Hong Kong is an immigrant society. All who live here know that and do not pay it much attention any longer. The city's most valuable assets are its millions of hardworking immigrants. And that includes me. I was born on the mainland, grew up in Hong Kong and left the city in 1969 as a naive 18-year-old. I studied and worked in Canada until 1987, when I moved to Singapore. Only in 2001 did I return to Hong Kong, to head the sociology department and the David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. So what does that make me?
I'm a return migrant, an immigrant in my home town.
There are many return migrants in Hong Kong. In the face of the anxiety about the 1997 handover to China, thousands of Hongkongers left for the west. A bulk of these people went to Canada and many have since returned. I have spoken in-depth with those who have returned from the United States, Canada, Europe, England, Australia, New Zealand and Sweden. They come from a cross-section of age groups and most stayed abroad for more than five years. Some had even returned a second time, their restlessness manifesting in what I call 'circuit migration'.
More on that later. For now, I want to discuss the tensions that return migration generates. Most noticeable is conflict between husbands and wives, the gender politics within the family and marriage. A husband who returns to Hong Kong because he cannot develop a satisfactory career in the west because of racism could bring with him a reluctant wife. She misses the quality marital life in the west, where her husband had shorter working hours. She has made a sacrifice for her family.
There is a paradox - the wife's sacrifice has become a powerful motivating force that pushes her husband to work hard, but in doing so he spends increasingly less time with his wife and children. So the wife and husband collude in the wife's misery. Not surprisingly, there is an ongoing drama of conflict among returnees between husbands who want to stay in Hong Kong and wives who want to leave.
More widespread is the conflict between movers and stayers, which is often generational. Sons and daughters who have returned to Hong Kong realise they have changed, but their parents, and others of their parents' generation who stayed behind, have not.
This occurs with friends, peers, and elementary and high school classmates. Returnees are frequently treated by the locals as 'different', and they oscillate between the familiarity of home and the strangeness of the west.