Abstract

This thesis examines the lived experiences of refugees in Hong Kong, a global city that permits temporary stay but offers no local resettlement. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with refugee households, NGO workers, lawyers, and local residents, it explores how refugees live, work, reside, raise children, and imagine the future under prolonged transit. I develop the concept of transitionality to describe a condition in which present life is organized around the promise of future departure, while that future is repeatedly delayed by transnational legal and migration regimes. The study shows that Hong Kong is a place of “arrival without arrival”: refugees reach safety from immediate return but remain excluded from stable membership. Transitionality shapes education, work, housing, family life, and resettlement pathways. I argue that transit can become an institutionalized way of life, in which refugees are always about to leave yet never fully arrive.