Arriving at a Dream

Originally posted: Saturday 30th September 2006:

Most of my life can be conviniently divided up in segments, JHB, Cape Town, high school and university. The most clear cut of these segments of my life was when I left China at the age of 6 to visit for the first time what I then considered to be a magical city: Hong Kong.

Hong Kong had almost a mythical status in the hearts and minds of many Chinese living in the mainland. You see, two decades ago China was not a manufacturing giant and an emerging superpower. At this point in time it was still a typical communist state: poor, corrupt and with a generally miserable population.

The city was awe-inspiring. For a 6 year old who until now has been living in the country side, seeing sky-scrappers for the first time had an almost spiritual feel to it. This was the place where millions of Mainlanders has tried to reach, legal or otherwise. Many would have paid richly and given much to be in our shoes. We were the envy of thousands and millions. In fact, Hong Kong to many is what US represents to most of the the third world, and so for all intents and purposes our family has achieved the "Hong Kong Dream."

However, mainlanders to the general Hong Kong population is much like the current Turks in Germany. We were the bottom of the social hierarchy, somehow less than them. The media and television portrayed us as criminals and a distasteful part of their society. I was too naive to realise that these people don't consider us to be their equal. More recently a Hong Kong born girl told me that she has nothing against Mainlanders; it's just that"...the whores kept on stealing Hong Kong woman's husbands and have no shame."

What makes this particular form of racism/discrimination interesting is because vast majority of the (then) 6million people in Hong Kong are either refugees or descents of refugees that fled China during and after the civil war. The separation of Hong Kong from mainland China was less than a hundred years. Our language and culture was undistinguishable and this discrimination was brought out completely by class and shame.

The same shame that drove me to only speak the "Cantonese" dialect and not my own home dialect or the universal Mandarin. The same shame that made my parents tell people in South Africa that I'm from Hong Kong and not China because we were ashamed. You see, during the time that Hong Kong was becoming an economical powerhouse of Asia, China continued on its decline and economical collapse. They were embarrassed by their homeland and started to believe that they weren't "Chinese" but rather something else, something better. I spent a lot of time pretending that I don't speak Mandarin and only Cantonese (which I picked up quickly with my cousins) But that was all set to change and in came in the form of 1997.

In 1997 China regained control of Hong Kong. I guess it's because that they can no longer be in denial - they're now Chinese, by birth, culture and now by politics. Perhaps they were slowly but surely realising they need China more than China needs Hong Kong. Either way, Mandarin suddenly became the next big craze, it was now considered "educated" even "cool" to be able to speak the dialect. The irony of this hypocrisy nauseates me.

In 2003, I was impressed by a salesperson at Lacoste when she made her sales pitch starting in Mandarin, then in Cantonese and English consecutively. A big contrast to my earlier visits in 1994 when while sitting in MacDonalds one of the patrons; a middle age housewife loudly complained about the amount of "stinking" Mainlanders are in Hong Kong, more specifically she was referring to me and my sisters.

How the world has changed, nowadays people from the Mainland, especially from the big cities such as Shanghai and Beijing can hold their heads high and stare at everyone else and proudly proclaim their origins, culture and race; frowning on those who decide to emigrate. However, at the same time these mainlanders are also discriminating against their fellow countryman from less privileged backgrounds. Their contempt and racism for people of other races are as bad if not worse than those that discriminated against us decades ago.

Recently, China has been referred to by many as the "Miracle Economy" and seems to be on course to become the rival superpower to America. But with this kind of attitude and cultural arrogance, this "China Dream" will be short lived, or worse a negative influence in human development.