Heung Gong Yan

After watching the Hong Kong football team draw with Cambodia at Phnom Penh's Olympic Stadium, I began to ponder what defines a Hongkonger (hint: it's not race)

What, exactly, does it mean to be a Hongkonger?

Recently, I read yet another reliably great article by travel writer Mark Jones, in which he recounted his recent visit to the city, and gave his thoughts on the government’s new ‘Happy Hong Kong’ campaign. Watch it now yourself in the video link below.

The merits of this new messaging (which replaces ‘Asia’s World City’), and whether it will entice back the tourists, I’ll leave for someone else to comment on, but like Mark, you may (or not) have noticed something missing from the rather vapid campaign:

I don’t know who Happy Hong Kong is aimed at. But I notice that just about everyone who appears in it is Han Chinese and under 30. No brown, black or white faces.

Yes, some 90 percent of our population (7 million and shrinking) is ethnic Chinese, but there’s also one out of every 10 people that isn’t. Filipinos and Indonesians are the two largest groups, at almost 5 percent of the population. Many of them are domestic helpers (who shamefully are not allowed to apply for permanent residency by law), but they also work in a huge variety of jobs throughout the territory. Then we have the large South Asian community, mainly consisting of Indians, Pakistanis and Nepalese.

While the Filipinos and Indonesians on the whole are relatively more recent arrivals, since the 1970s, some South Asians can trace their origins back to the very start of Hong Kong as we know it today, when in the 1800s they followed the British into their newly acquired colony as merchants, policemen and soldiers. Indeed, Sikh troops were there when Captain Charles Elliot raised the Union flag at Possession Point.

Others soon followed, including founder of the iconic Star Ferry Dorabjee Naorojee Mithaiwala; Jehangir Hormusjee Ruttonjee, builder of the hospital that still bears his name; the Baghdadi Jewish Kadoorie family, who built an empire in Shanghai and then transferred it to Hong Kong upon the Communist civil war victory in 1949, the scion of which Michael Kadoorie is today the chairman of Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels (you may have heard of The Peninsula) and the city’s largest power supplier, China Light and Power (CLP). Then there’s the Keswick dynasty, behind the Jardine Matheson conglomerate, and the inspiration for James Clavell’s 1966 novel Tai-Pan.

Unlike the British Hongkongers (guilty, as charged), the South Asians successfully integrated into local life, learning the language and culture. Growing up two of my best friends were local Indian - one girl’s Sikh father was in charge of Stanley Prison. One memorable summer I worked as a ‘Skate Cop’ at the Taikoo Shing ice rink, where I handed out rental skates, patrolled the ice, learned the Cantonese for “stand up” (no sitting on the ice!), and had my Chinese colleagues run rings around me. However, the young guy in charge turned out to be the locally-raised son of a Gurkha, the Nepalese soldiers who formed a large part of the British armed forces based in Hong Kong.

When the Handover finally came in 1997, many of Hong Kong’s ethnic minorities found themselves adrift in their own home. The British had refused to grant full UK passports to all but a handful of prominent citizens, while the incoming Chinese regime wouldn’t give the new Hong Kong passport to non-ethnic Chinese. After five years of applications, finally in 2002 a girl of Indian descent was granted a Hong Kong passport, and now tens of thousands have been able to become full Hongkongers - the only place in China (our sister SAR Macau excepted) where people of foreign descent can officially become ‘Chinese’. For the rest of us, who still choose to retain foreign passports (you have to give that up to get a HK one), we are Permanent Residents.

The point is, I guess, before we get too caught up in technicalities and immigration law, is that Hong Kong has always been a place made up of people from a multitude of backgrounds. They came here to make it their home, and contributed in both small and large ways to make it the success story it used to be. No matter your passport status, we are all Hongkongers, which is why the government’s decision to remove diversity from their official picture altogether is concerning and upsetting. Are we no longer part of the picture? Interestingly, the next video that played for me after Happy Hong Kong was an Information Services Department video about the urgent repairs being made to the closed coastal road to Shek O following a major typhoon. As Chief Executive John Lee (our benighted leader) made his hard hat inspection, the repair crew who greeted him was full of Hongkongers of South Asian descent, hard at work.

Returning back to the photo up top, on 7 September 2023 I went to see Hong Kong play Cambodia in an international football friendly at Phnom Penh’s atmospheric Olympic Stadium (built by the country’s famed architect Vann Molyvann). To get into the Lion Rock spirit, I first gathered a group of friends at the Hong Kong restaurant across the road, then found some seats behind the goal. A multinational lot, among us were Britons, Americans, Canadians, myself and Jack, an ethnic Chinese Hongkonger.

We celebrated together as Hong Kong took the lead, let in an equalizer, then groaned as they almost threw it all away with a last minute penalty awarded to Cambodia (they missed, phew!). The point is, despite our different ethnicities, we were both there to support Hong Kong, no matter what. If only the government would recognize that.