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On a Saturday night, men in t-shirts and tank tops and a few women sip cocktails and chat in Hong Kong’s highest and one of its most popular gay bars, Bing Bing, on the 22nd floor of the Oliv building in Causeway Bay.  “Bing Bing is a safe space for us,” said Felicia Ho Chui-man, 49, a straight woman who was at the bar. “To my gay friends, Bing Bing is what they are used to and the most comfortable with.”  Bing Bing, located in the Wan Chai district, is known for its eight years of history, Korean pop music and affordable cocktails. Together with the several gay bars in the district and those in the neighbouring Central and Western District, they form a hub for the LGBTQ+ community in Hong Kong. “We try to provide a private space for gay community, to connect and to share all the support and fear,”  said Yim Kai-kong, the manager of Bing Bing for the last seven years.  Wu Tin-chak, the chairman of GayHK_caring, an NGO that helps local gay teenagers and students, said one of the reasons why gay people go to the Wan Chai district for entertainment, especially nightlife, is its deep historical roots.” According to the Hong Kong Public Records Office, nightlife in Wan Chai can be traced back to the Japanese occupation period from 1941 to 1945. At the time, Wan Chai district was a designated “entertainment area.”  During the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, Hong Kong began to receive servicemen from the United States who were on leave. Bars and nightclubs in Wan Chai prospered when Americans from the United Nations Command landed at a small pier on Fenwick Street that was demolished in 2022. Published in 1957, British writer Richard Mason's book “The World of Suzie …

Building public awareness about the hardships faced by 15,000 refugees and asylum seekers in Hong Kong remains a priority for the city, a rights group says.  Speaking on the sidelines of the Home and Away charity football tournament it organised last week, Branches of Hope executive director Alexander Pforte said an intensifying global refugee resettlement challenge, fuelled by geopolitical tensions, anti-immigrant sentiment and populism, has compounded their clients’ hardships “exponentially”.  “We can see this anywhere in the world. If you look at Europe and North America, which are the [primary] countries for resettlement, geopolitics and domestic politics [both] play a role…in fuelling rejection and reluctance to accept refugees and asylum seekers,” Pforte said. The annual tournament, which has been growing each year, attracted 29 teams last week to King’s Park, with about 580 players participating in this fourth consecutive edition. This year also marked the first time the tournament has branched out to youth, involving schools across Hong Kong to raise awareness of an issue it described as polarising.  “Either people don’t know that there are refugees and asylum seekers in Hong Kong, or if they know, they think that they’re here illegally or don’t have a proper claim and that they have no right to be here,” Pforte said.  As of September this year, Hong Kong’s Immigration Department received 1,925 applications for torture claims or non-refoulement protection. While the city does not grant asylum or legally recognise refugees, it has systematically screened asylum applications since late 2009. Of the 33,060 cases it has determined, only 379 or approximately 1% of those, have been successful. The majority of successful claimants have come from Pakistan, Yemen and Indonesia.  Often, these non-refoulement claimants or refugees must wait for years, if not decades, for authorities to determine their cases. During this prolonged limbo, …

Joey Li's dream of studying in Hong Kong is confined to a 10-square-meter room barely larger than a parking space.  The 21-year-old undergraduate from Guangdong, who majors in Integrated Communication Management at Hong Kong Baptist University’s College of International Education, paid HK$4,000 monthly for this partitioned corner in a shared 30-square-meter apartment. She shares this apartment at a cost of HK$15,500 a month with two other roommates, each of whom has a private bedroom. The sacrifice is a loss of privacy, where she is constantly accompanied by the noises of roommates cooking or using the bathroom. "It makes me feel bad, but I have no choice," Li said. To save more money, she mainly cooks at her residence and resorts to McDonald's and frozen food.  Li is one of nearly 89,000 non-local students studying in Hong Kong, a number set to grow dramatically as the government pushes its “Study in Hong Kong” brand. Non-local student quotas have been doubled by 40% and are set to hit  50% next academic year.  However, the city’s eight top universities are only offering about 42,000 dormitory places. This severe shortage forces the majority of non-local students into the private rental market, where soaring demand squeezes prices in university-adjacent districts like Shatin.  According to the University Grants Committee, all full-time UGC-funded undergraduate students are only eligible for one year of on-campus housing during their studies at universities.  Starting from the second year, both non-local and local students must apply for on-campus accommodation, with allocation subject to a screening process. The school considers factors such as commuting time, academic performance, and participation in student activities when assessing applications, according to the official websites of HKBU, CUHK and HSU. For postgraduate students, on-campus housing is not guaranteed, especially when the number of applicants exceeds available places. At …