As Beijing pushes a Chinese identity for Hong Kong, where do Eurasians fit in?

I am Eurasian. My father’s ancestors, to borrow a Chinese turn of phrase, are buried in the fertile plain of the lower Po valley, in an Italian region best known as the birthplace of balsamic vinegar – and Ferrari. My mother, who was raised in Kowloon City and attended St Mary’s Canossian College, is as thoroughly a Hongkonger as one can be.

As peculiar as that admixture is, it was unremarkable from my perspective; I happened to attend schools with Eurasian students and entered a workplace where many of fellow early-millennials were of European and East Asian descent. Anecdotal evidence would suggest that the demographic trajectory for Eurasians in Hong Kong is very much on the ascendant.

The lack of official recognition of Eurasian identity in Hong Kong is thus curious. Hong Kong is in essence a Eurasian city, built on British norms and institutions that took root in the fertile substratum of the industry and ambition of a heterogeneous local populace.

As a colonial entrepôt, Hong Kong was a place of meeting and acculturation. Eurasians, being the biological issue of those exchanges, have been a part of Hong Kong life since the colony’s foundation. Yet the debate around Hong Kong identity today gravitates around two cardinal disputes: the localist question and the matter of the integration of “ethnic minorities”, an ungainly term applied to South and Southeast Asian residents.