Belonging across generations
Those who arrived young often described integration as easy. Some adult parents separated living comfortably in Sweden from truly belonging there, while describing stronger belonging among their children.
Research
Migration, Identity & Belonging
I grew up as a migrant child, and I study migration. Three connected projects — a documentary film, a social media analysis, and a field study — each ask the same question from a different angle: how do people build identity while in motion?
01Filmmaker & Interviewer
Rooted in Motion (《在流动中扎根》)
A Five-Minute Documentary on a Mainland Migrant Working in Hong Kong Media
📍 Hong Kong📅 August 2026 · Hong Kong Documentary Filmmaking Program
Documentary FilmMigrationHong KongInterviewingVisual Storytelling
Overview
During a week-long documentary filmmaking program in Hong Kong (Tsinglin Practical Platform, August 2026), I co-planned, shot, and edited a five-minute documentary about "Journey", a 31-year-old mainland woman who came to Hong Kong as a student in 2017, left for Shanghai during the pandemic, and returned — building a career in Hong Kong's media industry. The film follows her evening walk from newsroom to harbour, asking what it means to put down roots while still in motion.
Watch the Film
Rooted in Motion — final cut (5 min 39 s)
Filmed and edited in Hong Kong, August 2026. The subject appears with her consent and is referred to here as "Journey", the name used in the film. English captions are on by default (CC); they sit at the top so they do not cover the original Chinese line.
Background
The program trained us in documentary theory, interview design, cinematography, and post-production, then sent us into the city to find and tell a real story. My team chose a subject whose life echoed a question I have carried since childhood: when you keep moving between places, what part of you stays the same? Our subject's Hong Kong–Shanghai–Hong Kong trajectory mirrored my own China–Sweden–China path.
Methodology
We designed a hybrid "follow + sit-down" shoot: trailing our subject through her after-work streets in Mong Kok and Sheung Wan, then a long-form interview in a quiet bookshop, closing at Victoria Harbour. I co-wrote the full script and shot plan — interview questions, scene design, lighting, and a storyboard built around the theme of change and constancy — conducted street and sit-down interviews, and worked through the edit in post-production sessions.
Key Findings
The film's answer to its own question is in its title: rooting and moving are not opposites. Our subject never 'became' a Hongkonger in the checklist sense — instead she chose what to keep (her accent, her curiosity, her mainland memories) and what to let change (her pace, her work, her map of the city). At the program's final screening, my work received an EXCELLENT evaluation.
This was my first time turning research questions into a visual narrative. An interview is a different instrument from a survey — silence, hesitation, and a switch from Mandarin to Cantonese mid-sentence can say more than a direct answer. It sharpened the same instincts I use in my migration research: listen first, notice the small things, and let people be the authors of their own story.
02Independent ResearcherRevised draft
Between Two Cultures
Identity and Belonging among Chinese Migrants in Sweden on Xiaohongshu (RedNote)
📍 Independent project · BIPH📅 Grade 11 – 12
Migration StudiesDigital EthnographyIdentitySocial MediaCultural Anthropology
Overview
This paper examines how young Chinese migrants in Sweden use Xiaohongshu to negotiate identity and belonging while living between Chinese and Swedish cultures. I analyzed 20 public posts — some personal accounts of studying or working in Sweden, others guides to Swedish food and everyday life — and found that the platform is not only a place to document migrant life. It is a digital space where people actively construct who they are.
Background
When my family lived in Sollentuna, I watched the adults around me navigate a life split between two countries — celebrating Lunar New Year under a Nordic winter sky, hunting for familiar ingredients in unfamiliar supermarkets. Years later I found those same experiences written in public, post by post, on Xiaohongshu. What began as recognition became a research question: how do Chinese migrants in Sweden use social media to make sense of who they are?
Methodology
I collected 20 Xiaohongshu posts by searching tags and keywords such as “Sweden,” “migrants in Sweden,” “living in Sweden,” and “Swedish food,” then read both the writing and the images. Most users appeared to be young — some in Sweden temporarily to study, others settling for the long term. Recurring patterns clustered into three themes: food, language, and loneliness. I interpret those patterns through Stuart Hall (identity as becoming), Erving Goffman (identity as performance), and Homi Bhabha (the third space between cultures), grounded in my own eight years as a migrant child in Sweden.
Key Findings
Food works in two directions at once. Posts about köttbullar, kanelbullar, and fika show migrants learning Swedish social ritual; posts about luosifen in a Nordic supermarket, or a late-night bowl at Mala Town in Stockholm, rebuild a portable home. Language is a set of identity positions: English as a buffer of semi-integration, Swedish as either deep belonging or extra work depending on how long one plans to stay, and Chinese as the language of feeling. Loneliness has a climate (dark winters, Spring Festival spent alone), a social form (Swedish privacy versus Chinese density), and an in-between ache — neither Sweden nor a return to China feels entirely like home. The response is not choosing one side. It is living in the space between.
From the posts
Three public Xiaohongshu posts from the sample of twenty — one for each theme. Click a card to open the original screenshot.
Public posts cited in the paper, shown as they appeared on Xiaohongshu.
This project let me return to my own childhood with an analyst's eyes. The food we ate, the languages we switched, the quiet weekends — they were not only memories. They were data points in a larger human pattern. That is why I want to study cultural anthropology: research can turn private experience into shared understanding.
03Field Researcher & Interviewer
Sweden Immigration Field Research
Interviews on Migration, Welfare, and Multiculturalism
📍 Sollentuna & Stockholm, Sweden📅 Grade 9 – 10
MigrationWelfare StateMulticulturalismField InterviewsNordic Society
Overview
Before I could name it as research, I was living it: eight years as a migrant child in Sweden. In Grades 9 and 10, I returned to that experience deliberately, using a structured interview guide to ask immigrants and Swedish residents how integration looks from different positions. The resulting archive brings together 28 interview records on belonging, employment, welfare, education, and cultural adaptation.
Background
I arrived in Sweden in January 2014 at age five, speaking no Swedish. By the time I left in December 2021, I had grown up inside its schools, sports clubs, and social codes. That gave me an unusual double position for a young researcher: enough of an insider to be trusted, enough of an outsider to keep asking why. The interviews grew out of that position — I wanted to know how other migrants experienced the same systems I had grown up in.
Methodology
The archive combines several extended interviews using a 35-question guide with shorter field interviews focused on selected questions. The 28 respondents ranged from 14 to 73 and included immigrants and Swedish residents connected to China, India, Syria, Turkey, Germany, Denmark, France, and other backgrounds. I grouped recurring answers across five areas: integration, culture, welfare, education, and future outlook. This is an exploratory convenience sample, not a representative survey; my years in Swedish schools and clubs provide context but are not counted as interview evidence.
Key Findings
The responses resist a simple success-or-failure story. People who arrived young often described integration as easy, while adults more often named Swedish proficiency and social networks as barriers to deeper participation and employment. Welfare and education were widely valued — especially Swedish for Immigrants (SFI), free schooling, and support for children — but healthcare waiting times and uneven access to jobs complicated that picture. Belonging was often generational: some parents felt comfortable in Sweden without feeling that they belonged, even as their children did. Food, language at home, and festivals remained practical ways of carrying culture.
Primary material
Inside the Interview Archive
The questionnaire used a shared framework while leaving room for each respondent to answer from a different position.
- interview records
- 28
- respondent age range
- 14–73
- questions in the full guide
- 35
Language and networks
Swedish enabled deeper conversations and parent-school contact. Personal networks also shaped access to employment, especially for newer arrivals.
Welfare in practice
SFI, education, and services for children were valued. Healthcare waiting times and administrative efficiency were recurring points of friction.
Culture through practice
Home language, cooking, mooncakes, and holiday gatherings preserved heritage; school, work, sports, and local events supported adaptation.
The archive mixes long-form interviews with shorter field responses. Because the source notes contain names and other identifying details, the raw document remains private; this page reports only anonymized, aggregate patterns.
This field study changed how I see myself. I arrived as a Chinese child and left as something more complex — a person who knows how to read a room shaped by very different cultural assumptions, and who knows that most of the things we take for granted are choices, not facts. It planted the questions that my later research on Xiaohongshu and my Hong Kong documentary both grew from.