Guest Post: Living in Hong Kong

A friend of mine told me about his experience in Hong Kong after reading my multicultural posts. I found it so interesting that I asked him to write a post!

And WEE he DID, so here it is! Enjoy.

Chinese-Canadian 

Living in Hong Kong

Hong Kong is a place typically filled with a single culture population, ironic because the city is known for being international. You could walk around the street and you would see people of different skin colour, speaking in all different languages wherever you walk in different parts of the city.

 Hong Kong itself is a culture, its not a traditional Chinese culture, its not a British influenced colonial like culture, it’s a culture based on trend, NOT being outdated, following the leader kind of materialism.

 A lot of people love traveling, to different places whether it’s for sight seeing or anything, the more places the more you experience, especially for multicultural people they tend to be more open to visiting different countries. Here in Hong Kong whenever I ask any of my friends, 8/10 times they would like to go to Japan. I’ve been to Japan too myself, it’s a great country, polite people, yummy food etc … but personally, I wouldn’t want to spend all my holiday visiting the same country every time.

 I see this as being more of a trend than enjoyable personal experience, they have bought into the “greatness” of what the “great empire” brings. They believe that there will be nowhere else better in the world. It is all done though on a materialistic surface, if I were to ask them how much they understand about countries and particular culture they wouldn’t able to tell me anything.

 The typical Hong Kong population, in my wording I would describe as a flock of sheep.

 Fashion sense is influential to everyone, you and me included, to some extent at the very least. In Hong Kong though, it is not about how smart and neat you look when you dress, it’s about wearing the most fashionable things that doesn’t even fit you. Obviously these are my opinions and it’s not for me to judge peoples fashion sense. You remember seeing people wearing caps loosely on their head? When you’re 6 foot 2 the cap is just another 3 inches on top of your 6 foot frame. When your 4 foot 10 and you add another 3 inch on top of your head, it looks like your body is out of proportion, and you see people like that everywhere here. I remember 3 years ago when pink was the fashionable colour here, when a guy wears a pinkish dress shirt, it could look great, a pink t shirt great, but when you see a guy wearing a baby pink tank top alone (with pants of course) and not just one but a couple, you start to wonder do people think about how they dress or do they dress as they are just because it is THE colour of the year.

   When I go for food with my friends, it is always the same few Japanese restaurants or some sort of fusion cuisine (all of which serves pretty much the same things). I never really choose where to eat and I let them do that, but whenever I give some suggestions like “ hey I know there is a Spanish pub around that serves great food or have you been to that particular French restaurant?” they would start talking about something else. I do not know if it’s just me not fitting into their culture or do I just think differently. For them, life revolves around the same couple of things, I can’t say it’s boring but it’s too predictable.

 Sometimes I wonder if I should be judging them the way I have here. Maybe they are thinking of me in a similar way, who knows?