Expats.

While I was in Hong Kong, I went to get drinks with my travel buddy and a friend of mine that lives in Hong Kong.  Unfortunately these really annoying guys crashed our catch up session and would not take a hint.  They asked where we were from and in my annoyance I told them to guess because I really didn’t want to play along.  One of them stared at me for a solid minute and then said “Zimbabwe.”

What?

Now at the time, I just thought he was a moron and I was already filled with the disdain that only a girl, who doesn’t want to be hit on, can have.  Poor guy.  Anyways, in retrospect I can see now why he might be confused and have no idea where I was from despite my accent.  I still don’t know why Zimbabwe was at the top of his list, but in Hong Kong it really is impossible to tell where people are from based on appearance.  You can thank the expats for this.

I would like to preemptively assert that I went to Hong Kong to visit a friend (The redhead with me in the picture to the left) who moved there a little over a year ago and whose parents have lived there for eight years. Also two of my friends from my program grew up in Hong Kong and discussed it with me quite a bit. My conjectures are therefore not solely based on my week as a tourist.

 

Hong Kong is a kick ass place to do two things in your career:

1. Start a business. I guess there are very few stipulations you have to fulfill before being able to call yourself a business. 2. Get a job out of college as an English-speaking foreigner. No seriously, if you hate your job and like to travel, find a company in Hong Kong to hire you. They will pay you to move out to Hong Kong, pay for your apartment and help you deal with international taxes. Score!

Because of these two undeniable facts, over the decades a bunch of business tycoons, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and young professionals have moved to Hong Kong from all over the world to catapult their careers.  They are called expats, short for expatriates. Expats are exactly what you think: someone who leaves their home country to settle in another.  My friend says that Hong Kong is so saturated with expats that if she was to learn another language to help her in Hong Kong it would be French, not Cantonese.

Now there are a few things I find interesting about the term expat

1. If you are not Chinese you are absolutely an expat in Hong Kong, no matter how long you have lived there.  This means that even though a lot of those business tycoons and venture capitalists moved to Hong Kong and started families, their children are still expats. So despite the definition, it’s not really about the move itself is it?

2.  Unlike most labels, it didn’t really seem to have a positive or negative connotation. Everyone that I heard use it said it like it was a running joke. Like “Oh, haha none of us really belong here but we don’t really care because we are expats” and “Oh yea they don’t get it, haha, because they don’t belong here but it’s okay they are expats.” I wasn’t really sure whether or not I was allowed to use the term because it suggests an other-ness, which should be bad, but everyone seemed to act like it was funny.

3. It is the only unifying term for like half the population of Hong Kong and 90% of the population on Hong Kong Island. Hong Kong itself doesn’t really have a unique cohesive cultural identity. They have a very distinct Chinese culture, and a very confusing hodge-podge of other stuff, with little pieces that are obviously a melding of the cultures.  But really it’s not like in America where, despite all the cultures, there is the overarching idea of “America.”  Here, people identify themselves as Mexican-American or African-American or just plain old American because there are too many ethnicities tossed in there to count. In Hong Kong there didn’t seem to be such thing as French-Hong Kongese.  No, the person is just French and happens to live in Hong Kong.  There is a separation between the location they live in and the culture they claim.  And because of this confusion the word expat has come to prominence.

I kind of like it.

The people I interacted with in Hong Kong really held on to their cultural identity.  This doesn’t mean that the Germans in Hong Kong only eat German food and don’t associate with non-Germans and long for the motherland.  It just means that people there have a strong sense of heritage while still wanting to go out into the world and explore other places.  I was impressed.

Also it was nice to know that everyone in Hong Kong has to start their conversations out the same way: “Where are you from?” “What are you?” It isn’t a given there.  There is no standard.  It was liberating.  I felt like it was one of those places where I could claim anything and people would be like awesome! Good for you! I actually contemplated making up stories with the girl I was traveling with, but we’re scientists and the imagination/lying/story-telling part of our brains isn’t as skilled as the logic/puzzles part.  The furthest we got was fake bar names.

So thank you to the expats! I’m glad the only thing that separated me as a tourist was the map in my hand.

Side note: the urbandictionary definitions of expats are pretty funny… http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=expat