General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

To Be or Not To Be (来生不做香港人)

To Be or Not To Be (来生不做香港人) is a 25-episode Hong Kong television drama produced by Hong Kong Television Network (HKTV) and first broadcast on 12 December 2014. Under its former and overseas title Hakka (Chinese ethnic subgroup with its own language) Women (客家女人), it follows two sisters separated in childhood, one raised in a Hakka village in Dongguan and the other in Hong Kong, whose reunion frames three decades of change in the relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	来生不做香港人 (To Be or Not To Be); former and overseas title 客家女人 (Hakka Women / Hakka Sisters)³
Production	Hong Kong Television Network; director Luk Tin Wah (陆天华), creative producer Stella Choi (蔡淑贤), script supervisor Alex Pau (鲍伟聪)⁴
Broadcast	Premiered 12 December 2014 in Hong Kong (11 December 2014 in Malaysia); 25 episodes⁵
Lead cast	Maggie Cheung (张可颐), Prudence Liew (刘美君), Poon Chan Leung (潘灿良), Savio Tsang (曾伟权), Lam Lei (林利), Zac Koo (高皓正), Mimi Kung (龚慈恩)⁵
Audience	About 270,000 viewers, one of HKTV's highest-rating dramas; Douban score 8.0 from 2,061 users⁶^•⁵
Theme	The reunion of two sisters separated between mainland China and Hong Kong, tracing 30 years of Hong Kong–Mainland relations²

Spoilers

Plot and themes

The story centers on two biological sisters born in a Hakka village. Their mother worked in Hong Kong as a housekeeper and arranged for one daughter to migrate there; a change of plan meant the younger sister went to Hong Kong while the elder stayed in the village to care for their mother after a stroke. The sisters then spent roughly thirty years living apart, one becoming a Hong Kong professional and the other a wealthy businesswoman on the mainland, before reuniting as adults.¹⁰^•¹¹

Through this reunion the series stages the cultural frictions of the period: simplified versus traditional Chinese characters, Hong Kong companies entering the mainland market, differing attitudes toward contracts and personal connections, and the mutual vanity and insecurity each side projects onto the other.¹² Early episodes gave the Hong Kong sister dialogue that struck viewers as speaking for Hong Kong people, including lines about Hong Kong remaining a place that uses traditional Chinese characters and about being "poor with nothing left but money".⁶ A younger generation of characters participates in street demonstrations, which reviewers connected to the protest movements of contemporary Hong Kong.¹

The title itself poses the series' closing question: in an era of Hong Kong–Mainland integration, whether one would choose to be a Hong Kong person in the next life, or whether the distinction between Hong Kong people and Chinese people will eventually disappear.²

Production background

The series was shot in 2012 and 2013, before HKTV's application for a free-to-air television license was refused, and it reached audiences only after the company launched as an online streaming station.⁷ Script supervisor Alex Pau said the production team never treated the subject matter as too sensitive, arguing that the word "sensitive" promotes a self-censorship mindset and that a drama's most important job is to reflect reality and resonate with audiences.⁸

Location work. Unlike comparable period dramas, the production used real locations, filming in a rural village in Dongguan for the mainland scenes.⁹ Cinematographer-turned-commentator accounts note that this gave the historical passages a texture that studio-bound productions lacked.⁹

Reception

The drama was HKTV's highest-rated series after the station's launch and drew discussion among internet users in both Hong Kong and mainland China.⁵ Hong Kong media counted about 270,000 viewers, placing it among the station's top performers, and the launch-period lineup of The Election and To Be or Not To Be briefly lifted HKTV's audience to around 200,000 before later series saw ratings decline.⁶^•¹³ On Douban it holds a score of 8.0 from 2,061 users.⁵

Critical views. Reviewers praised the lead performances, particularly Prudence Liew's role and the pairing of Maggie Cheung and Poon Chan Leung, and the theme song 两杯茶, sung by Liew with lyrics by Lin Xi, was popular enough that HKTV uploaded a full music video to YouTube on 2 January 2015.¹⁴^•³ Critics also noted weaknesses: one commentator called the plot conventional, "TVB stuff", even while praising its convincing portrayal of middle-class Central professionals; the director of HKTV's The Election argued that even openly political HKTV dramas, including this one, stopped short of deeper ideological critique.¹⁵^•¹⁶ Alex Pau later said that if HKTV had been a free-to-air station he would have re-shot the ending so the series concluded during the Umbrella Movement.¹⁷

Legacy

Because it was filmed in 2012–2013 but aired in late 2014, viewers remarked on how closely its story lines tracked events then unfolding in Hong Kong.⁷ The series has since become a standard reference point in scholarship on Hong Kong identity: a 2021 master's thesis at National Chengchi University analyzes it alongside the 1979 series The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (网中人) to examine how realistic Hong Kong television dramas shape local consciousness, finding that the portrayal of mainland China shifted from negative to positive across the decades the two dramas span.¹⁸ Its mainland-born sister character has been compared with 网中人's "Ah Chan" as a recurring figure through which Hong Kong television stages conflict between new immigrants and locals.¹⁹ In April 2020, HKTV re-released the series on YouTube alongside The Election and The Menu during the COVID-19 stay-home period.²⁰

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026