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tions on foreigners will block any spectacular expansion. It may be that New Territories Chinese in Britain will gradually diversify their occupations – they have begun to do so finding their way step by step into a multitude of industries and jobs. And it is possible that a disintegration of the restaurant pattern of settlement will have important consequences for the assimilation of the migrants and their ties with home. So far the tendency has been for the unsuccessful to lose touch with their people at home (by failing to send money back and to return), and for the successful to maintain close ties. A man works a few years, sending money home, especially when his fare has been paid off, and saving for a trip back to Hong Kong. He then goes home for a while. If he is unmarried he uses his holiday as an opportunity for getting a wife. The break over, he returns to the United Kingdom to resume work. (I have seen emigrants' passports which show this pattern of work and return. Now that passports have to be produced in Hong Kong in connection with applications to be admitted to the United Kingdom it would be a comparatively simple matter for the authorities to keep statistics showing how long men stay abroad and where they have been. It would be very useful information.) The restaurant business itself acts as an insulation between the migrants and the people among whom they make their living. They are caught up in their own forms of social grouping (domestically and otherwise). Many of them return to Hong Kong knowing no more than a few words of English (as kitchen-workers they will not have needed to speak to a non-Chinese); most of them cannot conduct a conversation in that language. A few hundred young women have gone to Britain from the New Territories in recent years to join their men (I have been given a figure of 300), so that a measure of isolation is assured for even some of those who set up family life. A few men have married, some bigamously, or formed liaisons with local women in Britain. If what is true for many minority groups in present-day Britain holds also for the Chinese, then such unions are not necessarily a link with the wider society, for the women often become a part of the small social island into which they have moved without throwing a bridge across to the mainland.
79. I have heard speculations about the role to be played by returned migrants in the social life of the New Territories. There is talk of their being so worldly-wise and sophisticated that they may come to form a difficult category of people to deal with. My im-
SOCIAL RESEARCH IN THE N.T. OF HONG KONG, 1963
T
241
tions on foreigners will block any spectacular expansion. It may be that New Territories Chinese in Britain will gradually diversify their occupations – they have begun to do so finding their way step by step into a multitude of industries and jobs. And it is pos- sible that a disintegration of the restaurant pattern of settlement will have important consequences for the assimilation of the migrants and their ties with home. So far the tendency has been for the unsuccessful to lose touch with their people at home (by failing to send money back and to return), and for the successful to maintain close ties. A man works a few years, sending money home, especially when his fare has been paid off, and saving for a trip back to Hong Kong. He then goes home for a while. If he is unmarried he uses his holiday as an opportunity for getting a wife. The break over, he returns to the United Kingdom to resume work. (I have seen emigrants' passports which show this pattern of work and return. Now that passports have to be produced in Hong Kong in connection with applications to be admitted to the United King- dom it would be a comparatively simple matter for the authorities to keep statistics showing how long men stay abroad and where they have been. It would be very useful information.) The restau- rant business itself acts as an insulation between the migrants and the people among whom they make their living. They are caught up in their own forms of social grouping (domestically and other- wise). Many of them return to Hong Kong knowing no more than a few words of English (as kitchen-workers they will not have needed to speak to a non-Chinese); most of them cannot conduct a conversation in that language. A few hundred young women have gone to Britain from the New Territories in recent years to join their men (I have been given a figure of 300), so that a measure of isolation is assured for even some of those who set up family life. A few men have married, some bigamously, or formed liasons with local women in Britain. If what is true for many minority groups in present-day Britain holds also for the Chinese, then such unions are not necessarily a link with the wider society, for the women often become a part of the small social island into which they have moved without throwing a bridge across to the mainland.
79. I have heard speculations about the role to be played by re- turned migrants in the social life of the New Territories. There is talk of their being so worldly-wise and sophisticated that they may come to form a difficult category of people to deal with. My im-
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