The labels on the user interface are shown in English, while the advertisements that appear as a banner on top and within the running screen could be in either English or Chinese or both languages. Most of these advertisements on part-time jobs, parties, and tutoring classes are geared toward the younger generation. People from various places around the world enter the chat room using Chinese or English for the most part at different times of the day and night due to time zone differences. Between 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. when the girls usually logged on, they could be meeting other teenagers or young adults in the US and Canada who got off school at about the same time, or people in Hong Kong or Australia who just woke up to start a new day, or people in Europe who were staying up close to or past midnight. According to the girls and some of their interlocutors in the chat room whom I interviewed online, almost every participant in the chat room was Chinese.
The girls enjoyed logging on in the late afternoon and early evening because more people wrote in English at that time and their friends were all present then. These friends of theirs were mostly Chinese emigrants in North America and Europe, together with some local Hong Kong Chinese, who opted to write in English and code-switch to different extents into Cantonese using the alphabet. The girls tended not to associate much with Hong Kong people who only wrote in Chinese characters and ethnic Chinese growing up overseas who wouldn't code-switch into Cantonese. About the friends they met in the chat room, Yu Qing said,
We're all Chinese who have emigrated to different places, so we share a common feeling when we talk. It's like when we are chatting, we feel closer to each other. Many of the Chinese in the chat room are emigrants, cause you can ask them, and some would ask you how long have you been here. Many have come here for 6, 16, or 11 years. Or like they have been in one place for