Hong Kong takes great pride in its “East-meets-West” heritage and promotes itself as a diverse place, welcoming people of all cultures and ethnicities. At the same time, South and Southeast Asian Hongkongers are excluded from the city’s self-understanding as an Asian metropolis with a distinct cultural heritage. In a city that marginalises its non-Chinese microhistories, these minority communities are rendered invisible.

Hong Kong’s 2021 population census found that about 8.4 per cent of the population identify as non-Chinese, with Filipinos forming the largest ethnic minority group in the city. Generations of Filipino families have lived in Hong Kong since the British colonial era. Generations of Filipino migrant domestic workers have raised generations of Hongkongers, often sacrificing their own motherhood for meagre salaries to remit back home. These women form the backbone of a city where parents barely have time to raise their young, yet they’re treated as expendable labour with no path to permanent residency or even the right to live outside their employer’s homes. Institutional and societal racism is commonplace, discreetly isolating whole communities.

Assimilation. Exile. Assimilation/Exile.

Assimilation is learning Cantonese so you’re less of an outsider to your external world. Exile is losing your parents’ and grandparents’ native tongues, so that there’ll always exist a realm in each other’s worlds that neither can comprehend. Assimilation/Exile is learning a history your parents don’t recognise, but will gradually belong to you as you’re shaped by, and become inseparable from, the environment in which you live. Assimilation/Exile is at once looking forward and backward, so that your existence is burdened by quiet yearning for parts of yourself which are not bygone but have become inaccessible.

• Tags: Hong Kong, Issue 41, Kiara Agoncillo, Philippines