My maternal grandmother, Chik Chi Ming, left her family in Shandong, China, in the 1940s after her mom “gifted” her to a friend in Hong Kong whose family had died in the Second World War. My paternal grandmother, Fong Kwai Ying, moved from southern Guangdong to Hong Kong when she was a newlywed and later found work there. Like many other mainland newcomers at the time, my grandmothers’ cultural identities remained largely tied to their home provinces for most of their lives.

A distinct Hong Kong identity started forming as early as the 1960s, though it has largely “resisted definition,” says Helena Wu, Canada research chair in Hong Kong studies and an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. If you consider yourself a Hong Kong person today, what that means largely depends on whether you speak Cantonese, Sindhi, English, or Mandarin as your first language; whether you studied at a local or international school there; whether you grew up near the rolling hills and seascapes of the city’s affluent central and western districts, the gritty urban neighbourhoods of Kowloon populated by neon signs and cha chaan tengs, or the city suburbs flanked by farmland and mainland China. Your understanding of what it means to be a Hong Konger may have transformed several times in your life, depending on which era you came of age in.

Lately, in defiance of China’s vision for Hong Kong’s “return to the motherland” via patriotic education and so-called national security reforms, some are choosing to identify as a “Hong Kong person”—rather than as a “Hong Konger in China” or as “Chinese.” It’s a subtle choice that emphasizes separateness from the people’s republic, an act of protest against declining freedoms and a disappearing way of life. For some, it may be the only form of resistance they have left.

In the decades after the Second World War, the city’s role as an entrepôt between the East and West spurred an economic and cultural boom that most regard as Hong Kong’s best years. But for my parents’ generation, who watched Hong Kong rise to its zenith in the 1980s, an uneasy countdown loomed: to the United Kingdom’s return of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China. On July 1, 1997, Hong Kong residents officially became Chinese nationals.

Some locals expressed tentative optimism about rejoining China. Others felt anxious about what life under PRC rule would bring, a feeling that intensified after June 1989, when soldiers mowed down students and civilians in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Before 1997, an average of 30,000 Hong Kongers emigrated to Canada each year, my family among them.

China’s unparalleled economic rise soon started to assuage many Hong Kongers. “When the horrors after Tiananmen didn’t materialize, my parents were happy to go back to Hong Kong [and China] to make money,” says Simon Lau, a forty-four-year-old tech founder and strategy consultant whose family immigrated to Vancouver in the late 1980s. So-called astronaut families, like my own, became relatively commonplace. Breadwinners worked and lived in Hong Kong and the mainland while their families remained in other countries.

In the post-handover years, Hong Kongers saw themselves as the “successful sibling” of their “poorer and less educated mainland relatives,” says Miu Chung Yan, a UBC professor who studies Canada’s Chinese diaspora. Few people identified purely as “Hong Kongers,” and the majority still saw themselves as Chinese during that time, according to Yan. British rule over Hong Kong had instilled the idea that being Chinese was “culturally acceptable but politically controversial,” writes Anthony Fung, a Chinese University of Hong Kong professor, in a 2017 paper. “Hong Kong identity embodies and manifests both cultural affiliation with and resistance to Chinese identity.”

Hong Kong’s colonial legacy meant many........

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