It was foggy and cold on the second day of 2003 as the taxi swerved higher and higher up the Peak on Hong Kong island, you couldn’t even see the highest buildings of Victoria Harbour below. Within a few hours my daughter was born at the Matilda Hospital, a little early but healthy as she arrived with her eyes screwed up against the shock of the fluorescent hospital lights.
Hong Kong had taken some time to get used to, we had arrived in the first year of the new millennium. The Prince of Wales barracks sign was still up. “One country two systems” was a principle that was being tested and worked out by issues like the “right of abode”. Hong Kong was my entry point into personal knowledge of Asia beyond the Philippines. This is a place that occupies a border zone between the colonial and post-colonial imagination but refuses to fit neatly into tidy narratives.
CNN International, my employers at the time, had decided Hong Kong would be the regional hub from which it would run its operations across the western side of the Asia Pacific region. From here we would put out news to the region at the peak viewing hours for the time zone in a decentralised restructuring of the 24-hour news channel. At the time it made sense, and while I spent most of my working life at the studio, I sometimes got the opportunity to travel to the Philippines, Thailand, India, Timor Leste and even Australia on big stories.
During our time there from 2000 to 2005, Hong Kong’s pull as a base for foreign journalists to cover the region waned. Developments in Mainland China became a bigger story and Beijing and Shanghai (in China itself), as well as Bangkok and Singapore (for South East Asia) offered themselves as cheaper alternatives to set up shop.
Hong Kong was still a fabled place with its tumultuous and proud past. I would take my small children to visit the Hong Kong Museum of History and the Museum of Coastal Defense practically every month for their first rate exhibitions that demonstrated how the geography and history of the place were the crucible for the intense energy, enterprise and determination of the people who call it home.
We lived in a flat that was once accommodation for professors at Hong Kong University. One side looked south to Lamma Island and every year on China’s National Day when factories would shut down and the air cleared, you could see as far as the mainland across glittering waters. One of Sun Yat-sen’s final speeches was to the Students’ Union of the university in 1923, when he said he got his revolutionary and modern ideas in Hong Kong after seeing the security that people enjoyed there without a corrupt government. “Afterwards, I saw the outside world and I began to wonder how, it was that foreigners, that Englishmen could do such things as they had done, for example, with the barren rock of Hong Kong, within 70 or 80 years, while China, in 4,000 years, had no places like Hong Kong,” Sun is quoted as saying.
Those words still resonate. “The people of Hong Kong think of Sun Yat-sen as great even though he failed more than he succeeded. They will not go back to the time when only the winner is acknowledged to be king and the losers are declared as bandits. Their historical mindset has changed. Thus they will respect leaders not by success alone, but by their ideas, vision and personal qualities,” explained Professor Wang Gungwu, a former vice-chancellor on a university website.
By being simultaneously Chinese and yet not quite China, Hong Kong has been a place that Chinese dissidents have felt able to live relatively freely. A vocal critic of the Beijing government, writer Ma Jian left the capital in the late 1980s to live in Hong Kong because he couldn’t publish his works on the mainland. Another survivor of the Tiananmen Square protests, workers’ rights activist Han Dongfang has lived in Hong Kong since his release from jail in 1994 and runs the China Labour Bulletin from there.
As I file this article, news has come in that Hong Kong authorities are invoking a colonial period “emergency” law to prevent protesters from wearing masks. A teenager was shot in the chest just three centimetres from his heart by police. As Tony Tsang lay in critical condition his life in the balance, thousands of protesters turned out to demonstrate this National Day, the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.
In the past week, I’ve seen two extraordinary films about the way Hong Kong protests have gathered momentum. At the Tate Modern, political cartoonist Ba Diucao whose work’s been adopted by the protesters, bowed to the audience after a showing of “China’s Artful Dissident”. The film examines the nature of government repression and protests against it. Ba meets a Tiananmen Square protester in a wheelchair now living in the US who describes the moment when his legs were crushed by an army tank as pictures of the brutal incident are shown. At the end of the film there are more pictures this time of Hong Kong protesters screaming in pain on a commuter train. Ba said the protesters’ courage is the inspiration for his work.
At King’s College I watched “The Umbrella Diaries: The First Umbrella” directed by James Leong and produced by Lynn Lee. It’s a forensic street-level chronicle of the protests in 2014. “Determination is sacrificing something important in order to achieve something even more important,” says one activist. When the closing credits rolled, the lecture theatre still in darkness, a student cried out a protest slogan in Cantonese and set off a call and response among the audience.
Then, a silent moment in the complicit darkness, pregnant with the agony of empathy, before we looked at each other blinking in the light.