Written by Judy Lee.
Image credit: 保護傘 Aegis Facebook.
Were it not for emotions, this part of my research would not even exist.
Between 2023 and 2024, I spent roughly six months conducting fieldwork in Taiwan among Hongkongers who had arrived since mid-2019 — the moment the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement gathered mass participation and triggered what would become one of the most emotionally shattering episodes in Hong Kong’s modern history. I aimed to understand how this new diaspora engages with its adopted home: how individuals accumulate social capital, build communities, and quietly (or not so quietly) reshape the image of Hongkongers in Taiwan. What I did not fully anticipate was how central emotions would be to every dimension of that story, including my own role within it.
Here are the numbers behind the feeling. The scale of this migration is not negligible. According to statistics from the ROC National Immigration Agency, more than 48,500 Hongkongers had acquired permission to temporarily reside in Taiwan between June 2019 and the first quarter of 2025, with an average of 1,500 permanent residency permits granted each year. Yet empirical data about who these people are, how they live, and what they feel remains thin. Basic government statistics tell us little about the texture of daily life, the emotional motivations behind community formation, or the particular ways Hongkongers are embedding themselves and enriching Taiwanese society.
Learning to “Be Water”
My initial fieldwork plan was orderly: sample participants across class, age, and gender; conduct structured interviews; build a representative picture. Reality had other ideas.
Some targets were simply too busy to meet a PhD student. Others, such as former protest participants dealing with trauma and mental health challenges, were effectively unreachable. And I quickly discovered that post-2019, many Hongkongers in Taiwan operate under an unspoken “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about the circumstances of their departure, wary of doxxing or political repercussions. Trust had to be earned slowly, through mutual contacts and patience. Pressing strangers on sensitive matters early on caused awkwardness and, more worryingly, risked embarrassing the informants who had vouched for me.
I eventually abandoned my original design and embraced what I can only call an “opportunistic” approach: connecting with anyone available, following conversations where they led, and letting gatherings form organically. I began convening small groups of people who may or may not have known each other, creating space for socialising that doubled as participant observation. This felt, in spirit, like a tribute to the collective improvisation tactics Hong Kong protesters used in 2019: be water, find the path of least resistance, adapt.
This looser methodology turned out to be far more generative. People spoke more freely. Connections formed between participants that outlasted my visit. New initiatives emerged from these meetings that I had not planned for—which raised its own questions about where research ends and facilitation begins, but I managed to come to terms with myself on this question.
Three Ways Emotion Drives Engagement
Across my fieldwork, three patterns emerged in how Hongkongers’ emotional attachments to their home city were shaping their lives in Taiwan.
The first was a commitment to community service. The most immediate expression was simply doing good in the neighbourhood. Hongkongers I met were organising volunteers to care for stray animals, visit people experiencing homelessness, and distribute meals. Others, with more resources, were planning a touring performance group made up of people with disabilities, explicitly funded through ticket sales and business sponsors rather than government subsidies. The point, as they explained it, was not charity but normalisation: people with disabilities as equals in the creative sphere, not recipients of sympathy. This inclusionary instinct mapped onto something that had developed in Hong Kong during and after 2019, when neighbourhood WhatsApp groups that began as security networks evolved into mutual-aid communities, and when South Asian Hongkongers who had long been invisible suddenly became recognised as part of “us” at the frontlines and on social media.
The second pattern was the use of cultural production to preserve memory and sustain identity. Emotions also found expression in art and publishing. Taiwanese and Hong Kong performance artists collaborated on Speak, Hong Kong, a theatre production drawing on the poetry of Liu Wai-tong that tells Hong Kong’s history through a weave of Cantonese, Mandarin, music, and dance. Hongkonger-run bookstores and independent publishers have set up in Taiwan, curating works on Hong Kong history and culture alongside broader themes of democracy, human rights, and identity. These are not simply commercial ventures; they function as guardians of cultural memory.
Finally, student outreach is central. In Kaohsiung, university students from Hong Kong established culture clubs, ran social media accounts, mounted exhibitions, and organised flea markets, introducing their peers to Stephen Chow films, Cantonese slang, and Hong Kong snacks. They have gone further, visiting secondary and high schools to tell the Hong Kong story, sometimes organising displays of books that have been banned or censored at home. Taiwanese students have grown up in a democratic society and are taught its values. But a Hongkonger standing in front of them with a lived account of what democracy’s erosion looks like offers something a textbook cannot.
On Being a Researcher with Feelings
Is it problematic that I found myself moved by what I witnessed? Scholars once assumed fieldwork required a dispassionate stance—an assumption that has since been largely dismantled. Amanda Coffey put it plainly: fieldwork is about emotions, because we all have feelings about our research settings and the people within them. James Davies and Dimitrina Spencer go further, arguing that the emotions that arise in the field are not merely personal but shaped by the social structures we are studying, which means attending to them is analytically useful, not self-indulgent.
I am a Hongkonger researching Hongkongers. My insider position opened doors, transformed introductions into something closer to reunions, and gave me a vantage point I could not have manufactured from the outside. It also meant I was not a neutral observer but a participant with stakes: someone who, at moments, shifted from documenting community formation to actively facilitating it. I am comfortable with that. Research that “melts” into quotidian life, that evolves as relationships develop, produces a more honest picture of a world that is itself constantly moving.
A Cross-Cultural Fieldwork Note
Doing fieldwork on Hongkongers in Taiwan means sitting at the intersection of two very different temperaments. Hongkongers have a reputation for being direct, efficient, and occasionally blunt. Taiwanese society is often characterised by warmth, hospitality, and a slower cadence. The friction is real: Hongkongers sometimes chafe at the bureaucratic pace and the weight of pleasantries. Many are reluctant to say so loudly, aware that concerns about immigration and security have sharpened scrutiny of their community. But the slower rhythm also turns out to be an unexpected gift for fieldwork: people have more time, and they use it to talk.
What strikes me most, looking back, is that the emotions Hongkongers carry into Taiwan, such as love for their city, grief at what has been lost, and a stubborn instinct for community, do not dissipate with migration. They find new objects. They get redirected toward neighbours, students, and strangers in need. Emotion, it turns out, is not a methodological problem to be managed. It is the engine of the diaspora itself.
Judy Lee is a PhD student, Research Associate and Lecturer at the Department of Chinese Studies at the University of Tübingen, and a Resident Fellow at the European Research Centre for Contemporary Taiwan.
This article was published as part of the special issue on ‘Feeling Taiwan’.