Will Hong Kong Be British Again
During this uncertain and unstable year, I've learned not to take Hong Kong's liberty for granted. Prodemocracy protests consumed the metropolis for months starting in early 2019, only the political climate changed abruptly in the spring, when Beijing passed a wide-ranging security police force that many run into as a crackdown on dissent. At the terminate of June, a few hours before the law went into outcome, I walked outside to catch the last glimpses of protestation around my neighborhood in Hong Kong. A local barber was removing a gas mask and goggles from the mannequin in his window; I noticed that a java shop had already taken down all of its protestation figurines and posters. The citywide self-censorship was swift.
The next solar day, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared that, in response to Beijing'due south actions, the Uk would change its existing visa policies, essentially paving the mode to naturalized British citizenship for 3 one thousand thousand Hong Kongers. Some of my friends and acquaintances felt a great sense of relief—the U.K. could be their haven, a place to restart. Rattled by arrests of demonstrators, journalists, and academics in Hong Kong, several people have already left for the U.Chiliad.; the prodemocracy activist Nathan Law appear in early July that he had fled Hong Kong and would continue his activism in London.
The U.M. has not yet explained how it will accommodate mass migration amid struggles with Brexit negotiations, COVID-19, upkeep cuts, and a shrinking economy. Personally, I'chiliad less focused on these logistical issues than the possibility that Hong Kongers have an overly romantic view of life in the U.K. Everywhere I go in Hong Kong, I notice hints of colonial rule. Streets carry the names of dead monarchs; loftier tea with scones and Darjeeling is common in five-star hotels; the Union Jack flies at protests; some consider a British accent the ultimate status symbol. To many people here, the U.K. is an alternative motherland, an idyllic place of opportunity where one can, in fact, take freedom for granted. Although the U.One thousand. may exist more politically stable than Hong Kong, I know that it isn't the welcoming place many Hong Kongers seem to call back it is.
I was born in 1989 in London to Hong Kong immigrants. My parents were part of a large wave of migration that took identify in the decade before the 1997 handover, when the U.G. transferred control of Hong Kong to mainland China. An estimated 503,800 people left Hong Kong from 1987 to 1996, and by 2011 some 111,733 people born in Hong Kong were living in the U.K. Despite the long connexion between Hong Kong and the U.K. and the large number of Chinese people in the land, our diaspora was not very unified or politically agile. One illustration of this is that no person of British Chinese heritage was a member of Parliament until 2015. When Alan Mak finally bankrupt that bulwark, many in the Asian diaspora customs rejoiced, seeing his victory every bit a win for cultural representation. However, Mak seemed frustrated that his ethnicity was overshadowing his achievements as a political leader; he told the South Prc Morn Postal service magazine that if "Chinese for Labour think I am going to be representing every Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and Korean—and there are many in my constituency—they are mistaken. It's a stupid story. I am not standing for the Chinese population of United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland. I am standing for the people of Havant and my state." His comments were tough to read for those, similar me, hoping to hear pride in his dual identity. All the same I could understand with Mak's desire to announce himself every bit a British citizen first and foremost.
Similar many in the British Chinese diaspora, I was taught by people both within and outside my customs, in means both implicit and explicit, that I should ignore my Chinese identity in gild to conform and show my "Britishness." One of my earliest memories is of a instructor alert my mother that if I continued to speak Cantonese at home, I would be considered a bad educatee and mayhap never larn to read or write in English. I was merely 5. In response, my mother stopped sending me to Cantonese schoolhouse on Saturdays. (Later, I learned that bilingualism is an advantage, not a hindrance, in overall literacy.)
At main school, I was taught how to recollect, human activity, and speak in the proper British way, and to love the monarchy. During Princess Diana's memorial service, in 1997, I was amidst the many students at my school who were asked to participate in a filmed outcome for a news station. Our chore was to carry mourning flowers in and out of the park and, our teachers gently hinted, to cry. As I grew older, teachers fed me facts nigh Queen Victoria's "impressive" 64-year rule and her proclivity for tea and potatoes, among other quaint details. Merely they either didn't cover or merely vaguely mentioned the darker realities of the British empire: the trauma of the Opium Wars, the slave trade in British India, and Hong Kong'southward colonization.
I never questioned my lessons, and, more importantly, I never spoke about Chinese culture at school. I tried to assimilate. And all the same I all the same felt out of place, never truly at domicile fifty-fifty though London was the only home I knew. I began to ask myself why I felt like an alien hiding amidst neighbors. Was I British or Cantonese?
I couldn't exist both, I discovered, considering no space was available for soapbox on dual identities. When white acquaintances fabricated fun of my Chinese friends, I was acutely aware that, despite comments that I "wasn't like them," I was vulnerable to the same handling. At boarding school, these 2 groups fractured at the bottle: one table for white students, and i for Hong Kong exchange students. Both asked me to sit with them, and I would stand at the front of the big hall, thinking over my alliances, just to go back to my dorm room and skip the repast entirely.
The stereotyping was relentless. Strangers would yell "egg fried lice" and "wok face" at me, or, worse, call me "Suzie Wong" (a fictional Hong Kong prostitute from a novel of the same title) or comment on my "exotic looks." People in the U.G. like to pass off such microaggressions every bit ignorance or sense of humour, relabeling them as ethnic banter. "They don't know whatever better" is one excuse I've heard. Another: "It'due south merely a joke." This derisive focus on my identity—and the minimization of my discomfort—eroded my self-conviction. Was I being overly sensitive? Why did I feel then much shame nigh who I was, and why did I feel powerless to defend myself?
In my first year of academy, several of my white flatmates pranked me past leaving in our kitchen a note written by a imitation Chinese exchange student named Fung Ting. In it, she expressed that she was feeling overwhelmed and wanted to say hello. For days, I knocked on the door of an empty flat, worried nearly why this pupil never appeared. I wrote a annotation back: "I'thousand from Hong Kong besides," I said. "Can't wait to run across y'all!" When the ruse was revealed, I was on the verge of tears. My flatmates' laughter was savage; the joke was calculated and pointed. They understood my internal disharmonize so well that they were able to place its core element: To empathize with those who wait like y'all is to make a fool of yourself.
In February, a tweet by an Royal College London professor went viral subsequently he recounted how an ethnically Chinese teenager deflected racist COVID-19 remarks in Italy. "In that location you get, we are all going to exist infected," a passenger said as the teen boarded a train. The boy responded in Italian: "Ma'am, in my whole life I've seen Prc just on Google Maps." People on the train applauded. In the retweets from those of Chinese descent, I noticed a certain air of pride, of winning. But who has won what, in the game of assimilation? Why did the teenager stress that he had never traveled to People's republic of china, instead of pointing out the explicit racism of the passenger? Was he trying to decline a part of his identity?
I wouldn't have questioned his response when I was growing up. Only with some distance have I been able to reflect on the push and pull of my ii worlds. After I graduated from academy, I moved to Hong Kong for work and to connect with my roots. I fabricated friends with other Hong Kongers who had grown up abroad and, for the kickoff time in my life, began to take my complicated upbringing. I read the poems of Sarah Howe and listened to the music of Emmy the Cracking, who are both British Chinese. In 2015, I worked for a yr and a half in New York and joined communities that celebrated their American and Asian identities. In one case I realized that my diaspora identity was complex—not definitive, simply fluid—I besides accepted my British side, this time on my own terms. These experiences away from the U.K. made me who I am today: someone who can cover all aspects of her identity.
At present when I look at the U.Grand., I feel frustrated that the British Chinese diaspora hasn't come up together equally a community. We are less visible in activism and politics than our Asian American counterparts in the U.S. In the New Statesman in 2013, the writer Lu-Hai Liang noted that "immature grassroots activism amidst 2d generation Chinese is nonetheless almost unheard of." He followed up this twelvemonth with an article discussing the ascension in Sinophobia, noting that British Chinese "are now asking themselves nearly their identify in British life and why it has been depression-profile for so long." Tweeting in July, the parliamentary candidate Johnny Luk urged "the British Chinese to face up our identity, step up & not sit on the fence then much."
I believe people in the community don't speak up as a group for many reasons, including a deep-rooted fear of social exclusion and learned helplessness. Although information technology may be unacceptable for public figures to be openly racist—the Knuckles of Edinburgh's 1986 remarks on the "slitty eyed" Chinese might exist contended with now—racist aggression still occurs regularly. The Metropolitan Police reported 267 hate crimes confronting British Due east Asians—including trigger-happy attack, robbery, and verbal corruption—in the showtime three months of 2020 solitary, compared with 375 in all of 2019. These crimes have mostly been greeted with silence. I have seen no big-calibration protests; even the adequately prominent COVID-19 Anti-Racism Group, which distributed a petition calling for the government to investigate these hate crimes, hasn't managed to secure more than than 5,000 signatures later iv months. And while Asians take had to struggle with a rise in Sinophobia everywhere since the outbreak of COVID-nineteen, the difference in the U.Chiliad. is that the country presents itself every bit a long-term partner of Hong Kong, opening its borders to political refugees while doing little to brand them feel welcome in one case they arrive.
I recognize that I speak from a identify of privilege to even be able to write this essay and examine these concerns. Circumstances have changed dramatically since 1997. The adjacent mass migration from Hong Kong to the U.K. is being motivated not by a looming threat but past a very physical one. And I know that this threat is hardly equal to the one of feeling unwelcome in the U.G. Nevertheless, leaving unexamined these romantic notions of the U.One thousand. would be naive. I know that for myself, wherever I end up, I cannot imagine returning to a place of assimilation.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/hong-kongers-dont-idolize-the-uk/616407/
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