Hong Kong Stories

Minding My Own Business (39x3)

Exibido em:: Jun 20, 2019

As children, we are often asked the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Typical replies by people from the previous generation would be doctors, drivers, or teachers. However, they would always give just a single answer, because they believed in the idea of focusing on doing one job well. In recent years, a new term – slashie – has emerged in the job market. It refers to a person who has multiple careers, and thus includes one or more slashes in their job titles: ___/___/___/___. Slashies are mostly youngsters. They don’t want to be tied down to only one job, and aspire to seek self-fulfilment in addition to making a living, so that they can enrich themselves while managing their own time. When it comes to career development, there is another choice: Young people in their twenties who have the vitality, determination, as well as innovation, can consider starting their own businesses, and become a boss instead of an employee. In this episode, Iris, Edward, and Dora, three youngsters in their twenties, will tell us about their careers, show us their working conditions, and share their views on today’s Hong Kong. Edward and Dora both have a master’s degree, yet are multi-tasking slashies. Edward is an editor/translator/private tutor/bassist/composer and arranger, while Dora resigned from her job as a researcher at a university so that she can plan her own time and concentrate on developing her career as a translator/calligraphy designer. Iris, on the other hand, is a young entrepreneur who runs a wedding photography business. An entrepreneur and two wage earners – despite working multiple jobs, the three of them have no security! Being an entrepreneur means you are on your own. Freelancing slashies enjoy neither benefits nor protection. If entrepreneurs and slashies cannot make themselves stand out from the crowd in the fiercely competitive marketplace, they will only be able to subsist on an unstable income, with no opportunities to mov