by Mia Yao
Actress, mother and diving instructor Hidy Yu finds in Hong Kong’s fragile marine world a quiet calling to protect, educate and pass on her love for the ocean to the next generation.
On a sunny, breezy winter morning, the waves roll steadily onto the narrow beach near Tsing Lung Tau, a quiet residential area on the south-west edge of Hong Kong’s New Territories. The wind carries the smell of salt and seaweed as Hidy Yu sits in the shade of a tree, her voice occasionally drowned out by the sound of the waves.
Hidy shares her journey from a nature lover to a learner and mother, and most importantly, to a guardian and educator for the ocean. With her multi-layered identity as an actress, model, scuba diving instructor and ocean ambassador, she contributes her “very small part” in helping with something “big” despite criticism and doubt, as she explains to Youth Hong Kong.
Hidy Yu finds in Hong Kong’s fragile marine world a quiet calling to protect, educate and pass on her love for the ocean to the next generation.
Vast, Yet Mysterious
Hidy’s first encounter with the sea started around 20 years ago. Fresh out of secondary school and waiting for her public examination results, she took a part-time job at an ocean-themed restaurant in Mong Kok. The owner happened to be a diving instructor. At that time, diving was far from mainstream in Hong Kong, limited information was available, and most people knew little about the underwater world.
“I was quite bold back then,” she recalls. “I asked if I could work at the restaurant in exchange for diving lessons from the owner.” That casual exchange led to her first diving certification and to a world she had never known existed.
The moment Hidy descended into the ocean, she was captivated. “It feels like entering a completely different world,” she says. “Everything changes, the way you breathe, move and see.” The underwater realm, as she explains, is not merely an extension of the world above but a parallel universe governed by its own rules. Vision is magnified, sound travels faster, and the body becomes weightless. For some, this strangeness provokes fear, but for Hidy, it sparked a sense of belonging.
“It feels like entering a completely different world. Everything changes, the way you breathe, move and see.”
She soon found herself diving around Asia and beyond, from the Great Barrier Reef to Okinawa. She worked part-time as a model, one of the few with a diving qualification, taking part in underwater shoots and travel programmes. “That was when I truly realised how vast the world is,” she says. “About 70% of the world is covered by ocean. Once you learn to dive, you can see two-thirds more of the planet than most people ever will.”
Yet what fascinated her most was not the scale of the ocean, but its mystery. Unlike mountains, which humans have mapped and conquered, the deepest parts of the sea remain unreachable. “No one has been to the deepest point of the ocean,” she says. “Even with modern technology, we still only understand a small fraction of it.” For Hidy, being at one with the sea is both an exploration of the planet and an inward journey, an experience of self that exists only underwater.
Hearing the Ocean Speak
Over time, that relationship with the sea has reshaped her outlook on life. The longer she dived, the smaller she felt. “The ocean makes you realise how insignificant we humans are,” she says. “It changes every day. It can be calm and gentle, or terrifying and destructive. That’s why humility is so important.” The sea, she believes, teaches her to go with the flow — not in a passive sense, but with awareness and respect. “You can’t control everything. You do your best in the moment, and that’s enough.”
This philosophy stands in sharp contrast to life on land, particularly in a city like Hong Kong. Underwater, Hidy explains, there is no internet, no constant communication, no need to explain oneself to others. “It’s very pure. You’re surrounded by the ocean and Mother Nature, and it feels like being held by nature itself.” That simplicity is what intrigues her the most. “Just like now,” she says, as the water gently laps onto the shore. “We just sit here and listen to the sea.”
Ironically, despite living in a city surrounded by water, Hidy notices that many Hong Kong people feel disconnected from the sea. Hong Kong is often described as a concrete jungle, yet around 60% of its territory is ocean, and more than 300 wild hills and mountains rise from its compact landmass. “You can hike in the morning, have lunch in the city, and dive in the afternoon. That’s incredibly rare anywhere in the world.”
Photo shows the view near Tsing Lung Tau, a quiet residential area on the south-west edge of Hong Kong’s New Territories.
Still, maritime culture remains marginal. “We know more about the land than the ocean,” she adds, which she thinks is probably influenced by the Chinese belief: “rather belittle a mountain, never belittle water” (欺山莫欺水). In other words, people growing up in such a culture think that water is dangerous.
Another persistent misconception is that Hong Kong’s waters are too polluted or not worth exploring. Hidy herself once believed this. “I wanted to dive all over the world, but I never thought about diving at home,” she admits. It was only after becoming a diving instructor, when students asked her where to dive locally, that she realised how little she knew about her home waters.
“If you look closely, Hong Kong has its own beauty.”
What she discovered then surprised her. Hong Kong’s eastern waters host an extraordinary diversity of hard corals, with around 84 recorded species of reef-building stony corals — surpassing the entire Caribbean in terms of species richness. Soft corals, gorgonians and other marine life thrive as well, despite the city’s subtropical and marginal conditions. “The visibility isn’t always perfect,” Hidy says, “but if you look closely, Hong Kong has its own beauty.”
That realisation sharpened her awareness of another gap – lack of education about the ocean. “We rely on the sea every day, for water, food, weather, but most people don’t think about it,” she says. For younger generations especially, the connection has weakened, replaced by screens and digital spaces. “So the question becomes: in such a technologically focused society, how do we restore balance?”
Diving into the Blue
For Hidy, the answer began to take shape through loss and shock. The first turning point came during a return trip to the Maldives. After a gap of eight years, she was heartbroken to see that the once thriving coral reefs had turned white from coral bleaching. It was the result of rising sea temperatures and climate change.
The second blow came closer to home. After Typhoon Mangkhut tore through Hong Kong in 2018, Hidy joined volunteers cleaning the coastline. The shore was buried under plastic waste — bottles, containers, fragments that had likely been drifting in the sea for decades. “It felt like the ocean was returning our rubbish to us,” she says.
From that moment on, she began collecting underwater waste and cleaning ghost nets, the “silent killers” of marine creatures, during her dives. Other divers joined in. What started as recreational diving slowly evolved into organised underwater clean-ups. To Hidy’s surprise, many divers were willing to pay to take part. Support soon followed from NGOs, institutions and companies with members who could not dive themselves but wanted to contribute.
Ghost nets are abandoned, lost, or discarded fishing gear that drift in the ocean or settle on the seabed. Made of durable plastics, these “silent killers” continue to trap and kill marine life.
In 2024, she formally established the Bling Bling Ocean Foundation, a non-profit organisation that promotes ocean culture, education and ocean cleaning in Hong Kong. Alongside underwater clean-ups, the foundation organises grassroots public activities such as drama workshops, fitness challenges using equipment made from marine waste, and ocean festivals that combine music, food and play.
The impact has extended beyond these events. Hidy’s story also features in the documentary Never Too Late (早鳥), which follows individuals who find healing and meaning through nature. Screenings have drawn audiences who might never have thought about the ocean before. “Some people came back three or four times,” she says. “That kind of resonance is very powerful.”
However, not everyone is convinced. Over the years, Hidy has faced criticism and doubt. Some call her work unrealistic, too small, or too late. Others question how such efforts can sustain a livelihood. She shrugs. “People often judge things by whether they can make money,” she says, “but what matters to me is knowing why I chose this path.”
“I’ve always had my own way of thinking. As you grow older, you start to notice how easily people assume that what the majority believes must be right, but that’s not always true. Many things need to be experienced personally.”
Ocean glass, or “sea glass,” is discarded glass waste that has been tumbled, smoothed, and frosted by ocean waves over decades.
Passing the Tide On
Education and what Hidy is doing now are all about quiet, gradual influence. “Maybe I’ll spend 20 years and still feel I’ve done very little, but that’s okay. We shouldn’t expect everything to be fast or instant, or to reach the destination overnight. Progress doesn’t work like that,” she says. “Moving slowly in the right direction is already a beautiful process.”
Perhaps the most intimate form of impact is closer to home. Hidy’s 10-year-old daughter is already a certified diver. “There’s a scene in the documentary film where the director asks my daughter what she wants to be when she grows up. She answers, ‘Like mummy.’ When I saw that on screen, I realised how deeply my child has been influenced. I saw that what I am doing is real and meaningful. That’s when I realised how influence really works,” she says. “It starts with the people around you.”
“When I hold her hand underwater, I see my younger self in her eyes.”
She and her daughter have dived together overseas. That’s when she experienced the magic bonds that can exist between a mother, a daughter and the sea. “When I hold her hand underwater, I see my younger self in her eyes. She kept pointing at things she saw underwater, just like me when I first tried diving. It is just so touching.”
When our interview ends, Hidy reaches for a few bin liners from her canvas bag, ready to comb the shoreline for rubbish and collect sea glass for educational purposes before heading home. As the wind picks up, she finishes filling the bags with discarded plastic, the takeaway food packages and the styrofoam.
By doing seemingly trivial things like this, she hopes to impact future generations and bring them closer to the sea, a world where words are unnecessary and time slows. “So we beat on, boats against the current,” and the ocean is always there — vast, unknowable, and patient — speaking, as it always has, to those willing to listen. ■