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The Hongcouver | Tales of a reverse-reverse migrant: When Hockey Night in Canada becomes Hockey Morning in Beijing
When sports obsessive Hosea Cheung moved from Vancouver to Beijing last year, there was something he was not prepared to give up on - his love of hockey.
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Ian Youngin Vancouver
When Hosea Cheung moved from Vancouver to Beijing last year, he was giving up a lot of things.
Family and friends, his one-time “dream job” as a sports reporter, not to mention the clean air and comfortable lifestyle that brought his parents to Canada from Hong Kong 25 years ago, when Cheung was an infant.
But one thing he wasn’t prepared to give up on was ice hockey.
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Now Cheung, 26, has returned to Vancouver after a stint working in the Chinese capital, technically making him a reverse-reverse migrant.
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In many ways, Cheung’s mobility is typical of a generation of ethnic Chinese Canadians as they move into young adulthood. The phenomenon of reverse migration is statistically profound, having resulted in a population of Canadians in Hong Kong estimated at 300,000. Well-educated, English-speaking Canadian reverse migrants make up a substantial proportion of Hong Kong’s middle class and elite, and plenty have beaten a path back to the mainland and Taiwan, too.
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