"Home is wherever Hongkongers are": Narratives of emigration and exile by pro-democracy Hongkongers.

Abstract

Hong Kong has seen a huge wave of emigration in recent months due to the ongoing regime repression in the city since the 2019 mass protests. As an indication, by September, 2021, 88,000 Hongkongers have submitted resettlement applications to the UK Foreign Office through the BNO visa scheme that was launched on 1st January, 2021. In this paper, I will explore narratives by members of the Hong Kong community found online in the public domain that speaks to their views and experiences of having to leave Hong Kong as their home and resettle elsewhere. Translating the original texts from Cantonese to English where necessary and using narrative analysis, I will examine how these online story-telling of emigration and exile raise potential questions of trauma, resilience, solidarity, and resistance, and how these inform Hong Kongers’ emerging identity as a distinct diasporic ethnic community. As the work on this doctoral project is very newly started, the analysis will be performed on a small sample of exemplar texts collated from different media platforms, including through the medium of protest art, as a way to compare and contrast how story-telling in different formats may influence narrative structures and thematic meanings.