AFRICAN COMMUNITY in HONG KONG
School of English
University of Hong Kong
I. Workplace
According to our interviewee Ato, “most of the Africans in Hong Kong are doing their businesses in Tsim Sha Tsui in the Chongking Mansions” and their major businesses are “clothing and food.” Indeed, as we walked through the bustling streets in Tsim Sha Tsui, there are many Africans on the streets. Dr. Adams Bodomo – an author who studies the recent Africa-China relations regarding the socio-economic aspects, have done extensive research on the African community in the Chongking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong. Out of the 51 questionnaires that he distributed to the Africans in the mansion, “55 percent” are Africans and “45 percent” are non-Africans. “More than half the population (almost 60 percent) indicated that they were businessmen, traders (16 percent), and salesman (12 percent)” – it is evident that Chungking Mansions is a commercial community for the Africans (Bodomo, 2007, p.374).
Language Barriers
II. Intermarriage
Among our five interviewees, only Joe and Elero have married Chinese, Hong Kong woman and engaged in intermarriage.
Joe has been married to his wife, Angel for two and half years. His wife is born and raised in Hong Kong. They will go to family gatherings regularly where Joe sits together at the same table with Angel’s family, who are all local Hong Kong people.
In contrast to his encounter at his workplace, where he finds little difficulty in communicating with his colleagues because his colleagues are also foreigners and they can communicate in English effectively, Joe has experienced some difficulties when he spends time with his wife Angel and her family.
Q: Do you have any hard feelings during the family gatherings when you have to communicate with Angel’s family who is a group of local Hong Kong people?
Joe: I am very willing and enthusiastic to communicate with Angel’s parents and her family; however, language barriers prevented me from doing so. I certainly do not feel discriminated by my wife’s family members, but sometimes I feel neglected and bored when I sit together in a big table in Chinese restaurants with them during family gatherings as they could not comprehend English. I start to lose appetite as I sit at the table and wait for time to pass by. I feel that I could not share my feelings to Angel’s family throughout the whole conversation.
As we can see, the fact that Angel’s family could not speak or comprehend English Language does form a language barrier between Joe and Angel’s family; hence, inhibiting language communication between Joe and Angel’s family.
Q: What languages do you prefer your children to use?
Joe: I would want them to acquire their mother tongue – Igbo, Cantonese and English well. By acquiring these three languages, it does not only act as a good language capital for them to get a good job in the future, but most importantly, they help them to communicate with Angel’s family more proficiently and effectively. Acquiring these three languages is not only a tool or resource for my children, but it also leads them to a better life in other aspects and helps to enhance their relationship and bonding with Angel’s family – “it is for their own good,” said Joe.
As we can see from Joe’s interview, linguistic capital is an important form of cultural capital for him and his children. According to Bourdieu (1986), it is an “embodied capital” in which external wealth is “converted into an integral part of the person, into a habitus” and it “cannot be transmitted instantaneously, unlike money” (p.48).
III. Comparing Dr. Bodomo’s interview results and our findings
Dr. Bodomo has stated that on the policy level, the Hong Kong linguistic policy has not made Cantonese an official language for foreigners to acquire in order to carry out economic or other transactional purposes. On the individual level, Hong Kong people also prefer communicating with the foreigners in English as well – Africans do not have the need to acquire and speak Cantonese because English has served their instrumental purposes regarding language communication.
By comparing and contrasting Dr. Bodomo’s interview results and the data we have collected from our interview research, we find some discrepancies. Our group has found out that some African migrants do find difficulty in getting employed in Hong Kong. They expressed that the employers would like to employ foreign (migrant) employee with better command and proficiency in English and Cantonese than those who do not have adequate proficiency, e.g. the Indian workers. Thus, from the actual, real data, we can conclude that language does pose a barrier to the African migrants – in our interviewees’ case, they found difficulty in the job-seeking process. H
owever, the situation is a hybrid one (hybridity), the different variations between different African migrants including their personal preference, choice and personality contribute to their decision on which language they would like to acquire and be proficient in; which, in turn, affecting how they’re being treated by Hong Kong people and how much they would be able to conform to the HK society.
Given the large population of Africans engaging in business activities in Hong Kong, workplace is one of the contexts that we have chosen to focus on in our study. Among the five or our interviewees, three are working as businessmen in Hong Kong, while two are football players in a Hong Kong football club and they also work as soccer coaches at local and international schools in Hong Kong.
Although the five of them expressed that they did not find a lot of difficulties in communicating with their colleagues at work, some tensions do arise from their interaction with their coworkers regarding language communication issues. For instance, our interviewee Elero has to work with his Chinese-speaking partners at work. He expressed to us that he finds his coworkers “disrespectful” sometimes because during meetings, his Chinese partners will carry out their conversations and discussions in Chinese for the majority of the time and his colleagues will only tell him the final conclusion towards the end of the meeting, since discussing in English will be more time-consuming and less effective for them as they are not native speakers of English. Elero does not understand Chinese; however, meetings are always conducted in Chinese and he said that he “loses a lot of opportunities in expressing his own thoughts” and can only “follow the decisions made by his colleagues.” Elero’s encounter at his workplace shows that language does pose a barrier to his life – he feels that he could not contribute as much as he wants to during meetings at work.
Another example will be our interview with Anthony. He told us that his friends have difficulty in finding jobs due to their lack of proficiency in Chinese and English. They have lower “competitiveness” compared to other foreign workers, like the Indians, who are also competing for low-paid jobs with the Africans in Hong Kong.
