CUHK Research: Changing the world

For Professor Hong Ying-yi, the “grand challenge” she sees as the impetus of her research is simple and concise: she simply seeks to “avoid wars”. She says, “ The unde r l y i ng rat i ona l e beh i nd my research is: how do people from different cultural backgrounds see things from different perspectives? How can we make use of interculturalism to help everybody communicate better, and cultivate positive relationships?” Comparing the historical, social and political contexts of a place, as well as discovering how these different contexts contribute to “‘who we are’ and ‘what we stand for’”, is something that fascinates Professor Hong. CUHK has long been a homebase for cultural psychology, but multicultural studies were still a relatively underdeveloped subject when Professor Hong started her research, and whenever it was discussed, most academics would opt for a more comparative approach; but having grown up in Hong Kong, Professor Hong was acutely aware of the potential for coexistent perspectives. Her start in research coincided with many people experiencing crises in identity concerning the 1997 handover — a research topic she calls her “first love”. Over the years, her research has coalesced around the thorny issue of Hong Kong identity, as she realised its critical nature. She says: “I want to understand how Hong Kong citizens identify themselves now, after all the changes that have happened in the past 25 years”. A newway to bridge cultures Nowhere is the complexity of identity and its effects on culture more obvious than in Hong Kong, wheremany citizens are familiarwith facets of both Chinese and Western cultures. “In typical multicultural studies, these people are treated as ‘contaminated’ and don’t make good research subjects because they are not typical, pure Chinese or American,” she says. But for Professor Hong, these subjects were valuable because “they really show the impact of culture on people.” B u i l d i n g o n t h e “ f r ame s w i t c h i n g ” phenomenon common l y repo r t ed i n multicultural individuals, Professor Hong proposed in 2000 the dynamic constructivist theory. Explaining this concept in 2014’s Oxford Handbook of Multicultural Identity , she wrote that “bicultural individuals can adjust their thoughts, affect and behaviours spontaneously and appropriately in different cultural contexts”. In other words, since an individual can host more than one cultural system within them, their cultural frame In more than two decades of research, Professor Hong Ying-yi has provided valuable insight into how multicultural identities are constructed. With her interdisciplinary studies, she has shown that individuals’ actions cannot simply be explained by one cultural framework. Having proposed the “dynamic constructivist theory” to explain how multicultural individuals can incorporate multiple cultures, she has gone on to provide the world with a more nuanced understanding of the Hong Kong identity, with her work featured in both academic journals as well as popular media like The New Yorker . Hong Ying-yi Choh-Ming Li Professor of Management 47