Let me just clarify a couple of points. It's not that we don't want to learn the language. It's mainly my wife, and I think she's mainly just worried she won't be able to do it, so she's reluctant to try. If you recall, one of my biggest reasons for wanting to relocate to HK is so the kids would learn Chinese, which I think is going to be a really big deal as they get older. Someone mentioned Spanish; no offense to any Spanish speakers, but I see a lot less serious commercial utility in that, even living in the US, than Canto and/or Mandarin.
It's also not that we want to live in an expat enclave long-term, I just thought it might lessen the cultural shock if we lived in a place with a lot of other Westerners and that had some familiar Western brands and shops. There's not much point in trying to give my kids the cultural experience of a place like HK if we just cloister up with the Americans, so it's not a long-term plan.
Regarding schools, I may be interested in just seeing if there's an option to homeschool. I read an article on that which says that while the HK government doesn't wish to encourage it by creating an official process for registering for homeschooling, they usually don't have a problem with expats doing it. I don't want my kids to have 2+ hours of homework every day and I don't want them to go to an English-speaking school with only Western expat peers and minimal exposure to Cantonese.
I do understand now that it's going to take 3-4x more money to live in HK than we spend in the US. To be fair, I think this is more just about population density than anything else, because HK looks about the same cost of living as New York City, which is just to say there are equally expensive areas in the US. I will consider the situation and decide whether it's worth the expense. I'm already well-paid in the US and it seems like it'd be difficult to get a job that pays more in HK, especially with the added constraint that visa sponsorship would probably be necessary. Most job listings seem to require pre-existing fluency in both English and Cantonese, and many also list Mandarin.
I'm somewhat open to considering Shenzhen but I'm worried about it being China China. I'm a lot less comfortable with that. I haven't done much research into that option, tbh.