I don't know if the OP is looking for individual stories or rather trends, but in recent years more and more Chinese Canadians (those originally from Hong Kong).
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Witnessing her children stuck between two cultures must have been frustrating for my mother, too. She had only her own childhood experience to draw from. Growing up in poverty, she had adopted an eat-or-be-eaten attitude as the second eldest of six siblings.
Immigration in reverse
The chaotic city life and incredible academic, societal, and economic pressures of Hong Kong were what eventually pushed my mom out of the city. Between the time my mom left in and the handover of Hong Kong from the British to the Chinese in , a slew of Hongkongers fled to the west. I went to high school in a city that was popular with recent Hong Kong immigrants and their children, who became my classmates.
When I registered for university and renewed my passport, I omitted my Chinese middle name on the application forms, thinking it might make me seem less Chinese and more Canadian. In my third year of university, I studied abroad in Copenhagen and traveled through Europe. I visited parts of the world where the concepts of immigration and visible minorities were virtually unheard of. They fawned over my foreign appearance, a rarity in eastern Europe. Growing up with my mother , and among other Chinese immigrants, I never once imagined that I might one day live in Hong Kong.
But then I graduated from university on the brink of a recession with no job prospects at home.
The Reverse Immigrant by Alfred Zappala
Hong Kong was a natural destination. I easily found work with an English teaching agency, and was trained with 60 other expatriates, who were mostly white and from the United Kingdom. Skills that I had snubbed in my adolescence now gave me an edge over the typical new arrival to the city. Over heavily accented Cantonese, I negotiated with my landlord for cheaper rent. I enjoyed blending in with the crowd, slipping into clothing stores and shopping for groceries unnoticed, until my accented Cantonese outed me as a foreigner.
See a Problem?
While my new colleagues fumbled with their chopsticks at group lunches, skeptically eyeing the steaming bamboo baskets of curried cuttlefish, shrimp dumplings, and pillowy white buns with mystery fillings, I found comfort in these dishes that were more familiar to me than the strangers I was seated with.
Eventually, these strangers did become my friends. But over time, as my social networks expanded past the English teachers I first arrived with, I met more and more expatriates like myself — the children of Hong Kong immigrants who were born, raised, and educated in the West, but had settled in Hong Kong for work.
No one has tracked the number of Western-born people of Chinese descent living in Hong Kong, but data from a analysis by Pacific Prime Hong Kong suggests that there are roughly , expatriates living in Hong Kong — a big jump from the , expatriates living there in We navigate the city as in-betweeners, with our varying knowledge of the local customs and norms, the language and food. Yet we retain our Western values, among them a sense of individuality and freedom that would be considered a rebellious trait in a traditional family-centric Hongkonger.
Working as an English teacher, I found that my in-between status hindered rather than helped. I feigned confusion and fought the urge to reply back in Cantonese. At the kindergarten where I worked, I was hired to teach these young students English. But through the playground games and classroom conversations I overheard, the students inadvertently helped me improve my second language, too. In between fits of laughter, she helped me translate the song and understand the lyrics.
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Out of seven English teachers, there were two other Chinese teachers like me at the kindergarten. Bovitz, who has been responsible for hiring native English teachers for the past decade, told me that she gets plenty of resumes from Western-born Chinese applicants — more so in the past few years. After completing my teaching contract at the kindergarten, I was eager for a change but was not yet ready to leave Hong Kong.
Like me, Chan knew very little about Hong Kong, having visited only once before she moved. Her parents were children when they immigrated to Canada, and they still live in Toronto, as my mother does. For Chan, being not-quite-local but not-quite-foreign has been a positive experience: And even easier as a foreigner who speaks Chinese.
Though Iris Lam was born in Hong Kong, she immigrated to Canada with her family in the late s when she was just a small child.
The Reverse Immigrant
Notwithstanding the demagoguery of Donald Trump and some of his GOP rivals, the number of illegal immigrants in this country, which has declined each year since , is now at its lowest level since , and the percentage of undocumented immigrants likewise is at its lowest point since the turn of the century. A report from the Pew Research Center shows a decline of nearly a million unauthorized immigrants, to An even more recent survey , from the Center for Migration Studies, a New York think tank, indicates that the number of illegal immigrants has now fallen to In fact, according to Pew , for the first time since the s, Mexican migrants have been leaving the United States at a greater rate than they have entered.
Those numbers underscore what demographers have known for several years: Most of those who have left have done so of their own accord; comparatively few were deported. Trump has leveraged fact-free rhetoric for political advantage is not news.
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Still, it is noteworthy that so much of the GOP-primary oxygen, at least until the terrorist attacks in Paris, was consumed by alarmist rhetoric about border security, when in fact the border is more tightly patrolled than ever, and apprehensions at the southwestern border, a rough measure of illegal crossings, have been cut by about two-thirds since Sept. The result, according to Pew , is that in the five years ending in , more than 1 million Mexicans including , children born in the United States with dual citizenship returned from the United States to live in Mexico, while , Mexicans entered the United States, many or most of them illegally.
Republican rhetoric on immigration has not caught up to those numbers, nor to the reality that the U. An estimate 7 million-plus undocumented immigrants, most of them Mexicans, are employed in this country. At some point, Republicans will need to grapple with that reality.