Life.Culture.Discovery.

ProfileA ‘cultural chameleon’ drawn to her roots in Ukraine by war, restaurant manager in Hong Kong connects donors with people there in need

Viktoriia Tkachuk is the manager of Ukrainian restaurant Ivan the Kozak in Hong Kong, where she has created a space for people to write messages of support

‘I’m helping raise money for the animals that have been left behind,’ she says. ‘It makes me feel less stressed about the war if I can be doing something’

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Viktoriia Tkachuk, born in Ukraine, raised in Hong Kong, fluent in Japanese, at home with Russians and Chinese, runs the family restaurant Ivan the Kozak and is helping victims of the war in her homeland. Photo: Jonathan Wong

Published: 8:15am, 2 Apr 2022

My mum was a nurse in Ukraine. She was doing her training when the Chernobyl disaster happened in 1986 and looked after some patients from the nuclear accident. I was born in Kyiv in 1991, right after the break-up of the Soviet Union.

The situation was bad, people were very poor and there was very little food or goods to buy. My mum said they couldn’t find diapers for me, so they had to use napkins. My parents had an arranged marriage which didn’t work out, and they got divorced when I was three.

My mum really wanted me to have a better life, so she started a small business, travelling back and forth to China, and it was there she met Ivan. Although he was living in China, his parents were Malaysian-Chinese and they later moved to Hong Kong.

Ivan and my mum got married and my brother, Daniel, was born in Kyiv in 1994. Later that year we moved to Hong Kong. My first memory of Hong Kong was getting on the airport bus, it looked so clean and I was impressed by the blue neon lights.

Troika was a Russian restaurant in Hong Kong. Photo: SCMP

Languages of love

We moved into a flat in Quarry Bay, on Hong Kong Island. Ivan – who I see as my dad – didn’t speak Russian and I didn’t speak English or Cantonese, so he started communicating with me by drawing pictures. It was a tough time for my mum, she didn’t speak much English and had no friends.