Hey Bill,

The answer to one part of your post is that in HK most expats are out there on short contracts. Hence, unless you want your kids to go to boarding school, you need to get them schooled somewhere that they speak the language and that their education can be a continuation of what they were doing at home.

Hence you find the French school, full of french speaking kids preparing for the Baccaleureat, German Swiss kids at the GSIS doing German and swiss exams, English kids at the ESF schools doing A-levels, and American kids doing SAT's at the American international school.

To name but a few ...

Being Irish, I ended up in the english system along with 37 other nationalities.

We all spoke English.

Very few ever learned cantonese - even the ones who spent most of their formative years there.

wierd but practical.

I have spent long hours searching my soul to reconcile the fact that I grew up on the coast of China, yet my second language after english is french.

But expat culture was transient and friends came and went and that is why it was the way it was.

As if things weren't complicated enough already.