Envisioned Belonging: Cultural Differences and Ethnicities in Hong Kong Schooling

The educational prospects and integration of school-age immigrants, especially for ethnic and linguistic minorities, have been a major issue roiling the education systems and polities of an ever-growing list of receiving societies around the world. Many studies focus on cultural disparities between public schooling and ethnic minorities to explain the non-adaptation and disproportionate educational failures among certain groups of immigrant students. To further explore the role of ethnicity in the academic navigation of immigrant students, my research compares the educational experiences of teenage children of the two largest incoming groups into Hong Kong: those coming from Mainland China and from South Asia. This comparison is revealing in that one group is Chinese, presumably sharing the same ethnicity and very similar cultural backgrounds to Hong Kong people and knowing the dominant written language of Hong Kong's education, while the other is not. This research finds that, despite the different ethnic backgrounds of these two groups of students, teachers perceive strikingly similar cultural discrepancies from Hong Kong norms in both groups. However, teachers seem to have a different understanding concerning these two groups of students as to how much they should do to insist that such students fit Hong Kong norms.