‘I can’t eat spicy anymore’: Hong Kong’s Thai community look back at five decades in the city
- Kowloon City’s ‘Little Thailand’ has been the heart of Hong Kong’s Thai community since the 1960s but many businesses will be displaced by redevelopment
Thai national Ann Bang On Leung fell in love with Hong Kong while on holiday in the city in the late 1970s.
“Hong Kong was such a cosmopolitan city with convenient public transport,” recalls Leung, who comes from a family of farmers in a village in Phichit, central Thailand.
In 1980, 30-year-old Leung found a way to Tung Tau Estate, a public housing estate in Kowloon City, through an arranged marriage to a local policeman.
“He didn’t know how to speak Thai, and I couldn’t speak Cantonese, but it was OK. We used a lot of body language,” she says with a laugh.
She was part of a trend that had begun in the 1960s, of Thai women who moved to Hong Kong to marry local men.
Soon she was a tour guide for Thai visitors, thriving on the camaraderie she shared with Thai shop owners in Kowloon Walled City. About a decade later, she opened a Thai grocery store with two of her sisters who had also moved to Hong Kong and married local men.
