<p>Breaking away from the paradigm of adjustment that has long dominated research on international students, an emerging body of scholarship emphasizes the self-formation of international students. However, despite a growing recognition of its relevance in studying the life and educational experiences of international students, the notion of self-formation remains relatively undertheorized and underexplored. Drawing on the concept of desire and positioning theory, this study presents a robust and generative framework for conceptualizing the self-formation of international students. The concept of desire serves to shed light on how the affordances of self-formation can be interpreted through two interrelated angles: transcending established boundaries and challenging imposed labels. Positioning theory is subsequently introduced as an analytic toolkit to elucidate how international students, as desiring subjects, negotiate their self-formation in everyday life situations. The dynamic interplay among the self-formation of international students, their desires, and the practice of positioning is exemplified in the study through a detailed analysis of the stories of an undergraduate Chinese international student in the United States. Alongside proposing an empirically based, exploratory framework for conceptualizing the self-formation of international students, the study discusses the implications of the framework for (re)thinking how to meaningfully engage and work with international students, especially in affirming and fostering their capacities as contributors to intellectual innovation and as catalysts for transformative societal progress. The limitations of the study, including those associated with its decision to focus on data collected from a single case, are also critically reflected on, along with suggestions for future research.</p>