Hong Kongers, Don’t Idolize the U.K.

Read: Hong Kong is a colony once more

The U.K. has not yet explained how it will accommodate mass migration amid struggles with Brexit negotiations, COVID-19, budget cuts, and a shrinking economy. Personally, I’m less focused on these logistical issues than the possibility that Hong Kongers have an overly romantic view of life in the U.K. Everywhere I go in Hong Kong, I notice hints of colonial rule. Streets bear the names of dead monarchs; high tea with scones and Darjeeling is common in five-star hotels; the Union Jack flies at protests; some consider a British accent the ultimate status symbol. To many people here, the U.K. is an alternative motherland, an idyllic place of opportunity where one can, in fact, take freedom for granted. Although the U.K. may be more politically stable than Hong Kong, I know that it isn’t the welcoming place many Hong Kongers seem to think it is.

I was born in 1989 in London to Hong Kong immigrants. My parents were part of a large wave of migration that took place in the decade before the 1997 handover, when the U.K. transferred control of Hong Kong to mainland China. An estimated 503,800 people left Hong Kong from 1987 to 1996, and by 2011 some 111,733 people born in Hong Kong were living in the U.K. Despite the long connection between Hong Kong and the U.K. and the large number of Chinese people in the country, our diaspora was not very unified or politically active. One illustration of this is that no person of British Chinese heritage was a member of Parliament until 2015. When Alan Mak finally broke that barrier, many in the Asian diaspora community rejoiced, seeing his victory as a win for cultural representation. However, Mak seemed frustrated that his ethnicity was overshadowing his achievements as a politician; he told the South China Morning Post magazine that if “Chinese for Labour think I am going to be representing every Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and Korean—and there are many in my constituency—they are mistaken. It’s a stupid story. I am not standing for the Chinese population of Britain. I am standing for the people of Havant and my country.” His comments were tough to read for those, like me, hoping to hear pride in his dual identity. Yet I could empathize with Mak’s desire to announce himself as a British citizen first and foremost.

Like many in the British Chinese diaspora, I was taught by people both inside and outside my community, in ways both implicit and explicit, that I should ignore my Chinese identity in order to conform and prove my “Britishness.” One of my earliest memories is of a teacher warning my mother that if I continued to speak Cantonese at home, I would be considered a bad student and possibly never learn to read or write in English. I was only 5. In response, my mother stopped sending me to Cantonese school on Saturdays. (Later, I learned that bilingualism is an advantage, not a hindrance, in overall literacy.)

At primary school, I was taught how to think, act, and speak in the proper British way, and to love the monarchy. During Princess Diana’s memorial service, in 1997, I was among the many students at my school who were asked to participate in a filmed event for a news station. Our task was to carry mourning flowers in and out of the park and, our teachers gently hinted, to cry. As I grew older, teachers fed me facts about Queen Victoria’s “impressive” 64-year rule and her proclivity for tea and potatoes, among other quaint details. But they either didn’t cover or only vaguely mentioned the darker realities of the British empire: the trauma of the Opium Wars, the slave trade in British India, and Hong Kong’s colonization.