A Second Home in Hong Kong
The hidden bright sides of Hong Kong as a destination of working holiday
Anywhere can be her home since she left her family in the United Kingdom five years ago. Currently, she says Hong Kong is her home.
While a lot of Hongkongers complain about the stress in the city of skyscrapers, foreigners find the compact city exciting and convenient with the “7/24 life”.
Sarah Richard, an English working holiday maker in Hong Kong, is excited to see the compact city on a helicopter.
The “city of jungles” did not make her feel difficult to breathe. On the contrary, this city tops the list of her favourite places among the over 50 countries she has visited. Hong Kong is small, but Sarah Richard, as a foreigner enjoying her working holiday here, looks at the bright sides that many locals have forgotten.
When choosing a place for working holiday, cost of living plays an important role in the decision-making process. Hong Kong ranks number two in the worldwide cost of living survey 2016 done by Economist Intelligence Unit comparing more than 400 individual prices across 160 products and services.
For some of the working holiday makers, it does not really affect the attractiveness of Hong Kong. The international city still has its uniqueness that attracts both expats and ordinary young adults to come.
“I like Hong Kong. I like how fast paced it is. I like how many opportunities there are. Business, social life, it is so easy to make friends here. There is an expat community, so it’s really easy to find out information, and meet new people,” said Ms Richard, an “obsessed Travel Blogger” as she describes herself.
She sees life, opportunities and a lot more out of the skyscrapers.
The 26-year-old can enjoy a lot in the shoppers’ and food paradise, as what the city is promoted by the official Tourism Board. It has its rich culture of east-west encounter that provides her many to explore.
Hong Kong is not one of the popular spots as a place of working holiday. Only 4623 foreigners from the ten partner countries came to Hong Kong from 2001 to 2014, which is relatively a small number as compared with the 60,000 outgoing participants.
Ms Richard was one the the few ones among the 1000 quotas for British who chose Hong Kong. “It’s the best place I call home in five years. It’s the first place that made me to stop.”
She made up her mind to leave her ordinary life in the UK - going to school, finding a job, getting married - and started exploring different parts of the world.
Once she stepped out the airport and on to the bus in Hong Kong, she realized she was already addicted to this city.
Watching the lights go past, the mountains appear, people laughing and taxis beeping, she believed that she found the best place that could offer her everything she wanted but regarded as commonplace by locals.
Inherited a lot of the British features in the city, the transportation system, the architecture in Hong Kong Island, the rule of law are some of the similarities to London.
She was offered a job by a lifestyle magazine Expat Living to write about exotic places to go in Hong Kong, great hiking trails and country parks for nature lovers, beaches for relaxing and events happening around the city.
Being well-known as a great location for business, Hong Kong has retained its crown as the world’s freest economy for the 22nd year in the Index of Economic Freedom. But she believes that it is not just a place for business. “Even though the city is small, it is so diverse. People need to explore more to look at the beauty of the city, I love the social life here too,” she said.
She is in love with the city with hustle and bustle.
Ms Richard enjoys exploring the nature with her friends in her free time.
“Hong Kong is the worst place I have been with people being always on their phones. It was crazy. I’ve never seen a thing like this in others places I have been,” she said, “people forgot how to talk to others.”
“Busy”, “loud” and “a little bit standoffish” are some of the adjectives she used to describe Hong Kong people.
While she enjoyed the lifestyle, opportunities and landscape of Hong Kong, she merely mentioned about the locals. She hoped she would have more time to interact with them in the future, to have a clearer picture about the locals.
Apart from expats like Ms Richard, Kyun Seok Young from South Korea is another working holiday maker who enjoys being in Hong Kong. As he has been offered a job and a shared rent-free flat before he embarked his trip, he can put aside his worries about the living cost in the vibrant city.
He is the second manager at a Korean restaurant in Tsim Sha Tsui. As a fresh graduate majoring in Chinese, he could read Chinese and speak Mandarin in Hong Kong.
In his restaurant, there are ten other working holiday makers from South Korea. Even though he has no preference towards hiring Koreans or Hongkongers, he said working holiday makers from Korean are more flexible in their time and pay full effort to their work comparing to local students taking part-time job.
Mr Young wants to understand more about the culture of Hongkongers and mainlanders through his stay here as he wants to set up a Sino-Korean trading company in the future.
The 26-year-old said he chose Hong Kong not only because of the lack of partnership of working holiday with mainland China, but also the fact that he believed Hongkongers were nicer.
Kyun Seok Young has been in Hong Kong for about ten months and enjoys his first time of work in the food and beverage industry.
He used to stay in Guangzhou for one year as an exchange student and had the experience of living with Chinese. “Comparing to mainland, it is better to be here in terms of environment and people’s personalities. Only the living costs are too high,” he said.
He concluded that both the living pace in Hong Kong and Guangzhou were fast, but it was easier to see a mainlander to lose their temper than a Hongkonger.
Mr Young left Korea as he believed that it was hard for the young people to find a good job there, like in all other countries.
He was offered a working visa later. He only has to work from 6 pm to 3 am everyday so he spent his free time trying to understand more about Chinese by wandering in different parts of Hong Kong.
“I always want to go to less touristic places. For example, when going to supermarkets and shopping, I can look at how the locals dress, how they put on make-up differently from Koreans and know more of their wants for products,” he said.
South Koreans are more interested in coming to Hong Kong for working holiday than foreigners from other parts of the world. With the annual quota of 200 increased to 500 in 2014 after the set up in 2011, the number of application increased from only 65 in 2013 to 500 in 2014, according to the statistics from the Immigration Department.
In recent years, Korean restaurants and supermarkets flourish on Kimberley Road in Tsim Sha Tsui with the booming number of Korean working holiday makers.
Mr Young sometimes overhears his customers talking about Korea when serving them, which he thinks is one of the interesting parts of his work as it makes him understand his country from others' perspective.