MOHAN Chugani says: 'Often I am at the front of the taxi queue. A cab will pull up. But when the cab driver sees me, he drives away, only to stop just down the road and pick up another passenger.
'It's the same when I'm out shopping or at the market. The assistants always make a point of serving the Chinese customers first.
'I have friends who are highly educated and speak Cantonese but don't stand a hope of getting a job in a Chinese company. I don't know what it is. They just don't like us. Maybe it's the colour of our skin.' Businessman Chugani was born and educated in Hong Kong and speaks fluent Cantonese. He says he has been the victim of blatant racial prejudice all his life.
'My experience is typical of Indians and Pakistanis here,' he says. 'But we feel that with 1997 coming the situation is getting worse.' Anyone arguing that racial prejudice does not pose a great danger to the territory, almost invariably makes the following two points: that Hong Kong owes its success to the fact that it is such a cosmopolitan city; that this is a meritocratic society in which the best people will always get the job. Less talked about is the fact this is also a place where these jobs are found through advertisements which specify not only the age and sex of prospective candidates but also their race.
'We do have many clients who say specifically that they don't want an Indian,' says Gemini Personnel's Karen Ku Liu Ju-wei.
'But in some larger organisations, the appearance of the receptionist is very important. They want Cantonese speakers but they rarely want Indians even if they have the language skills. There are smaller firms who don't pay a whole lot of money and they don't mind. It depends on the company.' But headhunter Peter Bennett, an Australian who has lived in Hong Kong for 35 years, argues that racism is just a fact of life.
'I work for Chinese clients who ask me to find an employee and they don't have to spell it out. There is no way that the Double Happiness trading company will take on a white person, even if he is fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese. It would cause great embarrassment.