Why I Left Hong Kong for Germany
“Ich bin frei und deshalb bin ich verloren.” — Franz Kafka
「人生有幾多個十年？」 — 《巾幗梟雄》
A year ago I arrived in Germany, leaving behind a city I call home. For a long time, I had wanted to escape.
Throughout my adolescence, I have been told that academic performance is the only thing that matters. Like the good student that I was, I worked exceedingly hard at school, and even as I slipped somewhat academically in high school, I was still admitted to one of the finest universities in Hong Kong. More importantly, I was the first one — even in my (huge) extended family — to attend university. As a first-year middle schooler, I had a hard time adjusting to English as the medium of instruction; but adjusting to university life as a high school graduate was something else entirely. Mastering the language of the British was not nearly as difficult as figuring out how to exercise my freedom: I did not have to give up any extra-curricular activities, as I did with piano a year prior to the university entrance exam. Nor did I have to attend all lectures, seminars, and tutorials; I could skip them as I wished, as long as I completed the coursework. Suddenly, I was responsible for my own life. I had nobody to answer to but myself.
This newfound freedom would become the source of my existential angst. Like a dog unleashed for the first time, I pounced on whatever that met the eye rather than thinking about what lay ahead. I seized every opportunity to make new friends, so hungry for social life and the world around me. Since I was mingling with people on and off campus all the time, having lived on it during my freshman year, my close friends joked that I was a social butterfly. I joined two university societies not so much because of their mission or activism but because the prospect of meeting new people and consolidating existing friendships thrilled me. As if that were not enough, in my junior year I went to America as an exchange student. Time and again, I was mistaken as a local Californian due to my fluent English; even more flattering, though, was the fact that, by the time I’d had to return to Hong Kong, I was so embedded into the lives of my new American and international friends that they thought I’d been there for a year, even though I only stayed there for five months. I took that as validation for my extraordinary ability to connect with people.
All the while, I had at best a tenuous connection to the future that quietly awaited me. It was in my senior year that I finally confronted the question of what kind of career I wanted. As a stellar student at university, I briefly flirted with the idea of carving out a career in academia. Taking a semester off to intern at the world’s largest private education company convinced me that the “world out there” is too interesting a place to miss. Although literature seems practically useless for a respectable job — for what professions require the knowledge of Shakespearean sonnets or the postmodern novel? — I trusted that the by-products of my university education, i.e. mastery of the English language and my social skills, were more than attractive to prospective employers. Indeed many English majors have gone on to become PR professionals and marketing specialists, human resources managers and secretaries at law firms. And then of course there is teaching.
While my classmates were busy preparing for job interviews and applying for the hottest jobs in the city at the start of the senior year, I procrastinated and procrastinated. Job search? What job search? I did, however, make a semblance of an effort to do the same, missing some deadlines along the way and failing at the last rounds to gain a foothold in the most competitive management trainee programs. The job titles, the job descriptions, the interviews all felt like Greek to me. What is your greatest accomplishment? Why should we hire you? How do you see yourself in 10 years? Although the Internet taught me elegant ways of responding to these questions, I could not fool myself into thinking that I had good answers to them. As I continued to write cover letters, send out resumes, and attend job interviews, it dawned on me that the “world out there” had been nothing but a pure fantasy for me. I could not wait to be a part of it, but in truth I knew very little about the world, let alone my place in it. Still, I soldiered on with my job applications, and in four years I would find myself going around and around in circles.
It all began with a short stint at a media juggernaut, which would take me to countries as far as Canada, yet in less than a year I accepted an offer to work at a local education provider, where I enjoyed obscurity and proximity to an industry leader whose face was plastered all over the city. It hadn’t taken long for me to get on board: the pay was irresistible, and although job promotion in my line of work is notoriously rare, in the absence of any concrete career plans it seemed the right fit for me, since I needed time to think about my next career move anyway. For the next three years, I would work punishingly long hours, but the responsibility that came with managing a team of editors to produce top-notch materials for thousands of high schoolers gave me meaning and purpose: if we could boost the academic performance of our students, then our hard work would have been worthwhile. And year after year, many of our students did clinch excellent grades in the university entrance exam — an entry ticket, in other words, to Hong Kong’s globally renowned universities.
Still, something was missing.
A year into my demanding day job, I enrolled myself in a part-time M.A. program in Literary and Cultural Studies, which ignited an intellectual flame that would scorch the edges of my humdrum existence. It was a welcome distraction which in retrospect felt more like a ruse to prolong the inevitable task of finding a real career, one that I could make good money and love. Regardless, I made like-minded friends who reveled in debating the big, grandiose ideas of the day. I saw in them a similar desperation to know, to feel, to make sense of our being in a world in disarray, acutely aware that successful completion of the program would not bump up our future earnings. (Indeed, many of us paid for the program, out of our own (small) pocket and in countless sleep-deprived nights, while working full-time.)
It was in the middle of the two-year program that I decided to make a foray into higher education administration. My parents, who generally have no qualms about my career moves, would approve of it (I didn’t ask). They had told me, years ago, that I should become a bureaucrat. My mother has been a civil servant most of her adult life, and understandably she saw the merits of a secure, solid career. After some poking around, I ended up working for my alma mater as an admissions officer. It turned out to be a disaster. I made it clear in the job interview that I wanted to expand the university’s online presence, having impressed the panel with a great many insights that I gleaned from dissecting the digital marketing strategies employed by other universities. Coincidentally that was what they were looking for. But the resignation of a key colleague not long after I signed the contract forced my manager’s hand: I would have to fill in the shoes of the newly departed colleague and give talks to bewildered high-schoolers instead.
That prospect brought me both trepidation and exhilaration. While public speaking has never been my forte (thanks, puberphonia), I did enjoy talking to high school students. As a humanities student, I wielded the power of storytelling like a weapon, and I did have a lot of compelling stories to tell from my undergraduate years. Still, I was not fit for that role, not because I was naïve enough to think that the job entailed nothing more than giving PowerPoint presentations and fielding questions from teachers and students. The real challenges were internal: dealing with red tape and easing myself into a culture of great deference typical of a Chinese enterprise, a stark contrast with the dynamic, highly flexible working environment where I had worked with people around my age. The adjustment proved too excruciating. After a mere three months into the job, I submitted my resignation letter, feeling despondent and more lost than ever.
Above all, I felt like a failure.
By then, any illusion that academic brilliance would translate into a good life had been shattered. Like my generation of Hongkongers, I am constantly haunted by the tyranny of “the good life” — study hard, find a promising job, get married, buy an apartment, start a family. In recent years, academic inflation has depressed the wages of university graduates. Property prices are so prohibitively high that few young adults could afford an apartment without financial support from their parents. And without marriage equality, queer folks like me have no prospect of signing up for the good life.
I did not have a burning desire to get married or to have kids, but I did feel a certain responsibility to make more than a living wage, even though my parents were materially comfortable. I did not think that I had to own an apartment to be happy, but I did want a space of my own, away from the prying gaze of my doting mother. And although my parents never pressured me into getting a job in business or the law, now I wish they had, because then I would at least think about what I wanted to do. But just as there is “an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction,” as the now-beleaguered J. K. Rowling once said, so I cannot fault my parents for not pointing me in any direction. After all, I was already in my mid-20s.
Now freshly out of a job, I decided to leave Hong Kong for a while in the hope of clearing my mind. For 17 days in Europe, I visited landmarks, tasted local delicacies, and made friends at the hostels in which I stayed: a South African psychotherapist, a Mexican exchange student, an Italian high school teacher, and many more. As I listened intently to their stories, I realized that I could live a life beyond “the good life.” Here in Europe, I could breathe clean air, work reasonable hours, rent my own apartment, and speak my mind without fear of persecution. “I could reinvent myself here,” I thought.
Soon after I returned home, I recalled several times a brief but memorable conversation with a German tourist while I was traveling in Barcelona. She had piqued my interest in her country, having described it in unassuming terms. I then reached out to a high school friend then working toward an M.A. in Germany, and I spelled out my full-blown existential crisis. “Come here,” she said flatly. “Germany suits you, I think. Hong Kong is a bit too much; it’s not for everybody.” I had never been a Germanophile, but after doing some research I decided to apply for a two-year M.A. program in Germany. I was lucky: I got accepted into the program, with a full scholarship.
In September 2019, I flew to the land of Schnitzel, Kartoffelpuffer, and Currywurst, though I hadn’t planned to leave Hong Kong in the midst of a protracted political crisis. “Ich kann das schaffen,” I said to myself over and over, after taking a six-week German course at the Goethe-Institut. “Ich muss das schaffen.”
One year on, I am convinced that I want to call Germany my home some day.
I am still a terrible German speaker. The job market is in tatters. And a future shaped by forces beyond my grasp — covid-19 being a major one — unsettles me. But I have made real progress with German, signed up for a few online tech courses, and learned to lean into the discomfort of an unknown yet potentially exciting future. Now the world is my oyster.
