Although Hong Kong prides itself on being Asia’s World City, a lot of common terms and phrases reflect an anti-foreign sentimentI am not easily offended. Offence-taking in the modern age, it seems, is often used to leverage power and impose one’s moral sensibilities on others. I don’t care. That said, one aspect of Hong Kong culture that has always unsettled me is the way other races are referred to in Cantonese. The roots of these terms come from anti-foreign attitudes. The commonly used phrase for “white person” is (gweilo), which literally means “ghost man”, or “devil man”. The term for...