Word: kong
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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Fermi Wong had her moment of revelation one day in 1998. The social worker was roving the streets of a working-class neighborhood in Hong Kong's Kowloon district, looking out for truant youth, when she came across a gaggle of Pakistani kids playing soccer. They ran and tackled each other along the edge of a pavement, in view of an unoccupied public field equipped with proper goals. Bemused, Wong asked them why they weren't using the actual soccer pitch, which was open to all. "People told us we're not allowed there," came the response...
...That encounter sent Wong, now 39, down a difficult and lonesome path as the leading advocate for those among Hong Kong's minorities who are poor and marginalized. Racism in the prosperous former British colony doesn't simmer into violence as it has in towns in northern England. Nor has it been institutionalized, as with laws that favor the ethnic majority in Malaysia. But while Hong Kong, a city whose 7 million population is more than 90% Chinese, garbs itself with a sleek cosmopolitanism, casual bigotry still shapes the daily experience of many of its nonwhite, non-Chinese residents. Local...
...Wong sits in a converted warehouse in Tai Kok Tsui, a remote western corner of Kowloon. It's the office of Hong Kong Unison, the organization she founded in 2001 geared to defend the rights of minorities. Initially, Wong had precious little funding and had to scavenge for furniture to outfit the place. She now has backing from a few private donors as well as the international NGO Oxfam, but times are still lean. An array of colorful drapes liven up the space, while a staff of local Chinese and South Asian volunteers busy about. Wong is a blur...
...financial hub, Hong Kong draws in tens of thousands of well-heeled Western expats as well as a modicum of Asian professionals who indulge in the fine dining and luxury malls ubiquitous in Asia's self-professed "world city." But affluent people run up against prejudice too, if they are dark-skinned. Stories of everyday discrimination are legion and often banal in their predictability: from being denied service in a bar or being unable to lease an apartment of one's choice and means. Hong Kong police practice racial profiling, routinely checking IDs of South Asians and sometimes frisking them...
...wasn’t really paying attention to [the number of Asian supporters], but when I went into the locker room my teammates told me it looked like Hong Kong,” Lin deadpanned...