Recently, the city I grew up in has become a bit disorderly. I often find myself trapped indoors on Sundays and always checking my phone for a message from my mother warning me about any sort of danger that may arise. It makes me sad to see the place I call home become so foreign and cold, a place about freedom, self-expression and being proud of the ever growing diversity of ethnicities, beliefs and cultures become warped to house violence. My parents have discussed contingency plans with me, about moving, about going to school in another country, about leaving Hong Kong. It hurt to know that they were being serious, that if things got out of hand I could be sent on a plane to some boarding school hundreds of kilometres away.
It got me thinking, could I ever call somewhere else home?
I often get asked about my last name and its origins. It doesn’t resemble the Mandarin or Cantonese pronunciation, which was the norm for students at my school. I never thought into it too much, but curiosity got the better of my negligence. My grandfather had never really left China until he got an opportunity to work in Vietnam, bringing my grandmother with him. Due to French colonisation, Vietnam uses a variation of the Latin Alphabet, which prompted my family to adopt a name spelt in Latin characters. Tạ, anglicised simply as Ta, was how our last name “謝” was translated, and has been passed down to me and a few cousins of mine. My father grew up in Ho Chi Minh City, before eventually fleeing to Hong Kong at the age of around 10 when the Fall of Saigon occurred.
I went to visit Ho Chi Minh City a few years back. Visiting the city with my now 50 year old father was simply surreal, as he recalled the high ceilings of his former home, reminiscing with the few members of family that still live there today. It felt strange knowing that he had a home before the small apartment in Honghum that my grandmother used to live in, that I had become accustomed to. His love for Vietnamese culture is still strong, having a large influence on both our lives, and it will live on in my last name. Is culture something that will always stay, frozen as part of my identity? Would I be burdened by messages from friends and viral videos circulating on the internet, feeling guilty for not being there?
My mother on the other hand was raised in Ghana, West Africa. Her father (my other grandfather) was working there at the time. She often told me stories about living there, how she would gather water from a well, marvelling at the large ant hills that towered before her. She spent a relatively small but not insignificant portion of her life there. Then, at 12 years old, she was sent to England to study at a boarding school. Her life was completely transformed, living away from home in a country she had never been to, trying to speak a language she only heard seldomly.
I can’t imagine spending 17 years studying aboard, only reaching family through letters that would take days to be sent. However, my mother adopted to the circumstances and to the culture rather well. There was a reason she stayed behind to study law in England. There’s a reason why she talks in RP, that she enjoys a cup of tea and biscuits for a snack. She was able to adapt and become part of the community that once felt so strange and different, but in the process, she lost her Ghanaian Accent, forgot about traditions and details that at the time used to guide her life. Is culture be lost? Meant to be fluid and ever changing? Could I leave Hong Kong never to hear of it again? Would I feel free from the knowledge that plants fear in me everyday?
I think that, no matter what happens to me, to this beautiful city, I will never forget what it means to be from Hong Kong, what it means to live here in a this fabled hodgepodge of east and west. But, sometimes I do wish that things will get better, so when I get to say “Hong Kong” in reply to a seemingly simple question, I can get to feel a sense of pride again.
The Big Duck 