Just Saying | To really shed Hong Kong's colonial mindset, stop putting white people on a pedestal
Yonden Lhatoo says it’s time, nearly two decades after Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule, to confront the unspoken bias here that those from the West are superior, and hire only the best person for the job.
There’s been a lot of heated debate recently about Hong Kong’s colonial roots. The spark was lit by former Beijing official Chen Zuoer, who blamed our political, social and economic problems on the failure to “de-colonise” our city.
Chen, who was a key player on the Chinese side during Hong Kong’s handover, also bemoaned the “revival of de-Sinofication” here, referring to the perceived rejection of Beijing’s influence.
I’m no fan of Chen and his hardline rhetoric, probably provoked by sightings of the clueless, British flag-waving boneheads at every pro-democracy or anti-mainland rally here these days, but he – along with everyone else – is missing the point.
Hong Kong needs to shed its colonial mentality in the context of racial reverence, not the physical trappings or abstract political notions of what should or should not be preserved of our British-era heritage.
Let me substitute political correctness with factual bluntness for the sake of further clarity: we need to stop putting white people on a pedestal so much.
I remember striking up a conversation with an affable young man from Eastern Europe some years ago. He told me in heavily accented pidgin English that he was earning a living as an English tutor in Kowloon Bay.
I don’t know what kind of English his students were learning, but that’s a typical example of Hong Kong’s colonial mentality. The families who hired him would never have accepted a much more capable tutor from the Indian subcontinent, for example, even if his English was perfect, simply because he wouldn’t have the “advantage” of skin colour deemed necessary for the role.