As the new Premier League season gets underway and the Olympics Games are officially over, the local tribalism that dominates towns and cities across the United Kingdom returns. As a British-Chinese citizen, I am an ardent Manchester City fan, and also, though I like to say I support China, I am ultimately an England fan. In fact, if you asked, I wouldn’t be able to name 90% of the China squad, though there was a slight sense of sadness when I saw them get miserably beaten during the Olympics.

I’ve been hearing debates about what ‘rights’ someone has to be a fan of a team. Some people believe that you must be from the area in order to be a true follower of that team. So for example, if you’re a Geordie who supports Liverpool, then that’s just plain wrong and there’s no chance that you’ll ever garner the same passion if you were, say, from inner-city Liverpool. But what if you are from the same area as your favoured team that you’ve been supporting them for many years, you’re filled with sadness whenever your team loses, but…you’re Chinese?

There were a couple of recent articles asking who you would be supporting during the Olympics, Chinese potential medallists or the British ones. Well, personally, I wasn’t as suicidal as some of my Chinese friends when Liu Xiang hobbled down that tunnel, but in the same way, I wasn’t that sad when Paula Radcliffe similarly hobbled over the marathon finishing line. Yet, the difference between the national teams and local teams is that whilst many of us BBC’s feel ambiguous when it comes to our national sides, when it comes to locality, we are 100% sure of who we support.

I don’t feel particularly out of place when I’m watching a Man City game, I can sit in a pub, be a bit boisterous and occasionally scream at the T.V. But when it comes to an England game, being sat in a pub and surrounded by other ethnically ‘English’ fans, then it suddenly becomes a bit ‘weirder’ as it were, when you’re the only England fan in the pub who doesn’t look like an England fan. Once, when I went to an England-Japan friendly before Euro 2004, I remember being seated in the England section, and typically getting all sorts of looks by the other fans wondering what I was doing in the ‘home’ section.

Similarly, when it comes to Man City, it almost seems novel when I reveal to others that I am indeed a City fan. Even though I’m from the local area and have supported the team all my life, it still seems as if I’m that Chinese tourist who has picked their favourite team and decided to loosely follow it. I know many of us sit on the fence when it comes to picking a team as, I have read in a few responses, but isn’t it great when you have that feeling of pure irrational support for a team? I guess this is why, as I can never seem to give full fledged support for either England/Britain or China, I’ve transferred this feeling of dogmatic support to locality.

Ultimately, it boils down to that age old saying of ‘I’m a banana: yellow on the outside-white on the inside.’ Yet I guess it’s never as simple as that is it? Perhaps the feeling of Britishness has been replaced by the strong feeling of locality in British-Chinese people. As we can never really place our identities in China or England, is it possible to filter that identity even further to where we are locally from? Because, as a lot of people do, we cannot give pure irrational support for our national sides and instead sit on the fence, what can we support? So forget the banana; what’s yellow on the outside- sky blue on the inside?

Leon Lau