Opinion | When becoming a Hongkonger means being anti-mainlander
Zuraidah Ibrahim finds it troubling when Hongkongers express their solidarity through racism and xenophobia against defenceless individuals
When my colleague Alex Lo wrote this week asking if Hong Kong was racist, I received a deluge of rhetorical questions from fellow Singaporeans at home.
One email stood out: “Poor you – Singapore, HK, same-same, right?” My friend was making the point that I am a minority in either city, making me a candidate for prejudice and discrimination.
Fortunately, living in Singapore, I was blessed with friends and bosses who looked past my race to give me the lucky breaks I needed. I felt the same way when I decided to relocate here. Prospective employers did not seem to care about my ethnicity.
Although not personally victimised, I have never had to look far to see people belonging to a dominant group subject others to subtle and not-so-subtle forms of exclusion.
Singapore’s ways of dealing with ethnic diversity can be controversial. The target is cohesion, or “one united people regardless of race, language or religion” in the noble words of the national pledge, but the interventions can be intrusive, like, for example, setting ethnic quotas on government flats to ensure public housing is racially integrated.
This has not made Singaporeans colour-blind. But most Singaporeans want to believe in the words of one of the founding leaders, S. Rajaratnam: “Being Singaporean is not a matter of ancestry. It is conviction and choice.” Racial and religious equality is widely viewed as a core part of the Singapore identity.