Corinna Chamberlain (Chan Ming-yan)
A singer and actress who was born and raised in Hong Kong, Corinna Chamberlain shot to fame after performing in the TVB series “Inbound Troubles”—in fluent Cantonese. In her first ever English media interview, the 31-year-old tells Andrea Lo about her childhood, her views on Hong Kong culture and her career.
I was born in Hong Kong. My mum is from Australia and my dad is from New Zealand. They came here over 30 years ago and they have been living here ever since. My brother and I were both born and raised here.
I went to a local Chinese kindergarten. For the first six months of primary school I was at an international school. But after that we moved pretty far out to the New Territories, and my parents decided to homeschool us. My mum was a school teacher in Australia. She taught us at home for a few years. We enrolled at a school in Australia, and we did long-distance learning from here.
There are a lot of third culture people like myself. When you ask people where they come from, they have all these long-winded answers. They’re not really sure where home is or who they are.
I was struggling with that when I was a teenager—am I Chinese, or am I western? What am I? At some point I thought I should just be a westerner again.
I’ve grown up here with Chinese people as my friends—kids in my village and my church—which is a little bit different from the westerners in Hong Kong who go to international schools.
I had this feeling of being an outsider the whole time, but I considered myself as an insider. It’s a feeling of, “Is there something wrong with me? How can I change [in order to] be become one of them?”