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Adopted daughter left stateless thanks to inefficient bureaucrats

I am a Canadian who has lived in Hong Kong for 16 years. After a wait of years, I recently adopted an eight-year-old girl through the Adoption Unit of the Social Welfare Department.

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Hong Kong government will not issue the adopted girl a passport, although she was born here, because her birth mother was not ethnically Chinese.

I am a Canadian who has lived in Hong Kong for 16 years. After a wait of years, I recently adopted an eight-year-old girl through the Adoption Unit of the Social Welfare Department.

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Although she looks Chinese, speaks Chinese and attends a local school, she is in fact from an ethnic minority, and therefore stateless. Her vulnerable status was forcefully brought home to me when earlier this month she was refused a visitor visa to Canada on the grounds that she would overstay. I and those who know me were struck by the absurdity of the situation.

I have no reason to return to live in Canada at this time, having a good job here and a position of responsibility. I do not intend to take her and stay there, or to dump her on the other side of the world and leave without her.

The fact is, I adamantly do not want her to attend school in Canada at this time. My spoken Cantonese is poor and my written is negligible - a failing for which I take full responsibility. It was with this in mind that I placed her in a local primary school, although this came at a great cost to me.

One small example is the 165 parents' notices written in Chinese (though entirely justified on the part of the school). I want her to retain her language and her culture. She sees herself as Chinese, even though the powers that be do not.

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She is trapped between the inefficient bureaucracy of the Canadian citizenship application process and the inflexibility of the Chinese government's definition of citizenship.

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