Footage of a Chinese woman covering her nose while sitting next to a black woman on the MTR has been shared widely on social media, igniting an online discussion over racial discrimination in Hong Kong.
The clip shows the Chinese woman sitting with a young boy, who appears to be her son, pressing a tissue to her nose. The uploader, a young black woman named Harmony, is heard saying, “When I came to sit next to her, she decided to put tissue on her nose.”
Harmony then gave her seat to her mother, but noted that the Chinese woman continued “doing the same shit”, which Harmony’s mum countered by also covering her nose.
“Whenever I tell people I face discrimination in Hong Kong no one seems to believe me,” Harmony wrote in the description of her video. “This lady was actually fine, she wasn’t having a running nose or whatsoever.”
Since it was uploaded last Friday, the video has been shared over 880 times, sparking comments from others who had similar experiences in Hong Kong.
One netizen who shared the video said, “This is the same thing that happens to me and my mom in the train. Stop discriminating us”, while a commenter accused the woman of setting a bad example for her son that’s “worse than drinking alcohol in front of him”.
A Coconaut who reached out to us described the video as an example of the “painful problems and discrimination we feel every day”.
On Reddit, some seemed to agree with Harmony that such instances of apparent discrimination are commonplace in Hong Kong.
While acknowledging that “this kind of behaviour does occur quite often,” one commenter expressed their disappointment that the Chinese passenger in the video appears to be “fairly young”, as they are more used to seeing “close-minded reactions” amongst the elderly.
Another Redditor agreed that “it’s not a secret HK is pretty racist”, but said the act wasn’t inherently racist, as “it could easily be a [body odour] issue, HK is hot and a lot of people smell awful in the summer.”
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