After a year-long hangover, can Hong Kong reawaken its desire to do better?

For most of its modern history, as long as most of us can remember, Hong Kong has been nothing if not aspirational. Ours has been the city of let do, make do, can do; a tiny dot on the map radiating outsized ripples across oceans. The world has eaten our food, bought our toys, watched our movies, invested in our funds. And as the city has dreamed big, so have the citizens. Nowhere else on earth is so much wealth concentrated within such small confines by so thin a sliver of society, and yet even the most downtrodden among us never take their frustration out by throwing bricks at the Mercedes-Benzes double-parked on a one-lane street. Because there is respect, if grudging, for the Benz owner; admiration, if covetous; and hope, if misguided, that we are all capable of joining the Benz club one day.

My father, born in a village in Kam Tin during the Japanese occupation, was cut from this dreamwoven cloth. He yearned for the city beyond the village walls, then for the world beyond the city limits. So one winter day in 1962, having exhausted his options in Hong Kong, he took off from Kai Tak for Australia. He hoarded degrees like they were precious metals, to be mined for increasingly lucrative corporate jobs. He got married and had children. And when he and my mother felt they had hit the ceiling of their middle-class immigrant life, they came back to Asia. I was three.

We came back, but my parents never stopped being immigrants, never stopped striving in their own lives and for their children’s. We never had a Benz, but the company provided the next best thing, a Lexus, to say nothing of international school tuition, fancy club memberships and roomy apartments on the south side of Hong Kong Island with sweeping views of the South China Sea. It was about 40km from Kam Tin, but the distance my father had traversed was, of course, immeasurable.

READ MORE: Hong Kong one year after Occupy

I used to be bashful about these spoils of upward mobility, wary of being out of touch with the real Hong Kong. But I have come to recognise that my Hong Kong is as real as anyone’s, and I have nothing to be embarrassed about. I am proud of my parents the same way I am proud of Hong Kong, of the audacity to have aspirations and, more difficult, the determination to realise them.

But as the events of the past year have unfolded, I have begun to wonder if that determination, even that aspiration, is waning; that this dragon is entering its slumber. Fifteen months ago, the world watched as our city, or at least parts of it, seemed poised to punch above its weight again, confronting the Chinese Communist Party more brazenly than any world power has dared in recent times. Then, by the start of this year, that (mis)adventure had already been put to bed, for better or worse.

READ MORE: Reckless drive for democracy would only derail Hong Kong

The chief executive, meanwhile, was in Beijing’s eyes transcendent, but in the eyes of our laws subject to prosecution once he steps down, just like any other citizen. That and the other headline trial of the year – the prosecution of Erwiana Sulistyaningsih’s former employer, Law Wan-tung – were either triumphs of our independent judiciary or indictments of the sense of entitlement running through this city, from the Tseung Kwan O apartment where the Indonesian domestic worker was abused, right up to Government House.