural knowledge and skills to help others, such as guiding group discussions for international students with stronger cultural-linguistic barriers for Pepperdine’s Great Books program.
“I feel like more and more so, you have to be proud of where you’re from and just acknowledge that not everyone has that same experience,” Wong said. “You can be the bridge to really push the cultures together.”
While Wong navigated how to express her cultural qualities in America, she also had to confront cultural challenges in China.
“That’s something I struggle with,” Wong said. “Maybe just the way I present myself is very different from what a common Shanghai person would. So sometimes, I’ll literally just be standing in the metro and people would tell that I’m not from there.”
Before even saying a word, Wong said people at the metro station in China would speak to her in English.
During her internship in Shanghai last summer, Wong said her cultural differences also created an initial barrier between her and the Chinese natives.
“As the weeks progressed and we got to know each other more, they were surprised to see that I am more Chinese than they thought I originally would be,” Wong said.
Being back in America, Wong said she felt inspired when others spoke about reconnecting with their cultural roots.
“I feel like them voicing out those thoughts gave me more confidence to be like, ‘Yes, you know what, Asia is amazing, and my identity that I come from there, that’s also amazing,’” Wong said. “It’s such a blessed experience that I get to ‘rep’ that when I’m here.”
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Email Claire Lee: claire.lee@pepperdine.edu
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