I often felt trapped growing up in Hong Kong: trapped in an apartment where my parents quarrelled and sulked; trapped in my extra lessons at Kumon, surrounded by middle-class kids like me and piles of maths workbooks; trapped in a lecture hall where we watched video recordings of famous private tutors who promised to get us good grades in the all-important final exams, the HKCEE.
Some evenings after school, instead of taking the MTR from Tin Hau back to Tai Koo, I would walk the five kilometres home, meandering through alleyways, pedestrian bridges and street markets. These walks momentarily alleviated an ennui that felt taboo to talk about.
I was living the widely touted middle-class Hong Kong dream, living in a private housing estate with an engineer father and a stay-at-home mother, attending a prestigious traditional secondary school in the science stream, and well on track to becoming “successful”. And yet, all I wanted was to jump off that track, to leave the home I grew up in, to leave Hong Kong in search of broader horizons.
The concept of home (家) is at once personal, affective and political. It simultaneously denotes family, kin ties (家庭), homeland (國家) and the private dwelling of one’s own (屋企). We expect, or at least hope for, our home to be unwaveringly steady, safe, and accepting – a container that feels like a tight embrace, allowing us to exhale fully.
When we feel discomfited instead of at ease in our home, we become what writer and scholar Sara Ahmed calls “affect aliens”, challenging the social script that tells us when and why we should experience contentment and belonging.
Out of place
Perhaps because of that, I’d always felt unsettled and guilty about my yearning for something outside of the prescribed “good life” in Hong Kong, a life my parents had steadfastly cultivated for me against the backdrop of colonialism and their own childhood of poverty and abuse.
At 17, I moved to the US on my own to enrol at the University of Pittsburg, daring to pursue something “useless”: a joint major in English literature and philosophy. That was the first time I’d ever stepped foot in the country, and had to learn and create a temporary life.
Long meandering walks along Tin Hau, Fortress Hill and Quarry Bay were replaced by lonesome strolls along Forbes Avenue during Family Weekends. Inside the Cathedral of Learning, the study hub and architectural focus of my college campus, however, I felt right at home: the seminars I was taking fed and grew my hunger for “useless” knowledge and enquiries in the humanities.
As I shuttled between the US and Hong Kong during my college years, I became preoccupied with the concept of home. To be more precise, I was preoccupied with locating a stable place I could claim and return to time and again to experience warmth, safety, ease and peace, and an unquestioned and unquestionable sense of belonging.
Home has always been elusive for Hongkongers: can – or, how can – we create a home or feel at home when the place we come from is always on lease, subject to the whims of some larger power?
In Hong Kong, I was sometimes touted and sometimes chided for being an ABC (American-born Chinese), or as too whitewashed or Westernised to respect traditional Chinese values – values such as absolute respect for hierarchy and filial piety, which I’d come to question even more critically after attending college. In the US, however, I was a FOB (“fresh off the boat”) who needed to be taught American ways of being.
These markers highlight the liminal space a diasporic racialised subject occupies within the lingering effects of colonialism and ongoing Eurocentrism and racism. As poet Ijeoma Umebinyuo poignantly articulates in ‘Diaspora Blues’: “too foreign for home/ too foreign for here/ never enough for both.”
While the US fuelled and fed my thirst for intellectual enquiries, I never felt fully at home. In unsuspecting moments, I was reminded that my body was still read as alien, something that needed to be disciplined and kept in line.
During my last year in college, I met a childhood friend from Hong Kong in Seattle to spend the holidays together. We were both attending predominantly white colleges in parts of the US where there were few Hong Kongers. We were each other’s home that week as we spoke Cantonese with abandon, meandering through festive streets and shops.
A sense of unbelonging
An older white man, who claimed to be a retired professor, interrupted our conversation on a bus ride to condescendingly tell me that my English would never improve if I continued to speak in Cantonese. My friend’s face turned red, her head lowered.
My heart was pounding as I defiantly but shakily pushed back on his assumption. “My English is just fine,” I said. He averted his gaze briefly, turned back to look at me, and asked: “Do you know how I know you’re an international student?” Using his chin to gesture towards my face, he said, “It’s your teeth. Americans have straighter, better teeth.”
Like most Hong Kongers of my generation, I had not worn braces as a teen. My overlapping bottom teeth and protruding canines were not a source of embarrassment until that man rendered them evidence of my unbelonging.
It has been well over a decade since that encounter; much to the imagined chagrin of that man on the bus, I have since earned a PhD in English, become a tenured professor and had my teeth straightened during graduate school. As of last year, I have spent half my life in Hong Kong, and half my life in the US, my scholarship always circling back to the concept of home and belonging.
I will likely always be preoccupied by that. The long diasporic experience, however, shows me that home does not have to be – or perhaps can never be – a stable, unchanging place. Rather, untethered to a specific place and script, we can feel at home anywhere through glimmers of connections we build along the way.
