THE touroid was baffled. 'They aren't Chinese? They look Chinese to me. It says in Jan Morris [in her book, Hong Kong ] that 98 per cent of people here are Chinese.' Not true, of course. It's one of those mistaken factoids that gets bandied around far too often. The Filipinas alone make up about three per cent of the population, for a start.
And it's hard to tell how many other people here are not Hong Kong Chinese, since no records are taken of people by race, only by nationality.
People of Chinese ethnicity are believed to make up about 90 per cent of the population in certain districts while others, such as Central and Discovery Bay, are more ethnically mixed. But the 90 per cent cannot all be assumed to be Hong Kong Chinese in the sense of people of that race who were born here. Until the 1970s, more than half the population had been born outside Hong Kong.
That means that even today, the number of Hong Kong adults who were born outside this city runs into millions.
For decades, Hong Kong was not so much a homeland, but the Grand Central Station of Asia. Older people greet each other and ask: 'Where is your heung ha?', asking where their real family home is.
Only recently have we become a genuine society with a sense of home. All those people who keep saying, 'Hong Kong didn't have democracy 150 years ago, so why should they have it now?' are desperately in need of history lessons.
This situation gives rise to many anomalies. There are many Hong Kong Indians, for example, whose families have been here for more generations than their Hong Kong Chinese friends.