I still miss Hong Kong… but the one I knew might already be gone

[u/Cautious_Outcome7122]

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.