That year, the family of five squeezed into a 100 sq ft cubicle unit in a dilapidated tenement building on Kweilin Street in Sham Shui Po, one of the city’s poorest districts.

Her husband, now 76, worked as a full-time security guard. For HK$1,200 a month, the family slept on a bunk bed in their room, and shared a kitchen and bathroom with five other households.

The squeezed living place, the new environment, the different lifestyle in Hong Kong and her mainland background left her feeling stressed at first.

“I was a newcomer, and I felt anxious. But I was willing to work hard and do everything for my family,” she said.

Except for the first two years when she stayed at home to look after her daughters and received government welfare allowances, Li worked to support the family.

Thanks to her fluent Cantonese – the dialect of her hometown – she found part-time work as a store saleswoman, domestic helper and cleaner, earning about HK$2,000 a month.

“I was careful, worked hard, and didn’t mind putting in more work than others,” she said. “As time went on, others saw and appreciated my efforts.”

She observed how the locals spoke and behaved, and learned from talking to the parents of her children’s classmates.

She remembered taking her daughters to the Tung Chau Street Park at 7am on a weekend to play and do morning exercises, just as they did on the mainland, but police officers stopped and checked their identities, saying no locals would wake up so early to go to a park on a rest day.

Life gradually improved. The family moved into a 200 sq ft flat a year later, and then a slightly bigger one with more windows. In 2000, they settled in a public rental flat in Sham Shui Po, with two bedrooms and a living room. Li has lived there since.

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For more than 20 years, she has been a volunteer with local NGO Society for Community Organisation, which serves the underprivileged including mainland immigrants, providing courses and activities for them and their children to help them adapt to the new environment.

Having found comfort there when she arrived, she has been helping other newcomers.

Li said she witnessed positive changes over the decades. Compared with the old days when most mainlanders came for family reunion, there were more younger, higher-educated mainland residents who came to Hong Kong to study and work.

She waited 15 years, but new immigrants now wait about four years.

Li considered herself lucky for not encountering much unfair treatment after she arrived, which she attributed to her fluency in Cantonese and efforts to learn and work hard.

But she has heard of other migrants being discriminated against by locals. They were paid less for the same work, made to work longer hours, and insulted in public, being told to “go back to the mainland”.

She said she felt heartbroken by the anti-mainland sentiment during the months of social unrest and protests in 2019.

“We are a big family, we should live in harmony,” she said.

She made a point of returning to her hometown to visit her parents and two younger brothers every year. Since her parents died about 10 years ago, she has returned to visit their graves during the annual Ching Ming Festival.

Li and her husband retired a few years ago and live with their eldest daughter. Her two younger daughters moved out after marrying and starting their own families.

Now a grandmother of three, Li said: “I have never regretted coming to Hong Kong. It was all for my family and it has all been worth it.”

The British expat: Curious to see the boats at Aberdeen, he stayed a lifetime

Peter Mann was in his early 20s and at home in Bath when he watched the Hong Kong film Enter The Dragon and was enthralled.

It was not kung fu legend Bruce Lee’s moves that captured his imagination, but a scene of the Aberdeen typhoon shelter with rows of boats crammed next to each other in lines stretching as far as the eye could see.

“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen anything like that.’ And I thought how wonderful it would be to spend a few years in Hong Kong,” recalled Mann, now 69.

He was 23 when he left England on an overcast October day in 1976. Like countless expatriates before him, and many more since, his stay stretched into decades and Hong Kong became home.

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Hong Kong was still a British colony when Mann arrived and became a police inspector. He learned Cantonese on the job. He then became a government administrator, with a stint as district officer for Wan Chai that earned him the nickname “The Sheriff of Wan Chai”.

He was a civil servant through the years when Britain and China were negotiating the handover of Hong Kong, with the agreement that Beijing would allow the city to retain a high degree of autonomy for at least 50 years.

Working in the government secretariat, he rubbed shoulders with people involved in the discussions, describing it as “a time of great tension, because nobody was quite sure what was going to happen”.

The city also saw waves of emigration, with people leaving in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing, and in the years leading up to the handover on July 1, 1997.

For Mann, however, there was never any question of leaving Hong Kong.

“It was a real international city with such an incredible variety of people. I think of all the great people I’ve met, all the friendships I’ve built. It was my home,” he said.

In the years leading to the handover, Mann also recalled optimism about Hong Kong returning to China and the “one country, two systems” model of governance.

“People thought it could work, Hong Kong could keep its freedoms and we’d have the best of all worlds,” he said.

Mann remembered June 30, 1997, the eve of the handover, for the pouring rain and a sea of blue and white umbrellas soaked through.

A particular memory was of the Prince of Wales and about 4,000 guests from around the world witnessing the final lowering of the Union flag and the raising of the Chinese one.

“I will always remember Prince Charles standing there with the water cascading off his hat. Unbelievable that it went ahead, as it did in the pouring rain, and what an incredible day that was,” he said.

He was at the Furama hotel’s revolving restaurant that evening, watching the British Navy warship, HMS Chatham, which escorted the Royal Yacht Britannia. Many people were in tears, both British and Chinese.

“I remember seeing grown men crying. It was a very emotional time and an emotional period, and no one was quite sure how it was going to turn out. But as it happened, it was very successful,” he said.

He retired from the civil service in 2001 and is currently chairman of the Hong Kong branch of the Royal Commonwealth Society.

Mann, who married a Hongkonger 23 years ago and has no children, splits his time between England and Hong Kong.

Asked if he ever visited the Aberdeen typhoon shelter that sparked his interest in Hong Kong, he said he did.

Seeing the boats packed together there was simply incredible in real life, he said.

The Indian toddler: Her grandfather came first, now the city is home

Ayeesha Francis was three years old when she moved to Hong Kong from Mumbai, India, with her mother and sister in 1987.

The city was not unfamiliar to them.

Her maternal grandfather had immigrated during the Partition of India in 1947, when his home province of Sindh became part of the new nation, Pakistan. He was among the Hindus and Sikhs who left, uprooted from their homeland.

He set up an insurance business in Hong Kong. His daughter, Soni, was born and raised in the city, but returned to India to get married.

After her divorce, she brought her two daughters to settle in Hong Kong working as a real estate agent.

Francis, the older one, recalled a childhood that was safe, and included family picnics on Repulse Bay Beach.

In 1997, she was 13 and a student at West Island School. She was part of a group of schoolchildren who performed a dance at the handover ceremony.

She wore a sparkly outfit and waved a ribbon in the air. She recalled the colours, fireworks, pomp and ceremony, as well as the rain.

“I remember thinking, I’m living through history right now,” she said. “I remember there was a little bit of sadness in the air that something was coming to an end.”

She was in an international school and many of her expatriate friends left Hong Kong at the time.

She went to university in London and began her career as a teacher there, before returning to Hong Kong in 2008.

She said Hong Kong had parts of other countries and cities all in one place, from the weather to the convenience, the buzz, and the beaches and mountains.

In 2014 she met the man who would become her husband, entrepreneur, Mark Francis, now 38 like her, who was born in Hong Kong and grew up in the city. His Welsh father moved to Hong Kong in 1969 and was a police officer for 35 years. His Eurasian mother worked for Hong Kong Telecom.

“It’s easy to bond with someone who’s had this unique upbringing, where it’s a bit East meets West,” she recalled.

She was in Hong Kong when it was rocked by the 2019 anti-government protests and remained through the Covid-19 pandemic.

While there have been a number of people leaving Hong Kong, Francis said the city had a grit and resilience other places did not have.

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“I know there’s a lot of doubt as to whether it’s going to bounce back from all that’s happened in the last three years, but at the same time, Hong Kong’s track record is that we bounce back from everything,” she said.

“We are a super resilient community of people who are hungry, who work hard, who are educated. Why wouldn’t it bounce back?”

Her mother and grandparents have died, but her plan is to stay in Hong Kong and raise a family with her husband.

“It’s my home and I’m grateful that we have roots that run so deep, that they’re hard to pick up and move,” she said. “We will stay as long as we can, as long as we are welcome. We will stay.”