Paper short abstract:

This paper illustrates a field study conducted in Milan's Chinatown. By using the ethnographic method, this paper aims to explore both young Asians' subculture and their everyday life in this urban space.

Paper long abstract:

This paper illustrates a field study conducted in Milan's Chinatown. By using the ethnographic method, this study shows that young Chinese in Milan bear multiple and hybrid identities which cross transnational borders. Through a 'cultural research', I explored this ethnic subculture to understand the peculiarities of 'Asian Betweeners' identity.

The Chinese district in Milan can be defined 'one large and condensed contact zone in which borders and ethnic boundaries are blurred and where processes of hybridization are rife inevitably because groups of different backgrounds, ethnic and otherwise, cannot help but enter into relations with each other, no matter how great the desire for separateness and the attempt to maintain cultural purity' (Ang 2001: 89). For the younger Asian Betweeners in Milan's Chinatown, this virtual connection to the global cultural flows constitute a social imaginary, a 'mediascape', as Appadurai (1996) wrote, and it clearly symbolizes a great longing for freedom.

The recent debate over hybridization and globalization with regards to "state's integrity" can be brought as a good example of how, today, we are not sure about space as something circumscribed, homogeneous, and centred. Borders are more permeable and there are multiple centres. The challenge for future research is to analyze how globalization causes the end of places and how alternative spaces are developing. Are we evolving into other ways of living, a virtual communicative globalscape as another form of postmodern reality?