My wife and I moved to Hong Kong in the summer of 2000 to pursue what we thought would be 'bigger and better' professional opportunities. As a dual-career couple and westernised Asians (we are both Korean), we were attracted by the idea that no other city in the world could match Hong Kong's cosmopolitan mix of east and west and its prime location on the doorstep of the next global superpower.
And even though the economic doldrums have placed some unexpected strains on our careers, for the most part we were happy campers. We often talked about staying for another five or 10 years.
Well, the Sars outbreak has changed everything for us. We readily plead guilty to reacting knee-jerk and jumping to conclusions, but we cannot help seeing Hong Kong as a diminished place now, a shadow of our imagined city of promise - even a dank and depressing destination.
Suddenly, the negatives of living here seem to far outweigh the positives. For one, pursuing our professional ambitions while possibly risking our three-year-old daughter's health seems totally wrong. Then too, the inevitable 'what if?' questions made us realise for the first time that we miss our families in South Korea and the US more than we expected. We would also have traded in an instant the sliver of a harbour view from our apartment for a small backyard where our daughter could have played while her local playgroup remained shut down for weeks.
This is why, as the government shifts its focus from crisis management to damage control, officials would do well to remember that restoring the confidence of people who already call Hong Kong their home is more important than luring back foreign tourists and businessmen. Some Hong Kong natives, of course, might scorn the concerns of expats like myself as self-centred whining. I don't blame them. After all, we do tend to blow with the economic winds and bolt out of town at the first sign of a crashing stock or property market, leaving the locals to deal with the mess that we helped to create. Still, expats are as essential a part of Hong Kong's identity as its multi-billionaire Chinese tycoons. Without its diverse communities of westerners, Indians, Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans and many others, this city would be just a prettier version of, say, Taipei - a rich and vibrant Chinese metropolis but a bland, second-tier destination for outsiders.
What is more, as we all know, Hong Kong's economic wellbeing depends on maintaining its position as Asia's premier business hub for all comers, even more than looking after the interests of local industrialists. If expats are not quite Hong Kong's lifeblood, they are at least its pacemaker, without which it will die a slow death.
