From the South China Morning Post:

It’s one a.m. Another round of tear gas in Admiralty, another pack of green riot police scurrying away. The crowds disperse, the crowds return, larger. I have given up trying to decipher what rules of deployment the police have for tear gas, assuming there are any rules. The chief executive has asked us to be rational; I would like to think that applies to the police as well, but it’s one a.m., and they seem to have just fired another round of tear gas into a stationary crowd for no reason at all.

Let us be clear about how we got here.

Continue Reading

From the South China Morning Post:

I once thought I would never say goodbye to Hong Kong. Or that if I ever did, it would be by my own choice. I should have known better. In this city, the choice has never been ours.

We are used to this. Coteries of old men—and three extraordinary women—in faraway places have been signing away our rights for 172 years. No one on that ship in Nanjing ever thought to ask how the people on this barren rock felt about being ransomed for heroin. No one in Beijing negotiating the terms of the lease on the New Territories considered bringing its occupants to the table. No one at the table in suite 336 of The Peninsula on Christmas Day, 1941, was even Chinese. And no where in the declaration Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher toasted 30 years ago is there any reference to the people of Hong Kong.

We are used to this, and maybe like we have before, we will soldier on, even on a battlefield where it sometimes feels like no one is fighting for us. Maybe we will yet squeeze a few drops of democracy from this lemon, even if its sour taste lingers. Maybe we will reinvent ourselves one more time, and make our administrative region special one more way.

But maybe not.

Continue Reading

From the South China Morning Post:

I used to occupy Central. I used to grab a sandwich and sit in Statue Square or Chater Garden and feel like I owned the place, because unlike the rest of Central during lunch hour, I never had to wait in line to get a seat. These outdoor areas are sometimes so sparsely populated, even on a cool, clear day, that a couple friends and I once entertained ourselves in Statue Square by watching a solitary cockroach scamper across the concrete tiles. It was the only one of us who needed unimpeded access through the Square to go about its business.

The rest of us, once lunch was over, returned to our respective offices in Prince’s Building, the Cheung Kong Center, and ICBC Tower through the series of covered, elevated walkways so interconnected and comprehensive that the Hong Kong Tourism Board tells visitors, “Once you’ve arrived, you never have to come back down to earth.”

It’s not an exaggeration: someone arriving in Hong Kong can never touch the ground from the moment they step off their plane until they reach any given destination in Central. From the jet bridge to the Airport Express, through IFC and over Connaught Road, you can reach as far as Star Street to the east and the Macau Ferry Terminal to the west, as far north as the Star Ferry and as far south as Conduit Road without ever setting foot outdoors at ground level.

Continue Reading

From the South China Morning Post:

The first time you go to the June 4 vigil at Victoria Park, expect to be unprepared for a number of things. The difficulty of affixing, with dripping wax, a candle to a conical paper cup. The funeral rites that without warning evince the hardest kind of loss, of a parent losing a child. And the cognitive dissonance triggered by the act of memorialising students whose deaths led in part to Hong Kong becoming the city it is today.

I was six years old in 1989. My mother worked in Hong Kong for a multinational chemical company whose business, like all business in China, evaporated after June 4. Two months later, my mother was among the first businesspeople to re-enter the mainland and attempt to resuscitate foreign trade. The deal she ultimately secured was the only one her company completed in China that year, and it set her apart from her peers and on a course of career advancement that underwrote my liberal arts and legal education. I am today able to specialise in human rights law as a result of the opportunity that the June 4 crackdown gave my mother.

This is the paradox we can never seem to escape in Hong Kong, forever and at once benefiting from and resenting Chinese–and, before that, British–rule. When the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square, we were eight short years from the same tanks rolling across the Shenzhen River, and the predictive trauma of that moment is not only what brings many of us back to Victoria Park each year; it was what sent thousands of us to Canada, Australia and elsewhere.

Continue Reading