A6 FRIDAY, AUGUST 23, 2019 S LATIMES.COM
This was the world Andrews
was showing the students from
Hong Kong Open University — a
Hong Kong through minority and
refugee eyes.
Andrews began leading such
tours long before the protests that
have rocked Hong Kong this sum-
mer, as locals resist Beijing’s at-
tempts to assert more control over
the territory. But at the heart of
recent unrest lies a question that
Andrews’ tours have been asking
all along: What does it mean to be
a Hong Konger?
For many in the city, especially
the younger generation, the an-
swer lies in Hong Kong’s non-
Chinese identity. As China pres-
sures Hong Kong to merge more
with the mainland, some are em-
bracing minorities and refugees as
part of an international city that
can be home to all.
Andrews began his tour in the
Tsim Sha Tsui neighborhood,
where accents buzzed all around:
Shanghainese, Korean, English
with African or Filipino lilts.
This was Andrews’ turf growing
up. Descended from Tamil Chris-
tians who left southern India for
Hong Kong in the 1960s, when it
was still a British colony, Andrews
was born and raised here. He felt
little connection with India, but
also distanced from the main-
stream of Hong Kong, where 92%
of the population is ethnic Chi-
nese.
Legally, minority residents
could go to school and work in
Hong Kong. But most, including
Andrews, attended segregated
schools where minority children
didn’t learn Chinese. Without the
Chinese reading skills needed for
higher education and white-collar
jobs, people like him were locked
into cheap labor on society’s mar-
gins.
As a teenager, Andrews fell into
Hong Kong’s triad gangs, roaming
the streets until he was arrested
one day for stealing a cellphone. At
the police station, he stared at a
chart on the walls listing the num-
ber of crimes committed by non-
ethnic Chinese.
“I’m just going to be one of
these statistics,” he thought.
A Cantonese social worker,
Fermi Wong, bailed Andrews out
of jail that night. He got home
expecting his parents to yell at
him. Instead, they cried.
From that day, Wong became
Andrews’ mentor, helping him
fight to enter Hong Kong’s educa-
tion systems, become a licensed
social worker and eventually natu-
ralize as a Chinese national with a
Hong Kong passport.
Now Andrews gives talks at
police stations, schools and corpo-
rate events. On tours like this, he
advocates for a Hong Kong that
provides a future for minorities.
“Minorities are scared to com-
plain because our parents say:
‘Hey, look, this is better than our
home countries. Don’t rock the
boat,’ ” Andrews said.
But his generation wants an
equal chance at education, work
and inclusion in the city where
they were born and raised.
“I’m a local Hong Konger, just
with a different skin color,” An-
drews said.
The tour’s first stop was
Kowloon Masjid, the largest
mosque in Hong Kong. None of the
students had ever been inside. But
they remembered 2016, when Hong
Kong’s parliamentary elections
threw the topic of asylum seekers,
and the mosque, into the spot-
light.
As an international business
hub, Hong Kong has loose visa
requirements. It’s easy for people
fleeing Africa, South Asia and the
Middle East to enter the city and
seek asylum, though the accept-
ance rate is about 0.6%, one of the
lowest in the world.
During the last parliamentary
elections, some candidates
pointed to that rate to argue that
most asylum seekers came here to
leech off Hong Kong’s welfare
system and steal people’s jobs.
The candidates hung banners
in front of the mosque decrying
“fake refugees,” as local media ran
stories about “South Asians” — no
distinction among asylum seekers,
migrant workers or residents —
committing rapes, thefts and
other crime.
As Andrews explained these
policies, the students nodded in
sympathy, especially when he
identified the candidates as part
of a conservative, pro-Beijing
political party.
One of the tour chaperones
said she wasn’t surprised that the
students related more to asylum
seekers than to China-friendly
politicians.
“The invasion of mainland
Chinese is making Hong Kong
more like China, which most Hong
Kong people would never want to
see,” she said. “Hong Kong people
don’t like mainland Chinese.
They’d rather welcome an asylum
seeker.”
Later, Andrews led the group to
Kowloon Union Church, a redbrick sanctuary built by British
missionaries in the 1930s. In one
room, a pastor told students how
Vietnamese “boat people” had
slept in rows of bunk beds here in
the 1970s, seeking refuge after the
Vietnam War.
Hong Kong later put Viet-
namese refugees in internment
camps, before repatriating or
sending most off for resettlement
in Western countries.
There’s a generation gap in
Hong Kongers’ attitudes toward
minorities and refugees, said
Terence Shum, the anthropology
professor who had brought these
students on the tour.
“Young people want to fight for
their rights, gain independence,
have more say in the political
system — they’re more willing to
embrace people with different
cultures,” Shum said. “Older peo-
ple say foreigners are here to
abuse the system, and they should
get out.”
The irony of that gap is that
many of Hong Kong’s older resi-
dents fled from civil war and the
communist revolution in main-
land China. Between 1945 and 1951,
an exodus from the mainland sent
Hong Kong’s population rocketing
from 600,000 to 2.1 million.
Chris Lin, a 33-year-old Hong
Konger who volunteers at the
refugee center, was assisting with
the tour. His own grandparents
came to Hong Kong as refugees, he
said.
“Refugees now are also fleeing.
Why deny them? Didn’t we go
through the same hardship?” he
said.
Today’s students don’t talk as
much about their families’ origins
the way his generation did, Lin
said. But they’re more empathetic
to asylum seekers, perhaps be-
cause of the pressure they feel
from mainland China today.
That pressure is currently at aboiling point, as months of
protests against a now-suspended
extradition bill that would allow
deportations of suspected crimi-
nals to China have morphed from
million-person marches into
desperate, bloody clashes with
local gangs and police.
For many protesters, the sense
of urgency and anger against a
government beholden to Beijing
rather than to its people first
solidified in the Umbrella Move-
ment of 2014, when tens of thou-
sands of youth-led protesters
occupied Hong Kong’s streets,
demanding freer elections without
interference from Beijing.
Five years later, none of the
demands have been met; the
movement’s leaders have been
arrested and banned from public
office. But that movement was a
turning point for many young
Hong Kongers, minorities in-
cluded.
Andrews remembers watching
the police tear-gas the students on
TV, then gathering a group of
ethnic minority friends to join the
protests. They huddled in a sub-
way station with banners pre-
pared, then paused.
What if the Cantonese pro-
testers rejected them? What if
they called them achaand hak
gwei, “black ghost,” and told them
Hong Kong’s future was none of
their business?
Andrews took a deep breath
and went upstairs. In an instant,
the crowds surrounded them.
They hugged them, patted them
on the back and yelled, “Hong
Kongers!” That was the first time
Andrews felt he belonged.
The tour ended with in Yau Ma
Tei, where a Sri Lankan asylum
seeker showed the students her
home, a subdivided flat where 20
people shared one toilet, one
kitchen and 11 rooms the size of
wardrobes.The students squeezed single-
file in and out of her room, speech-
less. An Urdu radio broadcast
played through the walls.
“It’s really a shock to me. If you
asked me to stay here for 10 hours,
I would panic,” said Arbitor Ma,
one of the professors supervising
the trip.
One of the youngest students,
18-year-old Patton Leung, said
that he’d welcome asylum seekers,
calling them a “benefit to society.”
But mainlanders? Some were
kind, Leung said, but the sheer
numbers — 150 new mainland
immigrants come to Hong Kong
every day — felt out of control. He
called them a “red invasion.”
As Andrews looks to Hong
Kong’s future, he reflects on
an incident from last year, after
Typhoon Mangkhut ravaged the
city.
One of Andrews’ asylum-seeker
friends started a street cleanup.
The 23-year-old from Africa, who
asked not to disclose his name or
country for protection, said he just
felt compelled to clear the mess.
“It was just an instinct. Like if
you’re living somewhere, you clean
your house,” he said.
Soon, a whole group of Africans
and South Asians were picking up
tree branches, throwing them
away.
Andrews helped, too, and he
noticed a group of popos, Chinese
grandmothers, watching them.
They murmured in Cantonese, “So
many hak gwei!”
Andrews cringed. When one
disappeared, he worried she might
call the police.
But then she came back, her
arms full of pineapple buns and
Vitasoy cartons — classic Hong
Kong snacks — and passed them
out to the volunteers.
One of the Africans grinned as
he drank his first Vitasoy ever. The
popowatched him, satisfied.JEFFREY ANDREWS,at right during a soccer tournament, is a third-generation Hong Kong resident and the city’s first registered ethnic minority social worker.
Photographs by Anthony KwanFor The TimesHong Kong struggles for its identity too
[Hong Kong,from A1]
ANDREWS,a 33-year-old of Indian descent, runs an organization that advocates for minorities and asylum seekers in Hong Kong.