The Identity Crisis of a Post-90 HongKonger
By
CHAN Yee Hong Henry
Not a day went by without me introducing myself to a new friend during my stay in the U.S. I would usually go by my English name Henry, and I would also tell people that I came from Hong Kong. Out of curiosity, I once asked my friend, “Do you know where Hong Kong is?” After a few conversations, I started to notice their perplexed eyes, which were trying to shy away from mine as if they were moaning, “Please. Just don’t ask me about Hong Kong.” A typical conversation would go like this:
Me: Hey, nice to meet you. I’m Henry from Hong Kong.
J: Hi, I’m Jack!
Me: *smiling cunningly* Oh, um, you know where HK is?
J: Yeah I do.
Me: Oh great! Do you know it’s the capital of Japan?
J: Of course!
I would tell them afterwards that I was just messing with them. Of course, they were embarrassed, but I was ashamed, too, almost scandalized. I had assumed that they all knew at least a bit about Hong Kong. Yet, it exposed their lack of geographical knowledge much as it provoked me to rethink my own identity.
Identity begins with recognition. Like most post-90 students, I have always considered myself strictly as a Hong Konger for historical and cultural reasons. During155 years of colonial ruling, the British not only brought us western thinking (and their language), which helped modernize Hong Kong and set it on the road to becoming an international metropolis, but they also created an impregnable wall that separated Hong Kong from the rest of China, economically, socially, and culturally. As one of the four little dragons of Asia, it has had its own days. Now, even according to some optimists, Hong Kong is gradually losing its competitive edge. Forget about comparing ourselves to Singapore. Look at Beijing and Shanghai, and our fears of trailing behind them and our city soon becoming just another Chinese city one day are enough to make us sweat.
Regardless, I have always refused to be identified as a Chinese. When the sovereignty of Hong Kong was handed back to China in 1997, I was only five. Nonetheless, my distant memory informs me that the transition had not been smooth, and attempts to cultural integration have so far failed, if not backfired. In recent months, things have only gotten worse, extreme even. And while I am fully aware that many of the accusations from both sides are results of pride and prejudice, and that I have great friends from China, I have never wished to be identified as a Chinese partly because the word “Chinese” carries a negative connotation, if not stigma. I would tell my American friends, “I come from Hong Kong, not China.” I would frown upon them if they confused the two.
Yet I must quickly add that I did not always feel comfortable talking about my identity. It was easy to tell my Norwegian roommate that I was a Hong Konger. I had no problem explaining to a bunch of French students why I’d consider myself so. Indeed, whenever people asked if I was Chinese, I almost felt obliged to clarify my identity, but it was not so easy when I was talking to a Chinese. I remember travelling in Portland and being approached by a Mandarin-speaking guy, who asked me in English, “Hey, are you Chinese?”
Yes? But my Mandarin was just communicative, not even fluent.
No? And how am I supposed to explain? I’m from Hong Kong, not China. Imagine just how patronizing that would sound.
“I guess so,” I hesitated, and I felt instantly embarrassed by it. And then, strangely enough, I felt slightly guilty. I should’ve said “yes”, I thought. You don’t always have to be so truthful about yourself.
“Oh.” His stare was almost burning my cheek. He was waiting for an explanation. But I couldn’t look into his eyes.
“I come from Hong Kong,” I finally said, in Mandarin. I forgot what I said afterwards, but I was pretty sure that I had told him a million white lies. The truth is that I found it impossible to tell him everything I know about China – which was overwhelmingly negative. I wonder how he would’ve felt had I splashed out my contempt for the Chinese, just as I normally did to a non-Chinese. He’d probably be shocked, wondering what the heck was wrong with this Chinese.
And to be honest with myself, it was not easy at all to resist my Chineseness. As I mingled with my Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Malaysian friends, it surprised me how so many Asians have so much in common as we all have been in some way or another so deeply influenced by Chinese culture and language. For instance, the Japanese still adopt traditional Chinese characters, and while Koreans have abolished them altogether, the pronunciation for a sizable vocabulary in Korean has much consonance with Cantonese. It amazes me how I happen to be a native speaker of one of the oldest languages in human civilization, and it is absolutely a privilege in its own right, not least because it unites all of us Asians. I feel proud, knowing that while the Chinese government is trying to tame (if not to kill) the language, its roots lie in the Chinese soil and this is a fact I can never deny.
Yet undeniable, too, are the many other roots that have shaped me. Because Hong Kong is an international city, it should come as no surprise that the core part of our identity is just as profoundly influenced by the English language. What may seem surprising though is that while Cantonese is the language that conveys my thoughts, I find that sometimes – though not always – English can best express my true self. At times, my friends love to laugh at my “non-Chineseness” (“Wow your Chinese sucks!”); others despise it when I seem to overuse English in a conversation (“Stop pretending to be an ABC.”).
Why? Perhaps the simplest explanation has to do with my upbringing. Neither of my parents went to college, and neither of them speaks much English. Nevertheless, I grew up in a society where English is not only a language for workplace communication, but also a social marker of the elite. As it happened, the latter, rather than the former, has been my primary drive to improve my English proficiency, and my fondest wish is to climb up the social ladder. Truthfully, and ironically enough, I had never actually loved the English language (though I claimed to like it most of my life) until I became an English major. I have always been quite good at it, and I loved it whenever people said, “I wish I could speak English as fluently as you do.”
And so, rarely have I had issues with the Western part of myself with which I have lived quite comfortably. Interestingly, it was when I went to the U.S. that it got challenged. Once, I picked up a package and Giorgi, my Georgian friend, saw my name on it. He asked inquisitively, “So, Henry is not your real name, is it?”
I was bewildered. “Of course it’s my real name.”
“I mean, don’t you have a Chinese name? Surely Henry is an English name.”
“Oh, that.” I realized he was actually asking a sensible question.
“Hmm, I’ve been Henry since I was five. In Hong Kong we all have English names.”
I told him my Chinese name afterwards, but things didn’t just end there. I kept thinking about how even my roommates didn't know my Chinese name. I’d never told them. Somehow, I felt a little ashamed of myself. Most exchange students introduce themselves using their “real” names; I was one of the few who had an English name. “I read Giorgi in a rather English way, of course, but it is also my Georgian name,” I remembered him saying.
I wondered why I had not considered telling them my Chinese name. As it might be expected, they would mispronounce my three-part name; perhaps they would simply forget it.
Now that I think of it, maybe it was because I have never been proud of my Chinese name. It is not a funny one that people mock; nor is it so common that I’d love to hate it. But I definitely don’t have a liking for it; my Chinese name, for the most part, has merely been functional. My English name Henry, by contrast, is always the preferred name, the name I picked, not the one I was born with. However reluctant I am to admit this to myself, the reason why the idea of introducing myself with my Chinese name had slipped my mind was this: I loved English more than Chinese, so much that I would rather let people not notice that a part of me is Chinese.
What struck me further was that none of us was brought up to question the language of the colonizer and the colonizer itself. Here I use the word “colonizer” advisedly – because it has to do with cultural imperialism. During my exchange in the U.S., I felt flattered whenever people told me that I “had the best English of all exchange students”. Countless times, I was mistaken as a local student because of my “accentless English”. Yet there was more to that. I felt almost uncomfortable feeling comfortable with the ease with which I use English. In fact, the more compliments showered on me, the more disgusted I felt at myself. I should’ve devoted more time to improve my written Chinese, or Mandarin, I thought, and my English shouldn’t have been this good.
I couldn’t help but recall the day when I found myself an English name. I was six. “Please write your English name on your name tag. And if you don’t have an English name, find one,” declared my English teacher. That night, I flipped through the appendix of the Oxford English Dictionary. All those names made no sense to me, but that didn’t really matter. The next day I became Henry, and that was it.
Do I feel bad because I’ve had an English name since then? No, not really. My life is made easier because of it. But having fully embraced the English language – which was largely why I’d considered myself a Hong Konger – has an unintended consequence: I sometimes feel that I have become increasingly detached from the language that speaks to my authentic self. For the past 20 years, I have feared that my English would not be good enough. Now that I can use it fairly well, I shudder at the thought of gradually forgetting my native language.
Never have I been so puzzled by questions about my own identity. But that is okay. As Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Now I can’t be sure if I’m a Hong Kong Chinese, or a Chinese Hong Konger. But that is okay, too. If being a Hong Konger means outright rejection of my identification with the Chinese, or blind adoration of the British, that identity is not identity at all. And if there is really such a thing as a Hong Kong identity, there is surely a strong sense of insecurity and excruciating vulnerability beneath it. Recently, the Chinese government has forbidden the use of Cantonese in many news reporting channels in Guangdong province; we felt enraged, we felt betrayed, and most essentially, we felt lost.
What my exchange period in the US did was this: it exposed what I took for granted and allowed me to reexamine myself. I realize that being international can be a mixed blessing. Our local, national, and international languages all serve to complicate us. We use them, speak them with varying degrees of proficiency; and this, I believe, is the perfect metaphor for the fluidity of our identity. Which language(s) do we value most, and why? Which language(s) really define(s) us, and to what extent? May these questions trouble us for the rest of our lives.
Explore. Dream. Discover.
About the author
CHAN Yee Hong Henry is a 4th year student majoring in English at CUHK. In the fall semester of 2013-14, he went to California State University, San Marcos for a semester-long exchange with the International Student Exchange Program (ISEP).
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