Things I have learnt

It’s been seven years since my first day at high school, and I still remember being dumbfounded by how quickly the native English students spoke.  I had to strain to catch all their words.  I did not take long to get used to that, along with all the daily life differences such as tap water being drinkable.  However, looking back, there were so many things I didn’t know or appreciate back then.  For example, my mother (Fanny Wong, ’81), a light sleeper, would switch on the radio whenever she woke up at night.  I was oblivious however to the fact that ever since my departure, she developed the habit of checking for texts from me before turning to the radio. 

I also did not know how little I knew about race and unconscious bias.  I luckily only ever encountered one outright racist person in England, but there were a few memorable moments.  For instance, I randomly realised one day that I had been way more desperate to impress white people when I talked to them, over people of colour.  I also felt uneasy when a black student handed a flyer on racial issues to the white students walking in front of me, and they tossed it into the bin without a second glance.  After a long day of research, I rewarded myself with a comedy gig, only to feel uncomfortable when a white comedian made a joke about how ethnic names were “impossible to pronounce”, in an audience full of white people. 

It was comfortable living in Hong Kong, not just due to all the objective benefits of being familiar with how things worked, but because I was part of the majority.  I am sure the uneasiness I described might be relatable to some minority groups living in Hong Kong - but I would not have been aware of that at all.  How it is like to internally combat feeling like an outsider is something I understood only after first-hand experience.

The other side of the coin

Every coin has two sides, however!  My friendship groups in both England and Germany are quite international.  At our (online) Christmas party, all the Germans had to guess German words explained by the “internationals” in their mother tongue.  And, they fared extremely well against Hindi, Russian, Mandarin, Tamil, Italian … and of course, my Cantonese!  This was a game that only worked because we were foreigners, and I found it a precious experience.