What are we? Where do we belong? Many of us might just be confused by such questions. Many of us may never feel torn between conflicting emotions of belonging. Although these obsessions have puzzled people from generation to generation, it is often considered the exclusive topic of those who are the descendants of immigrants or those with mixed blood.

I once heard a Chinese-American girl had dropped out of college because she couldn't live up to her parents' expectations for climbing the social ladder like a native American girl. She was so aware of her Asian physical features that she failed to identify herself as an "American" girl and fit into society.

Although there is a universally acknowledged standard called citizenship which grants people their nationality, sometimes it is far from enough to provide people with psychological recognition of their identity. Race, blood, faith and even family environment play their parts in shaping attitudes towards connection with society.

In the old days, many descendants of immigrants and people with mixed blood were often discriminated against by local people. In the Philippines, a city named Angle had more mixed-raced children than anywhere else in the country because it was the location of a US military base. The thousands of light-skinned children were faced with unemployment, as local people said "Go to America" to them, while the Americans said "Get a job in your own country". They were people torn between two different cultures and societies. In most of these cases, it was not the people concerned, but the country that decided where they belonged to.

These days, with such unfair laws being overridden and conventional view being eliminated, many mixed-blooded people are now entitled to choose their own identity, which represents a sea change from earlier generations. They can now localize and at the same time retain an appreciation for their home culture.

The latest trend seems to be that their half-Asian, half-Western faces have caught on in international marketing. Many mixed-blood stars like Maggie Q and Rosemary are favoured by manufacturers to market their products, as consumers are especially drawn by their exotic beauty.

That leads to many youngsters taking steps to follow the trend. Young girls in China are saving to make their eyes look rounder and go through surgery to have more pronounced noses. They are dying their hair or putting in coloured contact lenses to look more like Westerners.

The craze for anything Western seems to go beyond the superficial, spreading to the inside of the younger generations. An increasing number of Chinese people who have studied or worked in Western countries are becoming more accustomed to Western lifestyles.

It seems that now people of hybrid identity are losing their sense of alienation, non-hybrids are taking their places and becoming wracked by cultural conflict.

Although some optimists might claim this craze for the West is nothing but a fad, I wonder whether - in the long run - it can coincide with national identity. The majority of the younger generation will be led to another sense of loss. While the world is marketing aggressively for a global face, the oversold combination of West and East actually becomes dominated by Western values. If the questions never occurred to us before, it is time to begin wondering "what are we" and "where do we belong?"