As a child of Hong Kong immigrants born and raised in North America, I watch the motherland decline from a distance with extremely complicated feelings.
I worry about my extended family. My remaining grandparents and most of my uncles and aunts are firmly rooted there, established and proud, tucked away in the sea of tall condo buildings high above the city streets; once host to protests and occasional violence, an autocratic government and an indifferent pandemic have since quieted the unrest considerably. My little cousins are sprinkled across the globe in various stages of education. By the time they mature enough to understand what’s been happening to Hong Kong’s democracy and culture, there may not be much of it left.
Though my empathy goes out to those with roots in the motherland, my own perspective and feelings are further removed. I was born in Canada, raised and immersed in Western culture; I know intellectually that Hong Kong should be my home of homes, but in practice it’s a place that we occasionally visit because a lot of our relatives live there. And even then, as a child, something about the place never quite sat right with me.
There is a lot for me to like about Hong Kong, theoretically. I love big cities and their bustling urban messiness, full of life and chaos and restaurants. Urban density can sometimes be fun to have a soak in: A rush hour crowd engulfed me once on the streets of Causeway Bay, and I waded through the swarm of other Chinese bodies like swimming upstream through a school of black-haired fish. Getting around is easy. Hong Kong taxis are cheap and plentiful, the streets full of the iconic red-and-white Toyotas, ready to open their mechanized back door for you and lower their circular “For Hire” sign, the blasting AC a welcome respite from the heat as you recline on their too-soft cushioned back seat. The subway system is comprehensive and intuitive: once I was old enough, I would venture out alone with nothing more than my Octopus card and the ability to read maps, tapping on and off as I pleased, almost as if I lived there. The train would always offer advice in her soothing British-Chinese voice, a perfectly appropriate accent until only very recently. The doors opened on the left, I minded the gap, and emerged from the darkness into yet another part of the city’s endless sprawl. But no matter which part of the city I would pop out into, it would always feel like a reconfiguration of the same fundamental place: the giant shopping mall.
In Hong Kong, commerce is inescapable. Walking the streets and buildings is like wandering an eternal labyrinth of retail, endlessly unfolding, where any path or walkway will inevitably open up into a new promenade of shops. Every square foot of space in the city is fully utilized to sell you a good or a service. I once saw a single, empty, retail space tucked away in a farm of identical units, noteworthy for its jarring amount of uncapitalized real estate. Wandering this environment can be fun, even thrilling, for up to a few days, especially if you have clothes to buy or if you’re feeling peckish. But once you’ve been sufficiently styled and fed, the mood, pace and density can start to feel overwhelming.
Everything about Hong Kong is relentless. The inescapable retail. The family dinners, endless and generous, with uncles and aunts that you simultaneously have not seen for years and just saw at lunchtime. The constant humidity renders showering ineffective: your clothes are always sticky, and the air pollution is at a constant low-grade haze that makes everything look just a little less clear and every breath feel just a little less deep. I remember how sweet the air tasted outside the airport upon returning home, standing next to a cigarette smoker and the exhaust from a running car.
This may all be to say that the city bumped up against my North American fragility, entitled and weather-sensitive. I wandered the streets, still searching for some deeper truth beyond the humidity and air quality; locals shot past me moving with purpose as I sleepwalked through another hazy afternoon, when a realization hit while riding on the subway.
At any given moment on public transit, your fellow passengers represent a random sampling of all the people in your city: a cross section of its entire demography. You share seats with the elderly and jostle with university students, maybe put an unintentional elbow into an office worker. Everybody takes the subway eventually, and if you ride it enough the commuters will give you a feel for the city’s temperament. So what might you find on a Hong Kong subway? Office workers swaying like leaves while holding the handle, drained from the six-day week in the world’s most overworked city. Students dreading high school exit exams and children dreading kindergarten admission interviews, their worried parents hovering nearby. In Hong Kong, its subways are telling me that its people are stressed, anxious, and tired.
When I return to Canada I end up paying closer attention to my commute just to make sure I’m not biased or insane, and sure enough, in Toronto, there are random spots of lightness on even the dreariest of subway rides. On the groggy morning train the odd teenager will smile quietly at a text from a friend. In the evening crowd of tired professionals, a few construction workers radiate satisfaction after an honest day’s work. When I used to take the GO train in the morning there was one woman who was hard-wired to make friends and chat with her neighbours, no matter how ungodly the hour. It was a little annoying and I don’t understand it, but her positivity was undeniable.
Hong Kong locals may dismiss these findings with a wave of a hand. High stress and anxiety are an accepted part of life, the cost of doing business, the price of extreme modern convenience. It turns out that wearing busy-ness and stress as a badge of honour and a symbol of importance has always been a part of advanced capitalism: Hong Kong just got there a few decades before the Millennial burnout in the West. Of course Canadians will appear slow in comparison, yokels in an urban backwater; thick as syrup and sluggish from the poutine, all sense of urgency snuffed out by our inefficient and socialist democracy. It’s the land where it’s impossible to get rich.
My extended family have been telling me this story my entire life, and though these views are not entirely wrong they’re still hard ones to hear from those that matter to you. My childlike and barely conversational Cantonese made me seem as slow as everybody thought I was, fulfilling all of their low expectations. All my best thoughts and retorts stayed trapped inside a passive Canadian-born body, eyes glazed and slack-jawed. And yet they would constantly ask me to move back, which I’ve always thought was weird. Though it would have been wise to have gone in my twenties, to broaden my horizon, work hard, eat well and travel, to have done so would have been to admit that they were right about me, that I was indeed a slow country bumpkin born and raised in the ramshackle backwaters of Toronto, and that they as Hong Kongers were indeed just better people, reaching down to me from above in an act of charity. I was too proud to accept their help should it validate their condescension.
The city itself, in its own chaotic and lively way was also trying to tell me that I didn’t belong within it; that in the one place you would expect me to blend in, I still don’t. All the years of English-speaking has sculpted my mouth muscles and expressions such that my Westernization is etched directly onto my face, my own cultural treachery made apparent to all the surrounding locals. It only takes one look from a merchant before their disappointment becomes palpable, and I get the broken English reserved for foreigners. I haven’t even said a word yet. But when I do, there are no deals.
Maybe I’ve been thinking about this the wrong way. Maybe it’s not about how I’m reacting to Hong Kong, but how Hong Kong is reacting to me, and to what I represent. All the disappointment in the air might be centered around my Westernized flavour of existence: the way I walk around with my big laugh and sense of independence, speaking broken and incompetent Cantonese and missing all the subtext in conversations that I’m expected to understand. I am a living affront to Chinese culture, the death of its future walking amongst them. And the culture’s reaction to this perceived insult? A mild sort of inverted racism, where we are judged not by our relatively similar outward appearance, but on the assumptions of what’s left on the inside: on the vacuum left by the culture’s absence.
Westernized Asians are called bamboo poles, or “Jook-Sing” in Cantonese. Though the comparison seems innocuous or even flattering at first, given bamboo’s propensity to be tall, sturdy, and generally useful, rest assured that it is neither. Though bamboo rods seem like hollow tubes on the surface, there are actually walls on the inside, evenly spaced, creating a series of cavities that are sectioned off from each other, such that water poured in one side is blocked from flowing through to the other end. The intended analogy is that the “Jook-Sing” are so Westernized that the life-giving water of Chinese culture is prevented from flowing through us. And though this is where the analogy technically ends, it would not be a stretch to see it one step further, that the Westernized Chinese like myself are empty on the inside, dried out and hollow. Compartmentalized nothingness. And just one more step past that, if you stretch dramatically a little bit and lean into hyperbole, is that a Chinese person without Chinese culture basically has no soul.
Even for my own family, underneath the veneer of altruism for my career and financial well-being is the desire to fix me; that by simply existing as a Westernized Asian I am automatically so disharmonious and fractured that immediate attention is required, that I must quickly be made More Chinese so as to not risk further corruption to my personal value system. The odd truth is that this cultural friction is, for better or worse, the defining part of my identity, and though it’s been an unusual and awkward experience it is an experience that is wholly mine. It’s hard to then have it seen as an undesirable quality, as something broken to be fixed or erased.
Back in North America, I hear the stories of what people like me are facing now, with anti-Asian racism coming back into style. And though I am fortunate enough to have avoided any such conflict, when I think about it in light of my time in Hong Kong I realize the racism in the West has a second and more subversive edge: being told to “Go Back to Where you Came From” is, on its face, obviously unpleasant, though even more so if you were born and raised in the place from which you are being told to leave. But I’ve been back to my supposed home country. And they don’t think too highly of us there either. I’m more at home and accepted here, staring into the face of my hypothetical racist aggressor, than in the places filled with people that actually look like me. Do you think we have another place to go home to? We don’t. This is it. We have to make it work.
I have a baby daughter now, and when I look at her with her mother’s big brown eyes and her father’s oversized head, I think about her future. Though she won’t have the same cultural conflicts that I did, she will be even further away from her roots than even I am. As Hong Kong is absorbed back into mainland China and its culture and democracy erode away, so too does the Hong Kong within me and my lineage dilute with each generation born and raised in the West. At the heart of it, all my Hong Kong relatives really wanted was to bring me closer to family, to spend time with aging relatives, and to keep the culture alive. It is only natural to have pride in who you are and where you came from, and though it made me feel like an outsider I know it wasn’t their intent. I ended up with the independence that I wanted, proving to myself that I could make it basically on my own by pushing away any family help offered to me, often to my own detriment. My pride won in the end, but it may have cost me my roots.
The alternative and less depressing view lies in Hong Kong’s history itself, that the whole of its culture is in fact already a blend of the East and the West. British colonialism shielded the region from China’s communist rule, forcing Chinese locals and their culture to coexist with British expatriates and their systems of government. The Hong Kong way of life is a stew: a Chinese cultural base with a British influence added for flavour, left to simmer for a hundred years in a Western style democracy and the capitalism inherent in being a port city of trade. Being a Westernized Asian in North America today, having to synthesize two different cultural circumstances and make choices between them is spiritually no different than what my ancestors went through before me. This is all still part of the same story, and even though I’m on my own branch maybe I can still see my roots from here.
They’ll say my daughter will be less Chinese by half, and they won’t be wrong. With my wife being a Mandarin speaker from the mainland, there won’t be enough of either of our flavours of Chinese to infuse our child with any strong essence of either. But we will teach her where she came from and raise her with our culture’s values, so even though she may not have the language or all the customs or the myriad of arbitrary and somewhat questionable superstitions, with luck and parenting she will still understand the importance of family, hard work and perseverance. How she chooses to fill the other half will be up to her, and as she grows up as part of a new generation with new challenges and opportunities I know it will be filled with something different and new and maybe even scary to me, something I may not even understand let alone expect. But if we’ve done our job properly and the luck persists, it might be wonderful still, and put to bed the idea that somebody “less Chinese” is a dilution, a watering down of a core concentrate of quality with something that is inferior.
We are the Jook Sing, after all. Born empty. We can choose to fill ourselves however we want.
Image credit: https://www.pacificprime.hk/blog/air-pollution-hong-kong-pregnancy/
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