Hong Kong's ethnic minorities struggle to call the city home
Junko Asano says faced with discrimination in all walks of life, ethnic minorities strive to find their place in the city. By opening up to them, we can all foster greater social harmony
We were eating lunch in a hip Peruvian restaurant in the heart of Soho. My colleague, an entry-level Macanese business executive, turned and asked me: "Where do all the Filipinos come from? Not the maids … But the ones who speak really good English and work in the restaurants here. Where do they all come from?" Straddling a mixed identity as half "local" Chinese and half "ethnic minority", this was a strange question for me. Unlike many of my local friends, I have been surrounded by ethnic minorities throughout my life. My best friend, for example, is Indian. I have memories of her mother making me curry and chapattis at her house since I was 10.
Despite the closeness with ethnic minority friends while growing up, we slowly drifted apart. As I was ticking life's milestones - school, university, first job - I found that my ethnic minority friends weren't ticking the same boxes. Some couldn't finish Form 3; others struggled with Form 5. Most didn't get accepted into university. It didn't make sense.
While my local friends climbed up the corporate ladder as lawyers, bankers and management trainees, my ethnic minority friends ended up becoming receptionists, bartenders and gym employees. Having been designated into ethnic minority schools, they were crippled by their inability to speak Chinese. Though bright, articulate and motivated, their realm of future possibilities was limited to low-income English-speaking service jobs, like being a waiter.
My colleague should have asked a more important question that day: how do these ethnic minority youths survive in Hong Kong?
When a "local" refuses to sit next to them on the MTR because of their dark skin, when the government segregates ethnic minority children into designated schools away from local children, when an employer turns someone away because of his "unsightly" beard and turban, how does one mentally and physically survive the structural violence of exclusion and marginalisation?
The answer lies partly in the ways ethnic minority youths gather on the streets and hang out in places like rooftops and parks. In these forgotten pockets of public space, they roam the urban sprawl and reclaim their playgrounds and basketball courts. Marked by their colour, these youths engage in the simple but political act of occupying space.