Hong Kong Hand-Over No Solution for Split Families

While millions of people in China may want to live in prospering Hong Kong, Lam Mei-cheng, a housewife from nearby Guangdong province, had three compelling reasons to sneak across the border: Her husband and two of her children are here.

But under the strict immigration laws of Hong Kong and China, Lam had been separated from her husband for more than half of their 11-year marriage. They have a total of four children but had been apart even during the births of some of them.

Lam recently decided she couldn’t wait any longer to bring together her divided family. In her fishing village, she found a “snakehead” who would, for $1,000, smuggle her and her two China-born children into Hong Kong on speedboats “that go as fast as airplanes.”

Now the Lams--like thousands of others with stories like theirs--are together. But perhaps not for long.

Instead of enjoying its own reunification when Hong Kong becomes part of China on July 1, the Lam family may again be riven. The territory will soon be part of the mainland. But officials, ironically, are trying harder than ever to keep the two areas--and their people--apart.

Hong Kong is supposed to be off limits to mainlanders, who need special permission to cross the border to the bustling, capitalist territory. The Lam children have the right to live here, since their father, butcher Lam Yi-hong, is a permanent resident.

But first they must get in line. Up to 130,000 mainlanders are eligible to link up with Hong Kong family members. With a daily quota of only 150 Chinese allowed to settle in Hong Kong, however, it can take years to get a permit.

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Many, like Mrs. Lam, didn’t wait. Prompted by rumors that illegal immigrants in the territory would be granted amnesty after the hand-over, mainlanders stealthily stormed Hong Kong. Like Mrs. Lam, they came with their children by speedboat or fishing junk or under floorboards of vehicles driven by Hong Kong truckers who have families on both sides of the border.

Hundreds of pregnant women took their first contraction as the signal to make a crossing, to ensure their babies were born on Hong Kong soil.

By April, police had stopped 1,367 Chinese children who had entered Hong Kong illegally--a number eight times larger than last year. Police also arrested 6,039 adults. Most are due to be sent back.

The amnesty rumors, though spread mostly by the “snakeheads,” may have some legal basis. Hong Kong’s post-hand-over constitution says a resident’s family members are also entitled to live in this metropolis and can’t be deported. While mainland relatives are required to apply for permission, there is no agreement on how to handle those who came here illegally. Technically, they can be jailed but not expelled. And what to do with the children?

“It may require a court case to settle this,” said Law Chi-kwong, a Hong Kong lawmaker who is also a professor of social administration at the University of Hong Kong. “By the letter of the law, it looks as if they can’t kick these children out. But the government fears if they allow them to stay, it will trigger a flood.”

Tung Chee-hwa, Hong Kong’s incoming chief administrator, is so concerned about the prospect of thousands of Chinese relatives pouring into this city that he met with authorities from neighboring Guangdong in April, more than two months before he was due to assume office. “There will be no amnesty,” he announced after the meeting. “Not today, nor tomorrow.”

Mrs. Lam has been in the territory before--she sneaked across the border to have her third and fourth children in Hong Kong to win them residency.

After she gave birth to her last child, she was jailed with the newborn for 21 days, then deported to China. This time, she thought that if she proved she was in Hong Kong before the hand-over, she would be allowed to stay after the territory reverted to Chinese rule. So she turned herself in to the police--and was promptly put on a list to be deported.

“I’m afraid of being sent back,” she says while carefully combing a daughter’s hair into pigtails. “I don’t know what I would do if the family broke up again.”

Her pigtailed daughter, Man-yin, 8, and the girl’s older brother, Man-mang, 10, were born in China and don’t have Hong Kong identity documents; without them, they can’t go to a public school or even a hospital here, unlike their two younger, Hong Kong-born siblings.

Hovering near his father’s knee, Man-mang says the midnight journey in a speedboat made him seasick but he is glad he took the trip. He likes playing with his Hong Kong brother and sister, who are 6 and 7. “But I want to go to school,” he said.

Daughter Man-yin shares the age and nearly the same situation as Chung Yeuk-lam, a mainland girl who became a cause celebre in Hong Kong.

Yeuk-lam’s Chinese mother had brought her illegally to live with her Hong Kong father, and they were caught. In April, 40 Hong Kong immigration officials and firemen dragged her and her mother out of their apartment in handcuffs to deport them to China.

The mother had threatened suicide--a gesture officials took seriously because last fall, another mainland woman who vowed she never again would be separated from her family dropped her two toddlers from a high-rise building, then leaped to her death.

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Those cases attracted great attention and sympathy in Hong Kong and China.

But every day, taking great risks in hopes of achieving huge benefits for their families, other desperate mothers breach the border.

Because only one family member needs to be a Hong Kong resident for the rest of the family to qualify to live here, many border-crossers have turned out to be women late in their pregnancies.

At Prince of Wales Hospital, the closest medical facility to Hong Kong’s border with China, the staff has handled more than 1,000 deliveries a year by mainland women waiting until the last minute before making a dash to try to get into the colony, said Dr. Li Chi-yin.

The women’s deliveries, after the trauma of riding in a speedboat or hiding for hours in the back of a truck, are often difficult. Afterward, the crowded hospital must double as a holding cell until police can take the mothers into custody. The women are sent back to China; some choose to leave their babies with a relative in Hong Kong.

For the government here, this is more than a heart-tugging issue, for efforts to accommodate the new families reveal the fault lines in Hong Kong’s social foundations.

Even with the current, carefully measured annual quota allowing 54,750 residents from the mainland, the Hong Kong government says new immigrants are arriving faster than the territory’s schools and housing projects can handle them.

In 20 years, officials project, Hong Kong’s already packed, burgeoning population of 6.3 million will increase to 8.2 million. “If we loosen the border even a bit, Hong Kong will sink under the weight of all the people,” said one official.

For the most part, in this city where almost half the people are immigrants from China, the newcomers get little sympathy. In the schoolyard, new students are bullied because their accents are different or their clothes are unfashionable, said Priscilla Lui, a social worker.

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Building housing and adding more teachers are the first steps to enable Hong Kong to accommodate split families who should be reunited, says legislator Law.

But he offers another solution to take the pressure off Hong Kong: Why not set up a special zone in Shenzhen, just across the border, with international schools and good housing, to attract those who would otherwise struggle here? The plan has support in the legislature. After all, Law argues, Hong Kong has $42 billion in reserves. What better way to help China and Hong Kong coexist?

Meantime, the Lams dwell in limbo, awaiting word of their fate and trying to live a normal life in a third-floor apartment they share with four other families. All six Lams sleep in two bunks in a room large enough only for the beds and a table. In a communal room that echoes with shouted Cantonese and children’s flip-flops slapping the tile floor, the Lams and their apartment mates discussed the future.

The father was skeptical that a legal challenge planned by a local social organization would save them.

Instead, he looked to action by Hong Kong leaders. “Even the fiercest tiger wouldn’t eat its own children. We count on Tung Chee-hwa to take care of us,” he said of Hong Kong’s Beijing-approved administrator, whose own family fled here from China in 1949. “Tung Chee-hwa came here from China without papers. Now he can bring his wife to Beijing and back without a problem. [British Gov. Chris] Patten brought his dogs from Britain. Why do I have to put my family’s life on the line?”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Access to Hong Kong

A checklist for emigrants who want to return to Hong Kong after the hand-over:

1. Did you have residency rights in Hong Kong before the hand-over (July 1, 1997)?

(yes)

2. Are you of Chinese descent?

(yes)

3. Do you have a foreign passport?

(if yes: go on to next question)

(if no): You have right of abode (residency rights) in Hong Kong after hand-over.

4. Do you wish to declare that you are not a Chinese national?

(if yes: go on to next question)

(if no): You have right of abode (residency rights) in Hong Kong after hand-over.

5. Have you returned, or will you return, to settle in Hong Kong before July 1, 1997, and remain settled there thereafter?

(if yes): You have right of abode (residency rights) in Hong Kong after hand-over.

(if no, go on to next question)

6. Have you been, or will you be, continuously absent from Hong Kong for more than three years?

(if yes): You can work in Hong Kong after the hand-over but not enjoy right of abode (residency rights).

(if no): You have right of abode (residency rights) in Hong Kong after hand-over.

Source: Hong Kong Immigration Department