Hundreds of thousands of Hongkongers made the most painful of calculations: take the children and leave, or stay for the grandparents. Most chose the children. The grandparents are still there. The video calls are never enough.
BY APPLE DAILY UK FEATURES DESK
As Apple Daily UK has documented, Jason and Emma Wong retained their Hong Kong apartment when they moved to outer London in 2022. This was partly financial — Hong Kong property is an asset — but there was another reason, the one that sits beneath many of the practical calculations that BN(O) families make. They left their parents in Hong Kong. The apartment is a physical tether, a reason to go back for visits that become progressively more fraught as the NSL landscape evolves, a way of not quite accepting that the departure is final.
The parent question is one of the least publicly discussed and most privately devastating aspects of the BN(O) migration. The visa scheme, by design, covers nuclear families: spouses, dependent children, and in some limited circumstances dependent parents and siblings. But parents who are healthy, independent, and not financially dependent on their children do not typically qualify as dependants. The generation that stayed behind is, by and large, the generation that could not easily be brought along — too old to easily uproot, too attached to their communities, too bound by the specific geography of their daily lives to begin again in Yorkshire or Bristol.
"These elements — parents, pets, friends — create invisible ties that stitch migrants to their home city."
— David Tsoi, Anthropology News, December 2025, on Hong Kong migrants in outer London
For BN(O) families with elderly parents in Hong Kong, the video call has become the primary medium of filial relationship. This is not the same as being present. It cannot replicate the dim sum morning, the spontaneous visit, the physical proximity of family crisis and family celebration. It cannot deliver the specific reassurance of being in the same room as an ageing parent. But it is what is available, across a time difference of eight hours, on a phone screen in a British kitchen while children are doing homework at the table.
The time difference is a particular cruelty. Eight hours means that when British BN(O) holders are getting their children ready for school in the morning, Hong Kong is in the afternoon. The overlap in waking hours is narrow, concentrated in British evenings when Hong Kong mornings are beginning. Families develop rituals around this narrow window: the Sunday video call, the WeChat message exchange in lieu of conversation, the deliberate cultivation of shared experiences across the gap — watching the same television drama, sharing photographs of meals, narrating the events of days lived in different climates and different political realities.
Whether to visit Hong Kong is a decision that BN(O) holders with any history of political activity must weigh carefully. The NSL is explicitly extraterritorial and explicitly retroactive — activities conducted before its enactment can theoretically be prosecuted. Attending a protest vigil in London, speaking at a public forum on Hong Kong democracy, writing articles for diaspora publications, or simply being a former Apple Daily subscriber are not, in themselves, criminal under British law. They may be under Hong Kong's NSL. The risk assessment is inherently personal and inherently uncertain.
Many BN(O) holders do visit — particularly those who have no formal political profile and whose departures were motivated by general rather than specific concerns about freedom. Others do not. And for those who do not, or cannot, visit — the separation from ageing parents becomes permanently negotiated rather than temporarily managed. Grandparents meet grandchildren on a screen. Important family conversations happen across a fibre connection. The accumulated minor humiliations and small joys of daily family life cannot be transmitted at any bandwidth.
"My mother is 76. She has never held my daughter's hand. She has seen her grow from a baby to a six-year-old on a phone screen."
The February 2026 expansion of BNO eligibility extended the scheme to adult children of BN(O) status holders who had previously been ineligible to apply independently. This is a meaningful improvement that will bring thousands more younger Hong Kongers into the scheme. It does not address the parent problem. The generation of Hong Kongers in their seventies and eighties — people who worked Hong Kong's industries, raised families during the colonial period, and are now watching their children's diaspora from flats in Kowloon and the New Territories — are largely beyond the scheme's reach unless they can be classified as dependants.
Some families have found workarounds: visitor visas for extended stays, applications for dependent parent status where the financial circumstances support it. Some elderly parents have themselves applied for BNO status where they qualify. But these are partial solutions for a structural problem that the visa architecture, as currently designed, does not fully address. The family separation is, in many cases, intended to be temporary. In practice, for a generation of elderly Hongkongers whose health makes long-haul travel difficult and whose children cannot safely return, it is becoming permanent.
The full cost of that permanence — measured in final conversations had by video, in funerals missed, in the specific grief of not being present at the end of a parent's life — will not appear in any policy document or integration survey. It is carried privately, by hundreds of thousands of people — whose stories Apple Daily UK is committed to telling who chose their children's future over their own parents' proximity, and who live with that choice every day in the quiet of British evenings that Hong Kong can only reach by phone.