Revisiting home in HK as a Sporean

The writer, who grew up as a third-culture kid, grapples with how Covid-19 and protests have changed her idea of home

- Charmaine Lim

HONG KONG - When someone asks me about home, I instinctively think of Hong Kong, the place I spent my teenage years. Moving there in 2008 for my parents' jobs as humanitarian workers, I grew up in a tiny flat with my younger sister in Shui Tau Tsuen, a residential village in the New Territories.

Having moved homes every year or two due to my parents' work, that flat in Hong Kong remains the longest I have lived in one place.

In Hong Kong, I met my first best friend and formed several close friendships I still maintain, over a decade later. I found a sense of stability and community there, which quickly became the feeling I associated with home.

Despite being born in Singapore, I often joke that the most Singaporean things about me are my passport and love of fishball noodles. Having lived away from my birth country for 22 years, I have accepted that Singapore, where I now live and work, feels less like home than Hong Kong does.

Coined by sociologists John and Ruth Hill Useem in the 1950s, the term third-culture kid refers to individuals raised in cultures other than their parents' or their official nationality, typically for a significant portion of their growing-up years. Many, like myself, find elements of identity in each country they live in without developing a deep sense of belonging too foreign to be local and too local to be foreign.

There are no specific records of third-culture kids in Singapore, although the rising trend can be seen in more families with young children moving here, and Singaporean families moving away for work.

The Department of Statistics recorded that the population of Singaporeans overseas is slowly returning to pre-pandemic numbers.

There were about 205,200 overseas Singaporeans in June 2023, compared with 217,200 in 2019.