Professor Puja Kapai vividly remembered her years as a primary school student in Hong Kong in the late 1980s, especially what would happen almost every day during Chinese class.
Kapai, an associate professor of law at the University of Hong Kong, is a third-generation Hong Konger of Indian descent. Like many of the city’s ethnic minority residents, she has had a complicated relationship with the education system she grew up in.
When she studied at a local primary school in Sham Shui Po, much of the teaching was conducted in Chinese.
One experience that stuck with her was an almost daily occurrence during Chinese class. All the ethnic minority students, including her, would be asked to leave and sit in the music room with no instructions given. “There was no teacher, no supervision. It was just us in the room,” Kapai recalled.
She described the experience as being “fun” initially, but as time passed, she started to realise that they were not being granted access to the same quality of education as others in the school.
“I think as we were growing older, there was a sense that we were excluded from some aspects of learning. And so that did grow to be a question mark for me,” she said.
Inspired by her experience and in an effort to raise awareness about the harms of exclusion and unconscious bias in schools, Kapai founded the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice, and Belonging Laboratory (DEIJB Lab) in 2023.
“The idea is that nobody’s born prejudiced, right? We acquire biases simply as a function of our development through life,” said Kapai.
The DEIJB Lab recently published its first educational resource and Hong Kong’s first children’s activity book featuring the city’s own ethnic minority women. Journey With Me Through Hong Kong, My Home highlights the lives and careers of 12 ethnically diverse women, including Filipina photographer Xyza Cruz Bacani; Sa’diyya Nesar, writer and disability rights activist of Pakistani descent; Mrs India finalist-turned-comedian Maitreyi Karanth; and Nepali education advocate Divvya Gurung.
Each chapter introduces the backgrounds of the women and is supplemented with various activities such as mazes or colouring exercises based on their personal interests.
The book offers a rare opportunity for positive intersectional representations in a city that hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities call home (over 301,000, according to the latest data from 2021), yet they are hardly visible or are negatively stereotyped in media and literature.
“By sharing these women’s stories, our hope is to expose children to multiple representations of diversity during their formative years,” the foreword of the book said.
Unconscious bias
The activity book was one of multiple projects developed by the DEIJB Lab’s 2023 fellowship, during which Kapai and her staff worked with secondary school students to tackle ideas of unconscious biases related to race and gender in children.
Kapai said she recognised how overwhelmed teachers and the education system in the city are and wanted to find a way to shed light on these topics.
“We figured that what we could do is kind of build on our expertise by curating content and just giving it to schools, saying, Here are some free-designed, ready-to-use resources that you could use to introduce kind of tricky subjects to students,” she said.
Kapai said that the motivation behind the book came from a space where women are stereotyped as less capable or ambitious.
“And on every page you see that, and not only are they kind of this complex, comprehensive person, but they’re also very much more common women. In every sense of the word.”
Kapai herself was at the receiving end of such discouragement. When she decided to study law, she received pushback from her school teachers and South Asian community members.
Some suggested she should study education and specialise in English or literature instead, as her Chinese abilities would make practising law difficult. Others said that no clients would want to hire an Indian lawyer, let alone a female one.
“It came very much from a place of like, I don’t mean to discourage you, but this is what the reality is,” she said.
Founding the DEIJB Lab is a natural progression of her years-long work in academia and advocacy. Kapai has been teaching, researching, and advocating for social justice, particularly the rights of women, children and ethnic minorities, for many years.
Since 2016, she has been the convenor of the Women’s Studies Research Centre, which promotes research and dialogue “crucial to the development of women’s, gender, sexuality, and diversity studies,” according to its website.
Prior to that, from 2010 to 2017, she served as deputy director and then director of HKU’s Centre for Comparative and Public Law.
During her tenure at the centre, in 2015, she published a groundbreaking report, titled The Status of Ethnic Minorities in Hong Kong 1997-2014, in which she explored issues related to barriers faced by ethnic minorities in education, employment, and their impacts on income, health and welfare.
“So it was like a lot of interconnected, you know, ideas,” Kapai said about her research.
Four years later, in 2019, she published another report, Doing Equality Consciously: Understanding Unconscious Bias and Its Role and Implications in the Achievement of Equality in Hong Kong and Asia.
The two studies later played an instrumental role in the development of the book.
Collaborative process
The idea of the book came from the DEIJB Lab’s 2023 summer fellowship, during which participating secondary school students drew on Kapai’s 2015 and 2019 research to learn about the adverse effects of implicit bias in education.
One of the fellows, Adele Li, proposed the idea of creating a children’s activity book.
Li, who worked on the project for around two years during her final stretch of secondary school, told HKFP that she initially suggested a colour-by-numbers book. However, feedback from a member of the ethnic minority community led her to realise it might not be the best way to communicate the book’s message.
“Even though the aim of this book was to raise intercultural awareness in kids, we were still doing this through pigmentary demarcation and focusing on these differences in order to celebrate diversity rather than commonalities,” said Li, who is now attending Yale University.
“I think somewhere along the way, we kind of lost the fact that diversity is so much more than skin colour and, funnily enough, ethnicity, it’s also about experiences and culture and different ways that people build their homes,” she added.
Li’s schoolmate, Sophie Yan, joined the project halfway as a co-illustrator and designer of the book. She too faced similar challenges when coming up with the designs for its front and back covers.
The team ultimately settled on a design that embedded each of the women within an emblematic Hong Kong building, highlighting their connection to their Hong Kong identity.
Yan also noted that a lot of care went into the illustrations of each woman, not wanting to make them appear too cartoonish or erase certain facial features.
“It was this fine line, balancing between something digestible for children, for younger children, but also creating caricatures that the women would be happy seeing,” said Yan.
The book demonstrated the DEIJB La’s focus on creating community-developed resources, with content and information coming directly from ethnic minorities, allowing them to share their own experiences.
It was important for the team to honour the voices of the women featured in the book and share agency, rather than speak for them, Kapai said. “We like to think about it as a collaborative effort.”
All the material within the book, such as their written introductions, came from the women themselves, with Kapai describing them as “contributors.”
“It’s very easy to take it upon [ourselves] to see ourselves as authors and be like, Oh, we wrote this book, and to impose our understanding of how we think someone’s life goes,” she said.
“It was really about giving the opportunity to the women to tell their own stories in their own words.”
The book was officially launched on June 26, with a fireside chat featuring Kapai, founder of the DEIJB Lab; Li and Yan, the illustrators and designers of the book; as well as six of the 12 women featured.
Li said that meeting the women before and after the book was published was very meaningful for her.
“Hearing from them how they never had access to material like this, or how they never dreamed that material like this would exist, made me understand that this book was more than just late nights spent on Adobe Illustrator with a cup of coffee,” said Li.
“I don’t think I would have had it any other way,” she added.
The DEIJB Lab is working on a card game called “Minority Legends,” which will be launched later this year. It is designed to introduce different historical and contemporary ethnic minority figures in Hong Kong and highlight their contributions across fields and industries.
“The Minority Legends game is something that we developed based on sort of the lack of understanding people seem to have in terms of why we can call Hong Kong home,” Kapai said.
The lab will also launch another book, Echoes of Home: South Asian Heritage in Hong Kong, a compilation of articles, stories, and poems from South Asian ethnic minority members in the city.
Lack of role models
Journey With Me Through Hong Kong, My Home was first conceived to target ethnic Chinese children aged five to 11 years old. “However, it has been phenomenal in its inspirational impact on ethnic minority kids,” Kapai said.
Ashmi Ghhondey, chief operations officer and co-founder of Kriti Children’s Centre (KCC), a charity focusing on Nepali and other ethnic minority children with special education needs, told HKFP that she had never come across such a book before.
She was touched by how children at the centre interacted with the book, particularly during an activity where they wrote letters introducing themselves and their dreams to the women.
The letters “were really surprising and lovely,” she said. “They were like, ‘Oh, I want to open up a cafe,’ ‘I want to do music.’ So we saw a different side to them.”
Two of the KCC’s co-founders, CEO Divya Gurung and her mother, director Pushpa Gurung – are also featured in the book, which Ghhondey described as “a very proud moment.”
Although younger children are likely to be more attracted to the activity book, Ghhondey believes it can benefit older kids as well. She recalled her experience as a university student, which she described as “a very lonely process” due to not having any role models or mentors.
If she had come across a book like this in her primary or secondary school days, it would have opened her eyes to many more possibilities and opportunities, Ghhondey said. “For a teenage girl in Hong Kong who might feel a little bit out of place, I think this book could really shift their perspective on a lot of things.”
Kapai described the book as “armour.” Her biggest hope is that it resonates with every child who has been told that they aren’t good enough or that they cannot pursue certain aspirations.
“Having a book like this, which features someone who’s done it, allows you at least to have a solid footing to say, Well, maybe I can, right?”
