Theresa Cunanan’s Filipino father moved to Hong Kong in the early 1960s to cook at a nightclub, while her Filipino mother arrived at a similar time to work as a hairdresser. It was here that they met, going on to build a life and home together in Hong Kong and giving birth to their daughter, Theresa, who would become a secondary school teacher before going on to complete a PhD in Education and become associate programme director at Hong Kong Baptist University.

My life has been serendipitous; everything is by chance and luck. At the age of four, I wasn’t going to go to school because my mother didn’t know how to enrol me. She didn’t have a network. One day, she was combing this woman’s hair and she was quiet. The woman asked her what was wrong, and my mum said she was worried because her daughter was four years old and she knew she should be going to school. The woman was the principal of the Portuguese Community School, Escola Camões, in Tsim Sha Tsui. And that was it—the following week I was in.

My first biggest hurdle was education. Even now, Hong Kong doesn’t really cater to the needs of the non-Chinese, because if we could read and write Chinese, a lot more career opportunities would be open to us. I didn’t do Chinese in primary school—the ethnic minorities were lumped together to study Portuguese while the Chinese kids learned Chinese. And then later, while my classmates studied Chinese, I studied French with the other brown kids.

When we were ready to move to secondary school, my grades were good, so I was sent to St Mary’s Canossian College, an elite convent school where I was educated by nuns, but I cried because all my non-Chinese friends were sent to another school. I loved drama and literature, but I sucked at maths, and in order to move onto sixth form, you had to pass English or Chinese and maths. I flunked two years in a row and was kicked out. I thought it was the end of the world. My classmate’s dad was so angry for me that he made some phone calls and talked to an education officer who could see that I wanted to study but just struggled with maths. She arranged an interview for me at Diocesan Girls’ School (DGS), and that changed my life.

I was known in school as a troublemaker. I think it was a defence mechanism from being brown and the minority. DGS was for the rich and famous and I was this brown girl whose parents only rented a room. I was amongst the elite and I didn’t even have money to buy a pair of black shoes for school. Sometimes I would take detours home because I was too embarrassed to let my classmates see where I lived. I thought that the best way to be part of the group was to be funny all the time.

Discrimination came out in a very indirect way, but you felt it all the time. I would go to the market and we would get cheated even though I spoke Cantonese. When we would rent a flat, they would think twice before letting us lease the place. In the ‘80s, a lot of domestic helpers started coming to Hong Kong as people would hire help at home, and people would look at me or my mum and make assumptions. I remember trying to find a job teaching English because I needed pocket money and the guy just took one look at me, and said, ‘No, you are not white’.

If you want discrimination stories it should be those of my parents. I remember yelling at my father’s boss because my dad and people at the restaurant where he worked were asked to resign just before they were due their five-year long-service payment. I told my dad not to sign that paper. They mocked him and asked why he was listening to his daughter when the boss had promised to rehire him. In the end, he was the only one who received his long-service payment. My mum was accused of stealing. She knew she was innocent, and so called the police herself, who, to everyone’s shock showed up and discovered the manager was the one who had stolen the money.

It’s not easy being brown in Hong Kong. I applied to the Chinese University of Hong Kong and I was rejected because of my ethnicity. I applied to the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts as I had dreams of becoming an actor, but I got rejected because the scripts were in Chinese. I applied to Baptist University when I wanted to be a journalist, but I got rejected because I can’t write Chinese and the training was in Chinese. Hong Kong University was my one and only choice and I had to fight really hard to get there.

My principal at Diocesan Girls' School truly impacted my life. After I had left, she offered me a job teaching literature back at DGS. I only had a Bachelor’s degree and I questioned how I would teach. She told me to just come back for a year; I ended up staying for ten.

Nobody asks to be poor, but it happens when you have to survive in a place where first of all you need a job, but if you don’t have the skills or the education you can’t get hired. Maybe that’s why subconsciously I just wanted to study, study, study. When I first got my current job, I decided to do a doctorate and write on what I grew up understanding—segregation and ethnic minority education in Hong Kong. After 1997, the medium of instruction was changed to Chinese and everybody had to take the Chinese exam to enter tertiary education. It destroyed the lives of many non-Chinese kids who go to local schools, and became the real ceiling. It’s much harder when no one at home reads or writes Chinese and the support is still not enough, so a lot of kids don’t have the opportunity to move upwards.

When I raised my kids, I purposefully put them in local Chinese school. It’s difficult at the beginning, but I didn’t care if they were bottom of the class, so long as they could read and write Chinese. It’s a life skill, especially if they are going to work in Hong Kong.

I think discrimination is in every culture, you just have to get over it. So, my advice is you can’t give up; you just can’t. And seek help to advance. I think things will fall into place and you will meet the right people. I think people will pass it on.

Born in India and brought to Hong Kong when she was three months old, Karishma Samtani was educated in Hong Kong’s local school system before choosing to specialise in young talent development to help other minorities like herself with building their careers. Having worked at Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, she currently looks after the early careers global development programme at Standard Chartered Bank in Hong Kong.

I’m very lucky to have a mother who was so persistent. I studied at St. Mary’s Canossian College in Hong Kong, which is one of the top English-speaking schools in Hong Kong, but it’s not an easy feat to get into this school because they have a quota for ethnic minorities, and by the time I applied it had already been met. I remember sitting outside the school with my mother every morning just in case someone decided to let us in for an interview. Then, we happened to meet a distant relative, mentioned our situation and got an interview two weeks before school started. I remember the principal was surprised at my grades, which were good, and it shows that there’s bias from the ground up—even if your grades are good, once the quota has been met that’s potentially it.

I came from a household of domestic violence. My father was often under the influence of alcohol and physically abused my mother, my siblings and I. My mother was not educated and felt that because she didn’t have an education, she couldn’t stand up to him. For her, the biggest aspiration was that her children get the best education that she could provide with the limited resources she had. When I started failing while at St Mary’s, one teacher told my mother, ‘I don’t know what your daughter is doing here, she has no future’, and my mother broke down. That incident was a turning point for me. I wanted to show her that she was not going to be the one to define who I was and what I wanted to be.

I always wanted to go down the route of helping young adults, particularly those who come from a similar background to myself—not just ethnic minorities but from low-income, marginalised families too, because I feel they also don’t get privilege in this city. And I’m very happy to say that’s where I am. I work with a lot of young adults through universities and non-profits to help them figure out what they want to do. I want to make a difference in as many people’s lives as possible. To me, that is success.

A lot of people have helped me professionally and interestingly they’ve all been women. Though that’s not to say that I have not met women who have made it difficult—I think the rationale is, ‘We’ve had it tough, so you should have it tough’. When I was at Credit Suisse, I was part of the women’s network, and one year I managed their flagship event. I even wrote the opening speech for one of our co-chairs, who was also my mentor. She came to me just before the event and said, ‘Since you’ve organised the whole event to the extent of writing my opening speech, I want you to give it’. I was panicking and I was so nervous. But I did it. And that was the second turning point in my career.

I think one of the biggest challenges for ethnic minorities in Hong Kong is that they don’t speak the local language, unless they’ve gone to a local Chinese-medium school, but then they often don’t speak good English. We studied French at school and were never given the option to even try to study Mandarin. And I think that’s where the biggest disadvantage comes from. I know the government is trying to do something to help with this side of education. Providing the right kind of support is key. And I think if that could be changed it opens a huge door for a lot to change.

My advice for other ethnic minorities is that we are in Hong Kong and it is not only the responsibility of the government and locals to embrace diversity. It is equally our responsibility to embrace the local language, culture, food, etc. So, whilst we know that our schooling system doesn’t support us in learning the language, I would ask ethnic minorities to take the initiative to show interest in learning the language and have curiosity to understand the culture, values and interests. Professionally, it may not be a requirement for a job, however it helps build rapport with colleagues and that can in turn help one settle well in the workplace. Also, professionally, take the initiative and put up your hand for projects above and beyond your day job. This allows you a platform to showcase your ability and provides you with opportunities to come out of your comfort zone to learn. There are multiple benefits to this: you have a steep learning curve; you develop new skills; you build a solid network; and you get exposure to leaders outside of your direct manager.

Born and raised in Hong Kong, and part of the city’s Sindhi community, Shalini Mahtani has long been involved in corporate social responsibility and DEI and is a strong proponent of social justice. She is the founder of non-profit The Zubin Foundation, which is dedicated to improving the lives of Hong Kong’s ethnic minorities.

I realised very young that I was not like other children in my primary school—they were all white and as a brown child growing up in colonial Hong Kong, there was a very clear distinction. If you weren’t white, you were pretty much ignored, and I don’t think I even ever questioned that until year nine when I had a white South African teacher who talked about Apartheid and how one group of people were treated differently because of the colour of their skin. These were things I had felt, but had never put names to.

I grew up in a family where my brother was allowed to do things that I wasn’t. My only purpose in life, according to my parents, was to get married. It was never about studying hard and being happy. I wasn’t allowed to go to university, and I wanted to go to university more than anything to escape this fate of marriage. I wanted to read law. I wanted to push for social justice. But I wasn’t allowed to read law, because it was thought that I would be argumentative and too intelligent, and what decent Indian man would marry me? One of the reasons I did go to university was because my deputy headmaster who was also my economics teacher, said to my parents, 'If you don’t send her, I will'. So, I ended up reading economics at the London School of Economics. I paved the way. Every cousin I have on both my dad’s side and my mum’s side went to university after me.

I came back to Hong Kong after studying and I worked in one of the biggest accountancy firms, and racism was rife. We talk about big global firms and global values, but in 1993, that was not the case. I came from a liberal university, and I couldn’t believe I wasn’t allowed to wear trousers. If I had worked for the same firm in London, I could have. And I had a senior manager tell me up front that I didn’t have a future—they said, ‘There’s a Chinese camp and a white camp and you are neither’. So, I qualified as an accountant and I left. I went into banking because I had ultimately wanted to live in India, and the bank said there would be opportunities. Then I realised that those opportunities didn’t apply. I left banking once I felt I had enough savings to buy a small house in the UK—that was my financial goal. I also met my long-term boyfriend who then proposed. I said yes, and ended up staying in Hong Kong and rethinking what I really wanted to do.

I decided I wanted to work in diversity and inclusion, so I set up an NGO, Community Business to work with large companies around corporate social responsibility. I also wrote reports on women on boards for the Hang Seng Index and the Bombay Stock Exchange.

In 2009, I lost my son Zubin, who was the love of my life. He died from medical negligence. Several years later I set up The Zubin Foundation to work with those who suffer, because pain can be unbearable and pain is extraordinarily lonely. I wanted to look at a community that was suffering and I chose Hong Kong’s ethnic minorities. I am an ethnic minority myself. I have faced immense discrimination on the grounds of my race at various points in my career and in my personal life as a woman and as a minority, but I didn’t have financial hardship and I wanted to help those who had it much harder. So, I set up The Zubin Foundation to improve the lives of Hong Kong’s ethnic minorities by reducing their suffering and providing them with opportunities.

When I was growing up the discrimination at school was not overt. It was more just exclusion. I think in public schools here today, the discrimination is overt. People are laughed at because they wear a hijab or because of the food they bring in. They sit on the trains or buses and people won’t sit next to them or will cover their noses. There are similarities [between then and now] because everyone who has experienced racism has been excluded and been made to feel inferior, but the way it manifests is different.

There have been huge changes in the Sindhi community. I would say more girls than boys go to university now. It’s not even questioned. What still remains a question for these women is the end destination, which is still marriage. The end goal is not being educated so that you are financially independent and can choose the life that works for you and makes you happy.

I think one of the biggest things we can do is give girls visibility. Often when we think of Hong Kong, we think of two profiles—the 96 percent of Hong Kong who are Chinese, and the remaining 4 percent we think of Caucasian expats. But we don’t think of the other part of that 4 percent—people who were born and raised here but are not ethnically Chinese and are not talked about. We need to give this group visibility.

My advice to ethnic minority girls is to find peace in yourself, and to push for things that are important to you, but in a way where you can bring others on the ride with you. Working with people is so much more effective than working alone. Bring your family on that journey with you, point out role models in the community that have done what you want, reach out to mentors from the community to help guide you. Today that is very possible because there are South Asian women who are older and who would be happy to help. It’s really important to do what you want to do, and you don’t need to do that with all guns blazing. I wanted to help women and the marginalised. I did not read law, but I am helping women and the marginalised, so I think life takes you to where you need to be if you are true to yourself and not second guessing what you want. Most women know what they want, but are too scared to go out and get it.

NOW READ

Respect is essential to changing gender roles and representation in India

Kay McArdle and Manisha Wijesinghe discuss the challenges and rewards of working in the non-profit space

Equality and merit are not as fair as they seem; it’s essential that we focus on equity