A young Nepalese woman will go to Geneva in August to attend a hearing of United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to spell out “the reality” that ethnic minorities face in Hong Kong.
The Nepalese woman named Suskihanna, 22, who graduated from the University of Hong Kong, will be one of the representatives from the Hong Kong Unison group to join the hearing in Geneva, hoping to reveal the difficulties and discrimination that ethnic minorities endure in the city, Apple Daily reported.
Suskihanna said her parents wanted her to learn to speak Chinese since she was young as they believed the language was very important if they wanted to stay in the city. However, most local schools would not enrol her, so she only went to a school for non-Chinese pupils.
But the Chinese-language syllabus provided in schools for non-Chinese pupils was too easy and she found it useless to improve her language ability.
Suskihanna said although she’s now a university graduate, her Chinese language was only at primary school level, and did not meet the requirements of most local employers.
Over the years, she found there was a lack of opportunities and funding from the government to help ethnic minority people to learn and improve their Chinese.
Meanwhile, she said, most people in Hong Kong seemed to think that ethnic minorities were less educated and, if you weren’t good at Chinese, you weren’t fully accepted in society.
Suskihanna said she would tell her story and explain the difficulties that ethnic minorities face in Hong Kong.
She hoped that by attending the hearing, the Hong Kong government would step up its efforts under international pressure to better support ethnic minorities by implementing its “Chinese Language Curriculum Second Language Learning Framework” in schools, as well as doing more to eliminate discrimination in society.