I can vividly remember the day when I decided to leave India for this foreign city.
I gave up the normal life to live in this alien city where I didn’t know the people, a language I couldn’t speak and culture I didn’t understand. All this in hopes for a better quality of life for me and my family.
Back in India, I worked as a carpenter and made barely enough to support my family. With the financial burden and seeing my parents leading a difficult life was not something I could tolerate. I had to do something to change that. And that’s when I made the critical decision to come to Hong Kong to find work. A city which I had only heard of from my childhood friends who moved there.
It wasn’t easy for my old parents to accept the idea of letting their 28 year old, unmarried son to go to a foreign land, far away from them. I was their support system in their old age as they were once mine.
It was a roller-coaster of emotions, feelings of doubt and fear but also hope and excitement for a future where my family could live easier and happier lives. Despite the conflicted emotions, soon before I knew it, we had already put a lot of our family’s life savings to support me for this hopeful yet risky journey. And just like that, I was in Hong Kong.
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