Jeffrey Andrews, age 32, is one of Hong Kong’s resident ethnic minorities. His family immigrated from India when he was very young. Andrews grew up, has lived all his life in Hong Kong, and speaks Cantonese fluently, yet he has struggled to find a job due to lack of written Chinese proficiency.
Andrews explains that the system is pitted against ethnic minorities from the start, non-Chinese immigrants are assigned to secondary schools which do not teach Mandarin or Cantonese and there is no opportunity for them to learn these languages at those schools.
Andrews admits that he was a less-than-focused student during his early years and took to the streets, but after being arrested during an attempted mugging he decided he needed to go back to school.
He received assistance from Hong Kong Unison, a group established by Fermi Wong, which is a mission dedicated to assisting ethnic minorities in Hong Kong integrate and have access to basic social rights.
It was also this interaction that convinced Andrews to pursue a degree as a social worker. Andrews worked a full-time job while he pursued his university degree, but says he had a lot of assistance from his mom. His mother secretly sold her jewelry to help pay for his tuition. She would often wait for him when he returned home late in the evenings to make sure he had a hot meal at the end of the day. Unfortunately, his mother was unable to see the day Andrews finally received his social worker’s license, as she passed away a few years earlier.
Here Andrews stands with fellow classmate and social worker, Arif Abbas, originally from Pakistan as they show off their licenses.
Abbas explains that when he was younger he was bullied at school by the local Hong Kong students and that the teachers did nothing about it. In fact, he said many teachers had the mentality that if you did not have Chinese blood in you, you would never learn Chinese well. They viewed ethnic minority students as a lost cause.
Andrews and Abbas both want to change this mentality in Hong Kong. They want Hong Kong to truly become the international city it claims to be and to help and accept its ethnic minorities as an asset.
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