Meet Caro Chan, Hong Kong’s Rising Chinese-Nigerian Star

Caro Chan is searching for a defining memory of growing up in Hong Kong. There are options: yum cha with her grandfather? Navigating her neighborhood in Shatin? Childhood rhymes like “Spinning Around the Chrysanthemum Garden” (氹氹轉菊花園粵語兒歌歌詞 tam4 tam4 zyun3 guk1 faa1 jyun4 jyut6 jyu5 ji4 go1 go1 ci4 )? 

(For the uninitiated, that’s about childhood mischief during the Dragon Boat Festival.)

Nope. The memory that has stuck with the 30-year-old actress is way more offbeat, possibly only shared by a niche group of TVB costume drama fans. It’s Love is Beautiful (無頭東宮), a hokey face swap from the early aughts that starred Mariane Chan and Anne Heung as two plain village girls who scheme to improve their looks and their social standing, with predictably disruptive consequences. 

The series “resonated with my whole struggle with identity,” Chan recalls of her preteen self. Chan, whose father was Hong Kong Chinese and whose mother is Nigerian Igbo, still hears a sympathetic voice in the lyrics: “Judging me by my identity / Could such a woman be truly cherished? / If appearance can mislead emotions / How can I reveal my true self to you / So that you may see me clearly, if only once?” 

“Growing up, I always felt, looking at the landscape in Hong Kong, there’s a gap between the marginalised people and the mainstream, and most of the time I feel like something in between,” says Chan. She is chatting before rehearsal at the Cattle Depot Artist Village in Ma Tau Kok — incidentally one of Hong Kong’s more ethnically diverse neighborhoods — where she is preparing to reprise her role in Flowing Warblers, On & On Theatre Workshop’s award winning 2024 production about Hong Kong diaspora in Europe and the UK, coming to Freespace in July. 

Feeling like a foreigner is something Chan knows plenty about, even though she was an overseas Hongkonger only briefly, as an English Literature student at Tamkang University in Taipei. In Flowing Warblers 2.0, she plays Beginning, a “moody” girl who is “very attached to her identity as a Hongkonger” but who discovers while abroad that she has to confront what that means. Her dilemma sits easily with Chan; her own bona fides have been put to the test more times than she can count.

Chan was raised by her Chinese grandparents in Tsuen Wan and by her mother in Shatin; her father was an electrical engineer who traveled frequently in Asia and Africa, which is how her parents met. Her grandmother and mother could not communicate except through gestures and cooking, and she learned to step in to translate between Cantonese and English. At Ma On Shan St. Joseph’s Secondary School and later at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA), her classmates didn’t even try to finesse their language, calling her the Black Panther, asking if she had “black people talent’’ and wondering “what kind of Asian” she is and could she even find acting roles in Hong Kong. Their insensitivity still provokes embarrassed laughter. “In high school, I kind of made it into a joke to welcome people into my world,” she counters, with emphasis on “my.”

For Chan Ping-chiu, however, the author and director of Flowing Warblers 2.0, her experiences as a double heritage Hongkonger bring an important authenticity to his investigation of diaspora. 

The play follows five stories of emigration inspired by interviews with three dozen Hongkongers abroad. Given the city’s current demographics — half a million Hong Kong people have relocated since 2019, many thanks to the UK’s British National Overseas visa scheme — Chan Ping-chu says he began to see these beginnings as a crucial lens through which to also question identity for Hongkongers who have stayed but who may occupy a quasi-diasporic imaginative state: living here but no longer tethered to Hong Kong in their minds and hearts, after so many changes in the city. 

“When I think about Hong Kong’s shifting identity or a new journey for young people to search for their identity, I think about Hong Kong’s minority,” says Chan. “Caro is the perfect candidate to embody that role.” Her portrayal in the original production in 2024 earned her a Best Actress nomination from the International Association of Theatre Critics (Hong Kong).

In our interview, Caro Chan shared her story with the guarded reflexes of someone who has seen a lot — she requested, for example, that some of her more painful life history be omitted from this article — and who doesn’t expect to be understood on her own terms. At the same time, in her demeanour and conversation,  she exudes a youthfulness and optimism that belies her years. When it’s time for a photoshoot, she announces that she’s been wanting to jump into a huge avocado-looking floatie among the show’s props, then takes unabashed pleasure in riding a kick scooter around the rehearsal room, her high side ponytails bobbing girlishly.

Chan uses humour to defuse uncomfortable situations, and lately she has been trying out some routines on Hong Kong’s standup comedy scene. Two years out of HKAPA, her CV includes emceeing, music videos, some ViuTV roles and a few professional theatre productions. She shows her most authentic self however, and the potential for that to become an exciting new presence in Hong Kong theatre, in her student demo reel, which is normally where an actor showcases their talents for agents and directors. Chan chose to dig into humorous depictions of her double identity as both Yuen-yu and Ifeyinwa, her Cantonese and Igbo names. She proved she can imitate a traditional Chinese grandparent as naturally as she can network to an Afrobeat dance version of — you guessed it — the theme song to Life is Beautiful. 

That mini-performance also gave Chan an avenue to connect with her mother’s culture, which, she admits, is “still a bit far for me.” She originally considered wearing an Igbo outfit in the demo reel, but chose instead to make a traditional head scarf with her mother’s help: a more subtle identity marker. Chan only traveled once to visit her mother’s relatives, when she was a small child, and her mother’s stories of royal ancestors, Igbo cosmology and traditions, including blood sacrifice, feel “alien” to her.  “It’s so hard to understand,” she confesses. Even depictions of Nigerian life that she saw on the occasional VHS tape growing up didn’t land with her. “I wasn’t exposed to the community in Hong Kong,” she concludes simply.

She found community in theatre instead, while studying in Taiwan and participating in a student production. It was enough for her to decide to audition for HKAPA, where she started with not much prior knowledge but a wellspring of “pure curiosity.” Her training has helped her build confidence: “It really pushed me because I sometimes get trapped in [thinking] maybe my appearance [makes] it hard for people, but it’s just excuses I think. I try to get over that and just really work.”  

“I guess I’m also quite aware of my ability, speaking Cantonese and having the soft skill of working with people,” she continues. “After the hurdle of [people] trying to figure out, ‘who are you?’ I think they slowly get to know me and my true qualities beyond my appearance.” Nevertheless, she loved discovering the neutral mask, a tool developed by the French theatre pedagogue Jacques Lecoq,  “because you don’t see my face anymore. It’s just my body you’re looking at, so what’s the barrier?”

Returning to Flowing Warbler’s stories of diaspora is also preparing Chan for her next role, as an Asian Cultural Council Fellow who will be spending part of 2026 in New York City. “I want to find more of the integration of different cultures,” she says, while acknowledging that immigrants are now being deported from the US without due process, and the possibility that she could experience culture shock:  “I do wonder if New York City is going to be so different from how I grew up.”

It’s probably safe to predict a steep learning curve for her, in the world capital of theatre and migration both. Chan’s first time seeing an African-American actress on stage was a few years ago when she was studying Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, about a struggling Black family in Chicago. She confesses she hasn’t considered how identity politics might shape her experiences there and doesn’t know where to start trying to understand New York’s theatre world. She hints that she may focus on her standup skills in the city of comedy legends like Joan Rivers, George Carlin and Jerry Seinfeld, then guides the conversation back to what she knows best: Hong Kong identity.

“Hong Kong has always been shifting. This is a phenomenon that will never end and the identity will always change over time,” she says. “I still wonder if attachment to identity really matters. We cling to our language and our practices, and I do wonder how long it can last. But there’s a need to adapt to a new world ahead of us.” 

As Beginning in Flowing Warblers 2.0, and with the lessons of her dual heritage, which have driven her to be as generous as she can in her relationships with her fellow Hongkongers, Chan is already dancing us into the future.

Flowing Warblers 2.0 runs from 12–20 July 2025 at Freespace. Click here for more information.