ABSTRACT
Chinese Malaysian contestant Jess Lee was singing Beyoncé’s Listen at the finals for The Avenue of Super Stars, the Taiwanese version of Britain’s Got Talent, on the evening of January 30, 2011. Malaysian TV stations were broadcasting the final round to domestic audiences in Malaysia. That night, at the moment when Jess Lee was announced as the new The Avenue of Super Stars champion on stage in Taiwan, Malaysian audiences cheered in front of their televisions in their Malaysian homes. Jess, a Chinese Malaysian exchange student who studies bio-science at the National Taiwan University, was born and raised in Seremban, West Malaysia, where 45 percent of the city’s population is ethnically Chinese. The Seremban area has been a historically Chinese Malaysian dominated region since the 1970s, perhaps even earlier. Many New Villages, the Malaysian version of Chinatowns, are located in this region.
