"Even if I sleep on the street in the UK, I won't go back to China" Hong Kong female teachers are dissatisfied with the system, give up more than 40,000 monthly salaries, and leave Hong Kong in a rage.
Fiona, a 21-year-old senior female teacher, originally lived a worry-free life in Hong Kong with her husband Aman, and the two worked diligently to support their small family. Although it is not a wealthy family, it can at least live a passable life and save a surplus amount of money.
Fiona's monthly salary is about 40,000 yuan, and her husband Aman is a bus driver with a monthly income of about 30,000 yuan, and the basic salary of the two of them adds up to 70,000 yuan, which is enough for daily expenses. Not only that, but they also hired a Filipino nanny, and such a petty bourgeois life can't help but be enviable.
In a busy city, the pace of life is fast, the pressure of work is increasing, and the chores of the family can be tiring to deal with. They have to deal with heavy work tasks every day, and when they return home, they are still busy with household chores, with little time to rest and relax.
Despite their hard work, Fiona and Aman often struggle to make ends meet, but their income is not enough to meet their expectations. Although their income is relatively high, in Hong Kong, where every inch of land is at a premium, they used all their savings to buy a house of less than 30 square meters.
And since her daughter went to school, Fiona felt unprecedented pressure, the school would assign a lot of homework to the children and ask parents to supervise the completion, which made Fiona, who was already physically and mentally exhausted after a day of work, even more irritable.
In order to prevent her daughter from being criticized by the teacher, she can only endure to obey the teacher's arrangement. The high-intensity cram schools, the interval of exams, and the exam-oriented education in Hong Kong also overwhelm the children, and they don't want to live this kind of life anymore.
So they hit it off and decided to immigrate abroad, thinking that living abroad would be much less stressful and their quality of life would improve. Eventually, they decided to immigrate to the UK, choosing the UK because a friend told them that the pass rate for immigrating to the UK is the highest.
After telling the news to relatives and friends, it was met with collective opposition, the first was Fiona's mother, she felt that Britain was a foreign country, unfamiliar with life, and it was impossible to live at all, even if the language communication was barrier-free, education and work were the biggest problems.
But how can they care about these dissuasions? Fiona thinks that she is a graduate student, can she not find a job in England? Oman also thinks that as long as she can go to England, everything will not be worse than now. As the best English speaker in the family, Fiona began to devote herself to the immigration process.
Fiona and her husband applied for immigrant visas and started a new life. However, when they first arrived in the UK, they spent a lot of time traveling, resulting in almost running out of deposits. When they began to look for work and housing, they encountered difficulties.
Fiona wanted to be a teacher, but her Hong Kong teaching credentials and experience were invalid in the UK, making it impossible for her to find a suitable job. The husband's driver's licence is also not recognised in the UK and he cannot continue in his original job.
Fiona wondered if they had really made the right decision to come to England, and her husband, Aman, was much more stable than Fiona, and he was confident about the future, saying, "I'd rather be a beggar here than go back to be emperor." ”
In the two weeks they came to the UK, the couple spent 50,000 Hong Kong dollars, but they couldn't find a job. Looking at the money that continues to be consumed, the two have their first quarrel, and Fiona proposes to end the house early in order to save money and find a relatively cheap long-term rental house. The husband looked helpless, but he had to agree with his wife.
In order to subsidize her family, Fiona had to find a nearby factory and work as an ordinary worker on the assembly line of the biscuit factory. Fiona was originally a master's degree graduate and a high-ranking people's teacher, but she became an assembly line worker overnight, and she couldn't accept the gap, so she spread her anger on her husband.
She once thought that if her husband still did not want to make progress, the two would likely divorce in the future. Fiona's husband had no choice but to go out to look for a job, and after running into walls everywhere, he could only deliver food every day to earn money, because he was unfamiliar with the place and the language barrier, so he suffered a lot.
Disappointment and frustration began to creep in between Fiona and Oman. They gradually realise that what they thought was the British dream was in fact a fragile bubble that was bursting with reality. In pursuit of illusory happiness, they lost Hong Kong's stable life and abundant economic resources, in exchange for the reality of living a hard life in the UK.
Facing the camera, Fiona and Aman admitted that the next time they broke out into a quarrel, it would probably be time to separate. Oman seems to have forgotten that he had made a wish to be a beggar in England rather than an emperor in China.