Music and mutual aid help people from ethnic minorities in Hong Kong feel at home

Children learning Cantonese by singing, and a pop-up market for small-business owners, help integrate members of Hong Kong ethnic minorities

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Children from ethnic minorities sing songs that help them learn Cantonese, while members of their parents’ generation who run businesses take part in a pop-up market – examples of initiatives to help people from minorities integrate better in Hong Kong society. Photo: Jonathan Wong

Published: 7:15am, 19 Sep 2024Updated: 9:27am, 23 Sep 2024

On a balmy Sunday afternoon earlier this September, owners of 15 small businesses in Hong Kong of various ethnicities – including Indian, Filipino and Nepali – took part in a pop-up market at the Hive co-working space in Sheung Wan.

Hong Kong’s first GuideFong Bazaar, it was organised by the Foundation for Shared Impact, a non-governmental organisation founded in 2018 to support under-resourced entrepreneurs from ethnic minorities.

A week later, a handful of girls of South Asian descent wearing colourful saris and salwar-kameez performed songs in Cantonese inside a shopping centre in Tsim Sha Tsui, in Kowloon. Their rendition of Disney’s “It’s a Small World” went down well with the Chinese audience.

Titled “Harmonise for Change”, the music show was organised by not-for-profit organisation Addoilmusic to help ethnic minority children in Hong Kong learn Cantonese through music.

Hong Kong’s diverse ethnic make-up has been key to its success as an international business hub where different ideas and cultures come together.

According to government statistics from 2021, there were more than 600,000 non-Chinese people living and working in the city, accounting for 8.4 per cent of the population.