Tongue-tied

Many people I went to school with don’t live here any longer. I recently spoke to someone I hadn’t seen since I was a teenager. “Glad you’re still here,” he said.

Reading this, you might think that I grew up in some backwater town, the kind of place ambitious young people try to leave. You would be wrong.

The child of a maths teacher and a banker, I graduated from a well-respected private school in Hong Kong. Why did so many of my classmates leave the exciting, prosperous city in which we grew up? People move for different reasons. It’s hard to know for sure, but I think many left because they are functionally illiterate here—as am I. Hong Kong is perhaps the only advanced society where such illiteracy is unremarkable amongst rich and poor alike. The city’s minority labourers have long understood that the schools do not prepare all children for life here. Its lawyers and fund managers are beginning to arrive at the same conclusion.

Areas of linguistic isolation exist in many affluent cities, but they mainly tend to affect adult immigrants, at least in the long-term. Children, usually highly adaptable and immersed in their new environment through schooling, are taught to move out of the walled garden of their mother tongues. A Cantonese-speaking father in London might only ever feel comfortable around other Hong Kong transplants, but his daughter will learn to drink and curse like any other native-born Brit. As unnerving as this may be for a parent, it can also become a source of pride—a sign of a child integrated into their new home, proof that the family’s transplantation is complete.

In Hong Kong, schools fail to perform this routine miracle of assimilation. They don’t turn immigrants into locals. This deficiency is so commonplace it isn’t even recognised as a systemic failure. Instead, it comes out of a series of choices made by an astonishingly wealthy government, by teachers and school administrators, by private education businesses, by well-meaning parents, by the entire culture of the city. It is largely accepted, like the weather.

When our family moved to Hong Kong from Bombay (it hadn’t yet been renamed), the job my father had accepted—credit manager for the Hong Kong branch of an Indian bank—paid for me, then five, to receive private education. This was a common perk for foreign bankers in pre-handover Hong Kong. Even a publicly owned bank from an impoverished, socialist country—not an organisation known for treating its staff lavishly—considered private, English-medium schooling for employees’ children part of the standard cost of doing business. Overseas postings usually lasted for four years: not long enough, it was felt, for a child to learn a challenging, idiosyncratic language like Cantonese. Coming from a country where few middle class people ever set foot in a government school, my parents never considered enrolling me in a local (Chinese) public school. Besides, what was the point? We’d soon be back in Bombay. Or so we thought.

Short-term work contracts have a way of growing. After seven years in the city, many (not all) foreign workers become eligible for permanent residency, which grants them the right to live in Hong Kong without an employer-sponsored work visa. My family ended up staying. At this point, many places will think hard about the ability of their new residents to integrate. Australia, for instance, asks all immigrants from outside the Anglosphere to take a basic English test. France provides new arrivals with up to 600 hours of free language lessons—even providing childcare to ensure that young parents can attend. But Hong Kong neither tests nor teaches Cantonese in any systematic way. I continued to attend a school, in a Cantonese-speaking city, that did not teach me Cantonese.

A Norwegian woman, a self-taught Cantonese teacher, used to present a programme on public radio about learning the language. Cecilie Gamst Berg often spoke of how discouraged her students—mainly Western professionals—would feel when they tried to speak to Hong Kongers in Cantonese. “I think Hong Kong is unique in the whole universe,” she said in an episode, “in that the locals actively discourage you from learning the local language… That’s the main reason for my students giving up, actually. They meet this wall everywhere.”

It’s possible to get by in Hong Kong without speaking Cantonese. English is one of the city’s official languages and is widely spoken. Local Hong Kongers have no expectation that a foreigner will speak Cantonese.

Behind this attitude lies an unspoken conviction: foreigners will eventually leave. They always have. Hong Kong was a stepping stone where colonial officials proved their administrative chops before moving on to bigger jobs elsewhere in the empire. Staying too long meant career stagnation. So endemic was this short-termism that when the colonial era came to a close the British government apparently didn’t even purchase a home for its consul-general: in 2013, British tabloids fumed about how much their “woman in Hong Kong”—Caroline Wilson, who served in the role from 2012 to 2016—was costing the British taxpayer in rent.

For a hundred and fifty years, assured of their place at the top of the power structure, few in the British ruling class learnt the language of those they governed. In 1997—the year of the handover of Hong Kong from the British to the Chinese—the historian Ming K. Chan noted that “the expatriate domination of the civil service top echelon is not only racially discriminatory but raises serious doubts about the integrity of the entire system as a genuine meritocracy… With some well-known exceptions, most of the expatriate top officials are illiterate or only semi-literate in Chinese.”

The British administration ensured that what it valued—money-making and the support structures that facilitated this activity—was documented in English. Bureaucratic English was the topsoil; everything else—the silty, mineral matter of daily life—was left in Cantonese.

This topsoil remained even in 1997 and beyond, but a robust Chinese language culture has since grown through it. Writing in the year of the handover, the civil service leadership committed to “intensify[ing] Chinese training for non-Chinese-speaking officers to enable them to use Chinese as a working language” and designed a Mandarin course for “expatriate officers”. These are among the last references to non-Chinese-speaking civil servants. With the end of colonial-era race-based language exemptions, opportunities for non-Chinese speakers narrowed. Hong Kong Unison, a non-profit that advocates for Asian minorities, noted that between 1997 and 2011, “the Hong Kong civil service did not hire any ethnic minority new recruits”.

To be considered literate in Chinese, you need to be able to read and write about 3,000 Chinese characters. Well-educated people know about 5,000. In a now-archived guidance for secondary schools issued in September 1997, the Hong Kong Education Bureau declared: “Our aim is for our students to be biliterate (ie master written Chinese and English) and trilingual (ie speak fluent Cantonese, Putonghua and English).”

Children attending Chinese-medium kindergartens in Hong Kong start learning to identify the simplest characters at the age of four. By eight, they are expected to reproduce, from memory, hundreds of characters at a teacher’s dictation.

Primary and secondary schooling is free and compulsory for every Hong Kong child—but kindergarten is not. Admission decisions are made at the discretion of kindergarten operators. Some non-Chinese parents who try to enrol their children in Chinese-medium kindergartens are turned away. We were.

When our Hong Kong-born son was a toddler, we moved to a district with a well-known Chinese-medium kindergarten. We walked in one day, hoping to collect an application form or put our names down for an open day. The administrator wouldn’t even discuss the possibility with us. “He’s too far behind,” she insisted. “He wouldn’t keep up.” She didn’t speak to our son, who hid behind my legs. He wasn’t yet eighteen months old.

We stood outside the school, watching domestic workers collecting their wards. Some children were strapped into prams. It seemed too absurd. Like most children his age, our son could barely speak—but he was already being written off. Few gweilos (a slang term for white people in Hong Kong) try to enrol their children in Chinese kindergartens because they assume they’ll leave the city before the child can really learn Cantonese, and they’re apprehensive about a classroom environment in which their child might not be able to understand the language. Or, like my father’s old bank had, their employer might cover the cost of a more expensive English-medium kindergarten—why turn down such a perk when it’s offered? But many other minorities will try to send their kids to Chinese-medium kindergartens… only to get turned away.

An ethnic minority social worker told me that our experience is common: “Even when I go with my clients to the kindergartens, the kindergartens always try to reject them.

Hong Kongers from the Indian subcontinent, the Philippines and Indonesia have lived in the city for a long time. Desi and Gurkha soldiers who died defending Hong Kong are buried in our Second World War cemeteries. But most in the Chinese majority have limited interaction with these Hong Kongers. They walk past roadworks manned by Pakistani construction workers, have their tank filled by an Indian petrol-pump attendant, or side-step a Nepali janitor mopping the office corridor—but they never really need to speak to these people. Apart from my family and friends, the only desis who ever enter my residential high-rise building are Deliveroo drivers.

Within this group of multi-generational minorities are pockets of wealth. Sindhi and Parsi families, many of whom left India during its traumatic postcolonial partitions, often run successful family-owned businesses. Older Sindhis and Parsis, cuddled and scolded in childhood by Chinese amahs (maids), speak fluent Cantonese. But the city’s wealth has made the Chinese amah extinct: poor Chinese families can make more in minimum wage jobs or through state support programmes than poorer Indonesian and Filipina migrants earn as domestic workers. Few fourth- or fifth-generation Sindhis speak Cantonese as their grandparents did.

Hong Kong Unison has published research detailing the kind of stonewalling that minorities face at Chinese-medium kindergartens. Researchers called more than two hundred Chinese-medium kindergartens to ask about admission for non-Chinese children. Some schools claimed to lack the resources or expertise to teach non-native speakers. Some insisted that children pass a Cantonese interview. Many were evasive or openly hostile: “Go and find another school” was one recorded response. A few simply hung up. In one district, kindergarten operators were noticeably warmer to such enquiries. As you might have guessed, the difference might have something to do with race and money: the neighbourhood is home to many well-off, white families and has few public housing estates.

This kind of de facto racial bar may contravene the Race Discrimination Ordinance. But parents typically don’t sue kindergartens that shut doors in their faces. Would you entrust your three-year-old to teachers who required a court order to accept her?

When Asian minority children enter public primary schools at age six, they’re already far behind their Chinese peers in both spoken and written Chinese. Corralled into separate classes for NCS—which stands for “non-Chinese-speaking”—students, they’re taught a watered-down curriculum that leaves them unable to catch up with the mainstream.

Opportunities to learn the language organically through relationships outside formal lessons aren’t common. Non-Chinese families used to be placed in so-called ‘designated schools’ that aimed to specialise in teaching non-native speakers. The designated school policy has been abolished, but anecdotal evidence suggests that many non-Chinese families still gravitate towards former designated schools while Chinese parents tend to avoid schools with large Asian minority populations—a local version of the ‘white flight’ phenomenon in America’s inner-city public schools.

Most seventeen-year-olds sit the Diploma of Secondary Education (DSE) school-leaving exam. The daunting Chinese paper requires a vocabulary greater than the basic literacy level of 3,000 characters and assumes familiarity with classical Chinese. Even Chinese students often require intensive after-school tuition to pass the DSE. After years of segregated schooling, minority students are in no position to take this test. Instead, they sit for what the Hong Kong government refers to as “internationally recognised alternative Chinese Language qualifications”, like the British-administered GCSE Chinese.

“Alternative” is one way of putting it. This British qualification is meaningless in a Chinese society: it only covers about 200 characters. Research by Miron Kumar Bhowmik, a Bangladeshi-Hong Konger academic, has shown how alienation in this “alternative” system causes desis to drop out of school sooner than their Chinese peers. “Martin, which lesson do you like to attend?” reads a recent GCSE Chinese listening transcript—a typically simple, two-line conversation. The answer: “I don’t like attending lessons.” Quite.

Children who manage to bypass segregated schools to attend local institutions can face ignorance and discrimination. An Indian-origin law professor with a child in a mainstream primary school spoke on public radio about a conversation she had with her son’s teacher. A Chinese boy had refused to hold her son’s hand during a class activity because he feared ‘catching’ a darker complexion, transdermally. The teacher advised the Indian mother to teach her son to accept such comments with more humour. The other boy went uncorrected.

If you could buy your child’s way out of this system, wouldn’t you? This is exactly what well-heeled minorities do: they send their children to so-called international schools, like the ones I attended, which follow foreign curricula. Since the end of British rule, about three-quarters of public secondary schools have been converted from English-medium to Chinese-medium. Sceptical of the quality of English in public schools and exhausted by a mountainous homework load and test-based streaming, Hong Kong parents with money flocked to English-medium international schools. In 1997 and 1998, international schools educated about 29,000 children, 7 per cent of them locals with Hong Kong passports. Twenty years later, international school places had grown to more than 43,000. About a quarter went to local students.

International schools have become so popular with Chinese families that some newer schools discreetly offer discounts to white families. Other times, it’s not that discreet. “Bursaries are available for families… including non-local (international/expatriate) families not in receipt of an education allowance from their employer,” reads one such offer, openly advertised on the school’s website. It’s one of a clutch of educational businesses that licence the names and crests of old English boarding schools, dressing children up in tartan and straw boaters. Schools are willing to go to remarkable lengths to cultivate a strategic number of white faces in the student population, so as to maintain a semblance of the ‘Western’ environment their primary (Chinese) customer base prizes. I wonder whether the Indian professor on the radio would have been offered such a discount. Would I? And would I take it?

At international schools, children learn no Cantonese. Several schools do teach Mandarin as part of an International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum. But like public schools, they often segregate students into native and non-native streams which sit different levels of IB examinations. Passing the lower-level Chinese ‘B’ only requires a writing ability of around 300 characters—similar to the basic Chinese taught to desi kids in public schools. One of the city’s most prestigious international schools describes itself as a “dual language” school. But only a handful of its last graduating class took the higher-level Chinese ‘A’ IB exam. It’s rare for non-Chinese students, at any school, to take this advanced paper. Instead of bridging the divide between Chinese and non-Chinese families, international schools replicate it. On one popular online advice forum, a commenter put it this way to a parent asking about Chinese language education for non-native children: “If you want them to learn Chinese in a cute but non-functional way, like saying a few sentences and writing some words, then most international schools can do that…”

Many foreign parents aren’t alarmed by the schools’ inability to assimilate their children. Even those who never leave Hong Kong don’t consider themselves settled here. Few gweilos ever try to naturalise as Hong Kong citizens. Like the Chinese-illiterate colonial officers, they believe, as Disraeli wrote, that “the East is a career” but not a life. You still meet old gweilos who describe themselves, half-jokingly, with the embarrassing phrase “old China hand”. Never “immigrant”.

Locals, too, seem unable to regard resident minorities as fellow Hong Kongers. After my father died, one of his Chinese colleagues asked me when we would take his body back to India. It hadn’t occurred to her that his funeral would be held here, in the place where he lived and worked and raised his children for twenty-two years.

Assimilation wasn’t necessary when there was an array of professional jobs that only required English. That’s no longer the case. It may be unpalatable for senior foreign bankers to admit it, but they wouldn’t be hired by their own firms as entry-level tellers today. This scenario is unimaginable in most financial capitals but common here. Hong Kong’s bank tellers assist customers in Cantonese, Mandarin and English, and interpret documents in English and two written forms of Chinese. Foreign executives still get by on English alone, cocooned from Chinese customers by layers of homegrown multilingual middle management. Few believe, in the current political climate, that those career paths will exist for another generation. Like working-class minorities, these professionals wonder if this place—their adopted home—will be able to provide a good future for their children.

As for us… we did eventually manage to enrol our son in a Chinese kindergarten. He teaches us words. No bad language yet.