First off, a little backgrounder - my parents were both born and raised in the New Territories, Hong Kong and immigrated first to the UK as teenagers, and then to Canada as adults with two kids in tow. I was born in Canada and raised in a small town outside of Vancouver, BC. Nearly 40 years after leaving their home and spending a lifetime raising their kids on foreign soil, my parents moved back to Hong Kong and now reside in the very home where my father was raised.
My first time in Hong Kong was for the funeral of my maternal grandfather, when I was nine years old. It was a blur - I have vague memories of the funeral, meeting an overwhelming number of people I didn’t know but who knew me, and being amazed at the sight of banana trees in front yards and turtles in the rivers.
The next time I set foot in Hong Kong, I was twenty-five years old. At that time, I had been living and working in a First Nations community. The connection of First Nations people to the land they've lived on for thousands and thousands of year is something I had heard about and learned about for many years. It is something I understood on an intellectual level, but not on a visceral, emotional or personal level until that second trip to Hong Kong.
My dad came alive during that visit, in a way I had never seen him in Canada. He took me hiking and biking, showing me all the places he spent time as a child and places of significance for our family ancestry. He showed me a plaque that commemorated the mother and her three sons that came from China to settle in Hong Kong - in the very village where my father still resides - over four hundred years ago, of whom I am a direct descendant. This moved something in me deeply and profoundly - I am a first-generation Canadian; I had never remotely felt a connection to the land, and had been told directly and indirectly my whole life that I don’t truly belong there. Well, I finally found where I would truly belong… sort of.
Despite feeling that connection to the land and little piece of history in Hong Kong, I certainly didn’t belong there, either. I had only been there twice before, I barely knew the language and I certainly couldn’t handle the crowds or summer heat! But this trip helped me uncover an important piece of myself that I attribute as the start of my journey to connect to my Chinese culture. It made me feel a little more whole in my identity. It showed me that I do have deep roots and a connection to past generations somewhere out there - and even though I don’t feel the roots I have in Canada, they are there - they’re just still growing and establishing themselves.
Comments