Have A Nice Day

The inspiration for Have a Nice Day came from my life as an immigrant to Hong Kong. The year before last, I began freelancing, but as income from film work was unstable, I had to find work outside filming.

A motorcycle was left over from the filming of my first short film. At around the same time, Uber Eats began operations in Hong Kong. I joined the fleet of delivery bikes. As I walked into a tiny office for my first Uber briefing, crowded into the room were almost all South-Asians, seemingly at odds with the tech upstart environment.

That same year, the Hong Kong Police made its first arrest of an Uber driver by posing as a customer. The “shared economy”, and what sounded like a noble new business model, was categorically rejected by the Hong Kong authorities. Nonetheless, the positive image of Uber remained undiminished in the eyes of the Hong Kong middle class. I tried to connect the two extremes – a group of people with legal status but unaccepted by society, and a work opportunity not endorsed by the government and yet remains a fad with the mainstream.

So, as an immigrant myself, what different perspective have I to tell this story? One characteristic of the protagonist on which I insisted was that he should be an immigrant from Pakistan – a Muslim. Having grown up in an Islamic society, I am particularly sensitive to the tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims: for example, in Malaysia, Chinese people have to avoid eating in the range of vision of Malays during Ramadan, and the government setting Friday as the day of rest. Malaysian Chinese have always lived with the effects of a dominant Muslim culture.

Things changed when I moved to Hong Kong. I no longer had to concern myself with the Islamic rules, but the Muslims in Hong Kong have an even harder time. They must abide by the strict rules of Islam, but praying five times a day, eating halal, etc., is in no way easy in the Hong Kong environment. I have therefore felt a sense of affinity with the Hong Kong Muslims, as I understand how difficult it is to maintain one’s own culture against the flow of the mainstream.

Fair play does not favour the immigrant. Whenever a conflict arises in Malaysia, one often hears the words “Chinese go back to China!” And yet, can Chinese Malaysian really go back to China? South Asians in Hong Kong face a similar predicament. When confronted with inequities in no man’s land, one can only grit and bear it, and soldier on.

Have a Nice Day is a story of a father who does his best to support the family, a mother who does her best to be independent, a child who longs for his father’s love and a friend who is loyal to his brothers. These four characters sketch an image of the Hong Kong immigrant and are borne out of my own experiences of living in Hong Kong in the last ten years. The story is also an internal dialogue within myself. I see in myself both the man and the wife: his incompetence and her sternness are both fractured facets of my immigrant life.