Off Centre | Why banker's 'leaving Hong Kong' blog jars with so many people
David Y Zhu writes about leaving behind the bright lights of Lan Kwai Fong after city left him tired and spent
I'm not sure David Y Zhu entirely deserved some of the more extreme epithets I have seen directed his way on social media over the last week or so.
Zhu's reflections seem to have jarred with a lot of people – in my own immediate social circles, at any rate. Good riddance – I'm summarising – to yet another parasitical banker type who embodies the crude excess and presumption of this city's casino capitalists at play but knows no other side of it. In his defence, he has grasped the un-reality of life in Central much earlier than many of his peers and even hints at the end of his post at doing something more worthwhile with his life (although not yet – he's leaving banking for private equity first).
Okay, so that's the case for the defence out the way. Zhu is patently a very smart young man – and yet, and yet, he exhibits a galling absence of self-awareness. Denouncing Hong Kong's lack of social mobility, he will not, he remarks, miss “gazing upwards to tycoons who will always be tycoons, and dancing alongside white-collars who will always be white-collars.” What the f*** is he talking about? Well, setting aside the question of the precise angle at which he expects to be gazing on tycoons in Beijing, let's be clear that yes, in Zhu's world it is he whom the Gods of social immobility have grounded, beached, thwarted.
As someone with “conversational Cantonese”, having grown up in Vancouver, it is quite conceivable that Zhu's forebears knew what it was to be poor and immigrants. If so, it seems to me that their scion (St George's School for Boys; Columbia University) has not been urged to reflect on it. It also seems to me that if there is a class of people who do not need help in becoming tycoons, Zhu very much belongs to it. Upper Ten Thousand? I wouldn't doubt it.
In a world that is growing progressively less equal, social mobility – in that pure sense of people from ordinary backgrounds accessing the more lucrative professions – has crashed. If your entire life has been an exercise in chasing prestige, gaming the education system, networking events and nepotism, you may view the whole equation rather differently. You may well simply consider your own position in life to be fully merited – just never let it be said that your fruitful career, money and privilege are due to anything other than your own individual brilliance.