As a new Amazon Prime series sheds light on the frequently glamorous, often claustrophobic and sometimes salacious expat lifestyle, five émigrés recount their own adventures in Hong Kong, Dubai, Australia, France and southern Africa.
Hong Kong: ‘Life for many revolves around private yachts and supercars – plus occasional wife-swapping’
Harbour view apartments. Boozy brunches. Weekend boat trips. Parties at The Peninsula. Private schools and live-in helpers. This is the life of Hong Kong’s affluent émigrés, according to excerpts of Lulu Wang’s new series Expats, starring Nicole Kidman – the mere mention of which is currently sending Hong Kong’s social media channels into a frenzy. That fury is not only due to concerns the series will gloss over the harrowing political crackdown of recent years, but because we’re all still livid that Kidman was given a quarantine exception for filming in August 2021 – a time when Hong Kong citizens were subject to prohibitively expensive three-week long hotel quarantines as part of the city’s draconian Covid restrictions.
Setting our chagrin aside, just who are the expats Wang has set out to portray? In British colonial times they were called FILTH – Failed in London, Try Hong Kong – but that’s always been a bit of a cliché. Hong Kong’s expat community dates back to the 1800s and includes people of all nationalities – a Parsee cook established the Star Ferry; Mizahi Jews from Iraq built The Peninsula – and come from all walks of life. That includes my father, a professional football player for Glasgow Rangers who swept our family into Kai Tak Airport in 1974. Later, I went to school with “expat brats” from Thailand, New Zealand, France, Canada, Japan, India, Australia and Malaysia – this is one aspect of life which Wang seems to get right, with a multi-racial cast that includes Americans of Korean, Japanese and Indian descent.
Filipinas also make an appearance in the role of domestic helpers, who along with their Indonesian counterparts make up Hong Kong’s largest expatriate community, even if the government classes them as migrant workers and affords them with fewer legal rights. More than 300,000 of these women (and sometimes men) are integral to the lives of most Hong Kong expats, as well as Hong Kong’s middle and upper classes, providing childcare, cleaning, laundry, dog-walking and grocery shopping, six days a week, for a minimum salary of £480 a month. “I haven’t picked up an iron in the 20 years I’ve been here,” I recently overheard an English “trailing wife” tell her friends at a party.
Hardly the crime of the century, but that’s not to say there aren’t badly behaved expats. There’s a tedious group of transplants whose Instagram feeds offer an endless stream of champagne quaffing and twerking on tables and I’ve heard “gweilos” (an unflattering Cantonese term for white foreigners) speak to Hong Kong’s waiters the way they would never talk to a Glaswegian equivalent, lest they receive a slap in the face. Expats have also been behind some of Hong Kong’s most gruesome crimes, including the 2003 case of an American woman who poisoned her Merrill Lynch banker husband with a laced milkshake before clubbing him to death with an ornament in their luxury home in Parkview, where two-bedroom apartments start at £8,000 a month.
But, while there is an expat solar system that revolves around lavish apartments, Michelin-star restaurants, private yachts and supercars – plus occasional tales of wife-swapping – it’s just one part of Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan universe. And it’s a more rounded view of the city that we’re all hoping to see portrayed when we crack out the popcorn and tune into Expats.
By Lee Cobaj
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