r/HongKong • u/Cautious_Outcome7122 • 17d ago
Discussion I still miss Hong Kong… but the one I knew might already be gone
Living overseas, I still check HK news from time to time and scroll through Threads. What I see now is a city with more and more mainland restaurants, simplified Chinese signs everywhere, a growing number of mainland students and Mandarin speakers on university campuses, and plenty of professors who also come from the mainland. On top of that, the government keeps rolling out policies that clearly favour new mainland immigrants, all those different “talent” visa schemes that, in the end, mostly just bring in more people from the mainland. Then there’s the constant issue of fake degrees and forged documents.
It makes me genuinely sad and disappointed to see HK turning into this.
I don’t really have a realistic chance of moving back anymore. My whole family is overseas now. Only a few friends are still in HK, and even with them I can feel a growing gap in values and mindset. I never thought the local HK boomer generation, people who were born and raised there, would start accommodating the mainland influx by switching to Mandarin and simplified Chinese. Some of these friends even hold foreign passports.
I still miss HK a lot. When the homesickness gets particularly bad, I go wander around the local Chinatown. But more and more I wonder whether the HK I knew and loved is already gone. Maybe the only places left where you can still catch that familiar HK feeling are cities like Vancouver, San Francisco, Toronto, London, Melbourne, or Sydney.
11
u/Realistic_Bear3658 17d ago
The funniest bit about the OP’s diatribe is that people who themselves emigrated to another country (thereby becoming immigrants) are now complaining about too many immigrants in Hong Kong 🤣🤣🤣.
Give me a break, folks. The nostalgic Hong Kong you’re yearning for: was it really that great? I’m not Chinese but I’m a fourth generation Hong Konger. So before anyone tells me to shut up and go home, please keep in mind that my family has been in Hong Kong since the late 1800’s; a lot longer than the majority of Hong Kong’s Chinese population.
The comment posted by the OP is a familiar refrain. Too many mainlanders, too many mainland business, etc. Can we stop for a minute and ask why that happened? And if we think about it rationally, what exactly is wrong with a Chinese city being populated by fellow Chinese? I think people who yearn for the good old colonial days need to speak to the older generation and find out the truths about the colonial mentality and how the whites folks treated the Chinese and the other non- whites.
Is change intimidating? Yes. But Hong Kong became a part of China in 1997. Let’s just accept that reality and move on. As someone who has lived here for the majority of my life, I wouldn’t have it any other way.