Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
has remained remarkably consistent across all of our interview samples.
Equally familiar was the motive for return, repeated in each focus group:
Everything is good in Canada except for job opportunities. The living stand-
ard is so good but the job opportunities are getting worse and worse.
Economic motives were paramount in the focus groups.
Promotions, opportunity, money. I think it's much better here. Here you work
hard, but you get your promotions, your money. You do work up the ladder.
With a lot of my friends who graduated at the same time, [they] are still in the
same position [in Canada] or have only got one promotion, and it's been three
or four years now.
On this theme there was unanimity:
I would say the working environment is better in Hong Kong. Like earning
more money. Lower tax. That's the main issue I would say, lower tax. More
opportunities here. I would say it's not hard to earn HK$15,000
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a month for
a fresh grad. But it would be super hard for a fresh grad to get a really good
job in Vancouver or in Canada.
The invidious comparison with Canada is of particular interest for special
cross-tabulations from the 2006 Census show that Chinese-Canadians who
are university-educated do not score at the top of the Canadian job market
until the third and subsequent generations, when they surpass the income
levels of all other groups including the children and grandchildren of white
immigrants and even the Canadian born (Jiménez 2008, Jedwab 2008b).
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But clearly for the high-achievement 1.5 generation, Hong Kong returns
trumped those in Canada. Respondents were working hard, commonly long
hours for up to six days a week, to jump-start their careers. The only free
time available for them to meet in our focus groups was over a working
dinner in the evening.
A closely related attraction was the intensity of a 24/7 city that engaged
and animated 'sensation-seeking' (Van Dalen and Heskens 2007) among a
number of younger focus group participants (as it did April Wong):
Hong Kong is more bustling. It tends to be more lively, there's more of a night
life… and it's more attractive to young people.
Against the buzz of bustling streets, night markets, and a city that never
sleeps, the trans-Pacific alternative was found lacking, for some seriously
lacking. A Canadian university graduate working in Hong Kong under-
scored the point to me while she was visiting family in Vancouver: 'I'm into
