Expat brats: the sad by-products of colonial Hong Kong society

Well into living memory, Europeans in the Far East have sent their children “home” for schooling when possible. From India to China, at the age of six, expatriate children were packed off to boarding school. Given the infrequency of expatriate “home” leave in the days before affordable air travel (generally, it came every three to five years), many children after having gone abroad for school saw their parents, at most, only half a dozen times before reaching adulthood. As many period memoirs reveal, enforced “exile” often caused great personal anguish.

Heartless as it may seem today, these separations were endured for the best reasons; most schools in the Far East were not of an equivalent standard to those in many expatriates’ home nations.

Government- or mission-run schools (with some notable exceptions) were patchy at best – even in Hong Kong.

By the 1950s, better schools had opened across Asia, catering to expatriate families who were not prepared to tolerate years of separation. As more children began to be educated locally through to matriculation, the phenomenon of the “third culture kid”, and their well-documented personal issues, began to evolve.

Among colonial Hong Kong society’s more pitiful by-products, the stereotypical adult “expat brat” is probably the saddest. Raised by a revolving-door cavalcade of transient “helpers” who instilled little or no real discipline in them, an attitude of unthinking privilege develops. School friends vanish permanently all too often, and the emotional consequence of this constant disruption is a superficiality in human relationships; due to their experiences, they expect people will ultimately leave them, and so make little deep investment in others.

Emotional shallowness, combined with a chillingly utilitarian attitude to almost everyone with whom they come into contact, are inevitable (and very visible).

Dismissive attitudes towards broader Hong Kong society are also evident. As the old Rodgers and Hammerstein song declaimed, “You’ve got to be taught to fear and hate, before you are six, or seven or eight.”