Eight things that are true if you went to an international school in Hong Kong

If you’ve ever attended an international school in Hong Kong, you’ll know what it’s like to be forced into bland cotton trousers and skirts with matching button-down shirts and blouses emblazoned with your school logo. Stuffy and ugly, the uniform made you look forward to casual days, or any school-sanctioned excuse to wear whatever the hell you wanted. What’s more – the week leading up to dress-casual day was usually spent carefully curating an outfit to blow away your supposedly fashion-backward schoolmates.

Okay, we realise not all schools require this, but one of the perks to having a student population generally coming from upper-income families is the access to premium resources. One of those is the ability to order Apple products – specifically Macbooks for each student – through school programmes, making the use of Macbooks absolutely mandatory for certain institutions. The 13” Macbook Pro goes from $9,988 to $14,388, so if you happen to spot teenagers running around in clusters an Apple laptop, chances are they go to an international school.

Every international school has it – that week where students are required to go forth, see the world and maybe even volunteer or perform in places like Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Korea or Japan, or anywhere in Europe. The objective is always to give students a better perspective of the world, but really it’s a blissful week away from classes to goof off with your friends and get away from your parents.

IB, AP, A-levels, extracurricular tutorials, piano or violin lessons, gymnastics and another sport to boot… Even just the chosen accreditation is a lifetime of stress and trauma enough, but in a world where a B is a failure and an A is par for the course, you have to make sure you’re getting that piano diploma in addition to practising three days a week for your (parentally) chosen sport too. And though stress is commonplace in both international and local schools, the constant parental guilt-tripping reminders regarding your exorbitant tuition fees don’t make things any easier.

The moment you friend or follow someone on social media who also went to an international school, there’s a high chance that you’ll discover a bunch of mutual friends between the two of you. Even if you’re not in the same year, everyone knows everyone or knows someone who knows someone who knows that person.

Speaking of knowing everyone, you probably have friends or friends of friends who live in all corners of the globe. Not only that, being an international school kid comes with all sorts of travel perks since your classmates have probably visited the places you’re thinking of going to (it’s a small world, literally and figuratively), know all the good spots and even know someone you can crash with while you’re there.

This is the question that nearly everyone hates answering. There are only so many ways you can explain that you were born in the UK, lived in Singapore for two years and recently moved to Hong Kong without wanting to gouge your eyes out. Have fun explaining your convoluted origin story.

Applying in particular to international school students of Asian descent, there is always a genuine yet condescending surprise when you start uttering words in English. Without any stereotypical Asian accent and with proper grammar, it leads to shock and awe for listeners who don't realise that English is probably your first language, sometimes at the expense of your ability to communicate in your native tongue (whoops).