My Experience Living in Hong Kong for 5 Months

Can’t believe it has been 5 months since I moved to Hong Kong. It’s been a couple months of growth, facing challenges, transitioning, making Hong Kong my home. I’ll just show you my highlights of all these 5 months!

Highlights of the Fragrant Harbour!

A Gateway to the Nations

Since doing my Discipleship Training School with Youth With a Mission last September, I strongly felt God calling me to stay in the mission field and letting this season to be a time of learning, training, and serving Him full-time. Being part of a missions organization in Hong Kong truly has been quite an experience! Hong Kong is a city full of different cultures, people groups, languages, and cross-cultural experiences. I’ve met people from so many different countries, just right here in my neighborhood.

Christ-Centered Community

Moving to the other side of the world was a huge step of faith for me! I don’t know what I would be doing without the community that I have here. I’m blessed to be surrounded by like-minded brothers and sisters, who are passionate for missions and seeing people meet Jesus! Some have been serving the Lord for decades and others have recently made the decision to be in the mission field. We are a small community but we represent almost every continent! I love that our community has both hot and cold cultures (I can write a blog post about this in the future!) and different ways of communication, love languages, personalities, ways of working. Sometimes it takes over-communicating to really understand where we all come from, BUT, that doesn’t stop us from learning of each other and adapting to one another. There really is no culture that is “better” than the other. God is the creator of all cultures and people, and it’s always a joy to continue learning and walking with others who are different from me. :)

I’ve also been able to join a care group at an international church and it’s been a blast to connect with other young people who are students or young professionals in different fields of work. Having experience working in the design industry, I love connecting with people who are in different professional fields! I love seeing how God can use us in our workplace to be a light to others.

Hope for the City

Well, what a time to be here! I think God already knew I was going to be in Hong Kong during this season of political unrest. Coming from Venezuela, I completely understand and have emotionally been through it. Honestly, yes, it has been quite emotional, crazy, frustrating, yet I see God working so much in people’s lives and in the churches of Hong Kong. I’ve seen unity and creativity. When a city is shaken, it’s when the gospel really spreads like fire! We continue to pray for Hong Kong and for the plans God has for this beautiful city.

FOOD, FOOD, FOOD!

Nothing makes me happier than enjoying a good meal! Especially when it’s something new, or something that I really love. Food really does bring people together. At least in my family, I grew up just enjoying food with my family, cooking together, sitting around the table and eating GOOD FOOD. My dad and I have the same love language: give us food and we’ll be happy! Lately, Hainanese Chicken has been my all time favorite. Honestly, I could eat it every day until I get sick of it, which probably wouldn’t happen.

Learning about my Cultural Heritage

The definition of cultural heritage is this:

Cultural Heritage is an expression of the ways of living developed by a community and passed on from generation to generation, including customs, practices, places, objects, artistic expressions and values.

So thankful for my parents that they passed along Cantonese language (thank God because I would not imagine learning 9 tones from scratch!!!), food, ways of cooking, and expressions. My dad taught me so much about Hong Kong’s golden years of music every day on my ride to school. I grew up in Venezuela but I realized that my Chinese culture definitely shapes the way I do daily life. It’s been a time of embracing my cultural roots and even learning more history about both sides of my family.

Sharing about Overseas Chinese Communities

It’s been in my heart to share the need of evangelism and discipleship among the overseas Chinese communities that live in other countries. Being an overseas Chinese myself, I used to be so frustrated because I couldn’t connect well with my cultural roots. I didn’t know how to connect with the Chinese we were first generation of immigrants. For me, it was so foreign, so traditional, so different from me. It felt like there was a million barriers when sharing the gospel in Cantonese to people who didn’t grow up hearing about Jesus. Last year, it finally hit me. I grew to love and embrace the Chinese culture and God starting to stir in me a passion to reach out to more overseas Chinese. Currently in Hong Kong, we have a Spanish fellowship that is focused on reaching out to Spanish speakers, but the majority are Chinese-Venezuelans that have moved to Hong Kong in the recent years. It literally feels like family, even though we are all Chinese-Venezuelans from different cities. I can’t wait to see more of what God will continue to do in this fellowship. In the past couple months, I’ve been able to share the vision of evangelism and discipleship for overseas Chinese to different communities in Hong Kong.

Overall, it’s been an adventure living in Hong Kong, and some times I still can’t believe I live here.

Looking back, I would never imagine living here. I used to say “Hong Kong is just for vacation, it will never be a place for me to live.” God can turn things around. Haha! Never say never to God! You don’t know where He might send you. It’s been a WHILE since I last wrote a blog, but thank you for reading until the end and I hope you were able to get a little glimpse of Hong Kong through this!