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Expats....Do you sometimes feel like you don't belong to anywhere?

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  1. #21

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    Quote Originally Posted by merryinmarch:
    hi , being an indian from bombay, i really miss all the good food, communicating in a language i understand, my friends, my flourishing career in mumbai, which has come to a standstill because of language issues and hk not being a media hub..i also feel the colour of my skin is a factor that makes me feel alienated and treated disrespectfully here. yes its sad...although i think the infrastructure is very good here, much much better than my home country, and the other indians here seem to force themselves to believe that its all ok, i cant really believe that in my heart and since im bad at false pretences, i completely empathize with you...
    Even as a westerner, I have seen that Indians and other ethnic groups face issues in Hong Kong which I don't solely because I'm white.

    I have a good friend who is an Indian in Australia, but he has a prestigious job and he speaks with an Aussie accent anyway. He doesn't face anywhere near the same stereotyping that I see in Hong Kong.

    Your post makes me feel a certain sadness and adds to the complexity of living in Hong Kong.

    Perhaps you can tell us more about your experience so we can get a better idea of what it's like to be a non-western expat here. But only to the extent you feel comfortable doing so, of course (The last thing I want to do is trigger unnecessarily any bitterness or anxiety).
    Last edited by John Doe Jr; 23-01-2011 at 08:34 PM.
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  2. #22

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    Quote Originally Posted by John Doe Jr:
    Yet, having lived a gypsy life ourselves, could we expect anything different from our daughter? And will she'll be happy and fulfilled living the same kind of life with so many transient relationships etc?

    Gone are the days (at least for us, it seems) when the farmer built a house on the farm for his son to live in with his family.

    Anyone else thinking through these issues?
    Yes, it's funny because I have this dumb idea in my head about buying a village house and my sons having a floor each and us being this solid family unit standing back to back taking on the world. The reality is that they probably won't want that.... It's interesting to me that while I think I wouldn't trade the experiences I've had in my life for a 'normal' one, I'm very concerned to provide as 'normal' an upbringing for my boys as possible!!

  3. #23

    thanks for your reply John,
    Im a girl in my thirties, presentable by indian standards, and yes, maybe im more sensitive to vibes people give out than most..well, vibes are just really personal experiences and there may or may not be any ground to them..as for the actual humiliations i had to face here, well, the worst of the lot was in TST when i was having a cup of tea in a small cafe and the bill came to 50 dollars!!!!!!!very politely (which might have not been the right approach now i think of it in retrospect), i asked the owner if he had an english menu or something anything that could show me on paper that a cup of tea was really 50 dollars in a small very small roadside cafe..well, his reply completely shocked me to say the least ..he said, in these very words:' fuck you, this is MY pahlah(parlour)'...i guess he thought i was challenging him or something..i have never ever ever faced this kind of rude behaviour in india..i guess being in tst and with all the indians working there, he feels generally threatened.. anyway i was so humiliated, i called the police to report verbal abuse to regain some sense of dignity back.. no i did not say fuck you to him..i did not want to stoop to that level. but i had to DO something..the police made him say sorry to me which he did in the most unsorry way possible...he was smoking and looking elsewhere.. refused to look at me the entire time and kept LAUGHING?!i asked him if he had spoken like that to me because im an indian, he kept smiling in this bizzare way looking somewhere else and said '' because i have low EQ'..i guess he was being sarcastic..anyway the police were very keen to restore yin yang balance and were very vocal to me about it not being racial discrimination...well, one can only hope so. The police i guess told him not to charge more than 20 dollars but i gave him fifty anyway and walked away with a bit of my dignity still intact..
    This is my story, and im moderately well off, wear decent well tailored clothes, though i like not to flash brands arounds...I just feel extremely sorry for the poor filipina helpers who cant afford to look like they cannot be treated anyhow..
    yes and i do guess as a white man you must be unaware of this facet in hk, as whenever i have spoken about this to my white friends, they are all quite shocked and surprized because according to them they are treated with quite a bit of respect in the city..well, many worlds in one...

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  4. #24

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    Quote Originally Posted by merryinmarch:
    thanks for your reply John,
    Im a girl in my thirties, presentable by indian standards, and yes, maybe im more sensitive to vibes people give out than most..well, vibes are just really personal experiences and there may or may not be any ground to them..as for the actual humiliations i had to face here, well, the worst of the lot was in TST when i was having a cup of tea in a small cafe and the bill came to 50 dollars!!!!!!!very politely (which might have not been the right approach now i think of it in retrospect), i asked the owner if he had an english menu or something anything that could show me on paper that a cup of tea was really 50 dollars in a small very small roadside cafe..well, his reply completely shocked me to say the least ..he said, in these very words:' fuck you, this is MY pahlah(parlour)'...i guess he thought i was challenging him or something..i have never ever ever faced this kind of rude behaviour in india..i guess being in tst and with all the indians working there, he feels generally threatened.. anyway i was so humiliated, i called the police to report verbal abuse to regain some sense of dignity back.. no i did not say fuck you to him..i did not want to stoop to that level. but i had to DO something..the police made him say sorry to me which he did in the most unsorry way possible...he was smoking and looking elsewhere.. refused to look at me the entire time and kept LAUGHING?!i asked him if he had spoken like that to me because im an indian, he kept smiling in this bizzare way looking somewhere else and said '' because i have low EQ'..i guess he was being sarcastic..anyway the police were very keen to restore yin yang balance and were very vocal to me about it not being racial discrimination...well, one can only hope so. The police i guess told him not to charge more than 20 dollars but i gave him fifty anyway and walked away with a bit of my dignity still intact..
    This is my story, and im moderately well off, wear decent well tailored clothes, though i like not to flash brands arounds...I just feel extremely sorry for the poor filipina helpers who cant afford to look like they cannot be treated anyhow..
    yes and i do guess as a white man you must be unaware of this facet in hk, as whenever i have spoken about this to my white friends, they are all quite shocked and surprized because according to them they are treated with quite a bit of respect in the city..well, many worlds in one...
    This to me looks more like a moron that anyhting else.

    Forget about it and lets face it, there are rude ppl everywhere, Mumbai is not exempted :-)

    But yes I agree that to a certain extend being indian in HK might be more difficult than being caucasian.

  5. #25

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    Quote Originally Posted by merryinmarch:
    thanks for your reply John,
    Im a girl in my thirties, presentable by indian standards, and yes, maybe im more sensitive to vibes people give out than most..well, vibes are just really personal experiences and there may or may not be any ground to them..as for the actual humiliations i had to face here, well, the worst of the lot was in TST when i was having a cup of tea in a small cafe and the bill came to 50 dollars!!!!!!!very politely (which might have not been the right approach now i think of it in retrospect), i asked the owner if he had an english menu or something anything that could show me on paper that a cup of tea was really 50 dollars in a small very small roadside cafe..well, his reply completely shocked me to say the least ..he said, in these very words:' fuck you, this is MY pahlah(parlour)'...i guess he thought i was challenging him or something..i have never ever ever faced this kind of rude behaviour in india..i guess being in tst and with all the indians working there, he feels generally threatened.. anyway i was so humiliated, i called the police to report verbal abuse to regain some sense of dignity back.. no i did not say fuck you to him..i did not want to stoop to that level. but i had to DO something..the police made him say sorry to me which he did in the most unsorry way possible...he was smoking and looking elsewhere.. refused to look at me the entire time and kept LAUGHING?!i asked him if he had spoken like that to me because im an indian, he kept smiling in this bizzare way looking somewhere else and said '' because i have low EQ'..i guess he was being sarcastic..anyway the police were very keen to restore yin yang balance and were very vocal to me about it not being racial discrimination...well, one can only hope so. The police i guess told him not to charge more than 20 dollars but i gave him fifty anyway and walked away with a bit of my dignity still intact..
    This is my story, and im moderately well off, wear decent well tailored clothes, though i like not to flash brands arounds...I just feel extremely sorry for the poor filipina helpers who cant afford to look like they cannot be treated anyhow..
    yes and i do guess as a white man you must be unaware of this facet in hk, as whenever i have spoken about this to my white friends, they are all quite shocked and surprized because according to them they are treated with quite a bit of respect in the city..well, many worlds in one...
    Through Mrs Doe, who is Chinese and lived in Australia for 20 years, I have come to a certain (though admittedly limited) understanding of racial and gender discrimination. Before we got married, I had no idea what discrimination was - and then because I was married to an Asian I received the kind of treatment from my fellow countrymen you would expect. I began to experience discrimination first hand. Not as directly and not as devastatingly as Mrs Doe did, but still in a way I never knew existed before.

    When I hear your story I automatically think of my 18-year-old daughter who is at this very moment working in a restaurant in Causeway Bay as a waitress. She doesn't need the money, but she was excited to get her first work experience. She is now overjoyed she'll be finishing up this week!

    But here's the thing. Miss Doe is a mix of Caucasian and Chinese, but she is not strongly one or the other in appearance. Customers routinely ask her what her first language is (she works in a high-class Japanese restaurant, so she has to deal with customers speaking English, Cantonese, Mandarin and Japanese) and no-one looks down on her because she looks, on balance, probably more western than Asian (which she personally finds distressing because she has always wanted to look more like Mrs Doe than me!). Before people know her as a person, she is given the benefit of the doubt and at least initially treated with greater respect than her workmates.

    Your experience in the cafe in TST is distressing to read because you have described in the owner of the cafe the same kind of person who perpetuates ethnic conflict around the world. He may consider himself superior because he is in his home city, but of course many Hong Kong people are themselves immigrants from other places who had a tough time fitting in albeit sometimes many generations ago. This type of irony is most starkly demonstrated in Australia where after just a couple of generations, some "locals" become eager and indiscriminate attackers of any foreigners who look different, but who are simply trying to make a home for themselves and their families in a strange land. The fact that the Australian Aborigines are the closest to real locals gets overlooked, as does their treatment as second-class citizens even to this day.

    I truly hope you can continue to demonstrate the same courage and dignity you were able to find within yourself on that day in TST. The police have their own agenda, of course, and perhaps their treatment of you made you feel even more alone and abandoned. Unfortunately, people behave like they do for reasons we can rarely fully understand. But you seem to have maintained a balanced view and I hope you can keep up your positive approach to living in Hong Kong.

    Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences. I'm sure we can learn a great deal more from you and your take on how to make the most of life here.
    Last edited by John Doe Jr; 24-01-2011 at 03:04 PM.

  6. #26

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    Quote Originally Posted by John Doe Jr:
    I began to experience discrimination first hand. Not as directly and not as devastatingly as Mrs Doe did, but still in a way I never knew existed before.
    As a white man I have experienced discrimination first hand. I worked in logistics in Denmark and quite oftendrove forklift trucks and wore overalls and boots. Danes always assumed I was Polish and they treat you like a piece of shit, then, suddenly they realise you are British, wow, you are like a God, but why are you working with your hands?? In Denmark it works like this - The Danes are in the office and rarely come to the factory/warehouse floor. The Turks, who were there before the Poles, are the foremen and control the shifts, the Poles are the bottom rung of the ladder - it was a real eye opener to see how it is to be treated like an idiot purely because of your supposed ethnicity. I can only imagine how humiliating and deperate it must be to be treated like this on a daily basis.

  7. #27

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    I think this is a fascinating thread.

    I think the answer is a function of how long you have been an expat to be honest - and this clearly comes out of some of the answers above.

    When you first leave "home", then the expat lifestyle is new. You can love it, or you can hate it, but it's clearly "here" vs "home". Over time, and with multiple moves (I've lived in 5 different countries now), the lines start to blurr and you start to forget where "home" is..... this home or the last home or the original one???? You go back to the original "home" only to realise it's now a foreign country; or you visit the pub you used to drink at only to realise that the folks there are still having the same conversation about the local football team they were having when you left and that nothing has changed for them, but for you, EVERYTHING has changed. Living in different countries broadens the mind and makes you notice things like culture, discrimination, food, everything really. I feel richer for the experience but when I talk these days to non-expats, they don't really understand or, worse, are not interested in the diversity of the world and the people in it!

    In some ways I empathise with Skyhooks frustation with expats who only moan about the countries they come to live in. However, I think this ignores two fundamental points. Firstly, if these expats are new to the country, it forgets entirely how strange and hard it can be to move to a new culture. So much of our views of the world are "hard-coded" by the environment we are brought up in. Being bumped in the street, for example, is extremely "rude" if it happens at "home" for me, but here it's not, but it still FEELS like somebody is being rude ... ditto many other things that "feel" like people are being rude even if they are not - it's really hard to not feel this way if you've 18+ years of hard-wiring of one's brain to contend with!
    But secondly (to Skyhook's point) ... it also seems to ignore the fact that people moan about places whereever they are! In pub in the UK conversations would be moaning about the weather/the manager of the local football team/the weather/the local goverment/the weather/whichever political party is in power /the weather ..... and so on.... in Australia they might be moaning about taxes/whichever political party is in power/taxes/flies/the manager of the local Aussie rules team/taxes ... and so on. So why do you expect people not to moan about the local issues here? the weather, the pollution, etc etc ? Seems rather odd!

    On balance - there is no one typical "expat" and no typical expat experience. My experience and how I feel now is different from 3 years ago and will be different in another few years. If you feel alienated today, you may feel quite happy in a little while when you have settled in!

    I think the one thing we might all have in common though is that we no longer have as much in common with the people we left behind as we do with each other

    Last edited by MovingIn07; 24-01-2011 at 07:50 PM.

  8. #28

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    Quote Originally Posted by MovingIn07:
    ... I think the one thing we might all have in common though is that we no longer have as much in common with the people we left behind as we do with each other
    Great observation (thumbs up from Mrs Doe as well). And now I'm thinking, Yeah, how many of the people "back home" could really contribute much worth reading to this thread? Or to the thousands of other threads on this site which pretty much cover/encapsulate a huge chunk of our shared experience as expats ...
    Last edited by John Doe Jr; 24-01-2011 at 08:42 PM.

  9. #29

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    Quote Originally Posted by MovingIn07:
    On balance - there is no one typical "expat" and no typical expat experience. My experience and how I feel now is different from 3 years ago and will be different in another few years. If you feel alienated today, you may feel quite happy in a little while when you have settled in!
    Absolutely - give it a while more.
    We change, over time.

    And if your first impressions of this place or its people (bearing in mind there's no one typical 'local') happen NOT to be rosy, to put it mildly, don't let these one or two unpleasant experiences or interactions dampen your enthusiasm for exploration... Give it another go, and another. Plus time.

  10. #30

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    Quote Originally Posted by becky :):
    Do you feel like that sometimes?
    Like you have lost track of what's happening at home, time difference prevents you to stay in contact with friends all the time, then you are all occupied by different things, while you still havn't fully integrated into this new community.
    You don't know what's happening at your home country, and you don't know what's happening here.

    (This may sound a little childish? lol)

    Do you ever get homesick?
    Becky - Just realised from your profile that you're an 18-year-old HK girl now studying in England, probably at uni, and probably your first time living away so far from 'home'. Your "homesickness" is all the more understandable. But as said, give it more time, and give it a go, get out and 'interact'... explore a little. You'll be fine

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