lørdag 20. november 2021

Yupina Ng: Why I left Hong Kong

It was in the early 1970s, on the eve of the Mid-Autumn Festival, when my father, without telling his family and friends, fled his birthplace in China by sneaking onto an overnight cargo train transporting crates of pears to the then-British colony of Hong Kong.

When he heard the songs of Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng, whose music was at the time banned in China, being played on board the train, he realised he had arrived in Hong Kong. He jumped off the moving train somewhere in the countryside, made his way to the city centre, and took advantage of the touch-base policy rolled out by the colonial government that allowed undocumented immigrants from China to remain in Hong Kong if they managed to dodge security measures in the countryside to reach urban areas. He thought he had finally escaped the clutches of the repressive Chinese Communist Party for good and was free to build a new life for himself in one of the most thriving economies in Asia.