“Telling the China story well” in Cambridge undergraduate admissions interviews

Abstract

This article explores how Chinese candidates draw on aspects of their sociocultural background during the University of Cambridge undergraduate admissions interview, an academic gatekeeping encounter. Tannen's three-tiered narrative framework is used to capture how candidates provide (small-n) narratives about China; how these narratives are organized by themes or (big-N) Narratives; and how these Narratives stand in relation to the cultural ideologies, or Master Narratives, disseminated throughout Chinese society. The analysis shows that candidates do not simply reproduce these Master Narratives during the interview. Owing to its interculturality, and marked power differential, candidates are shown instead to engage in careful acts of sociocultural positioning in order to express ideas and opinions—sometimes on matters of geopolitical sensitivity—that may not align with those of their interviewers. In so doing, they also problematize the notion of the “immigrant story”, in which migrant candidates efface and replace their sociocultural identity with one that is fully accommodating.