“Diaspora” is a continuation of “An Exile.” That was about departure from Hong Kong and arrival in a new place. This focuses on the period after arrival.
Both are intended as sequel to the book, Liberate Hong Kong: Stories from the freedom struggle, which is about the 2019–2020 protests. That in turn follows As long as there is resistance, there is hope about the period from 2014 to 2018, and Umbrella: A Political Tale from Hong Kong about the 2014 Umbrella Movement.
“Diaspora” will appear in installments.
In memory of someone who cannot yet be named but hopefully one day will be
離散港人會繼續為香港人整體福祉着想,為香港人共同利益出發。離散港人亦應善用海外的自由空間,積極發聲及倡議香港議題,尤其是因政治暴力而難以在香港發表的言論。
(Diaspora Hongkongers shall put Hong Kong people at the core and work for our well-being, common interests and values. Diaspora Hongkongers shall say what can no longer be said in Hong Kong, using our precious freedom to speak out for those silenced by the rule of terror in Hong Kong.)不禁慨嘆,何處是吾家?或許,有香港人集結、仍為香港奮鬥的地方,就是遊子能暫時心安之處。
(I can’t help but ask with a sigh, where is my home? Perhaps where Hong Kong people gather and keep up the fight for Hong Kong is where wanderers can temporarily feel at ease.)— Brian Leung Ka-ping, Hong Kong exile
Das Triumphgefühl der Befreiung vermengt sich zu stark mit der Trauerarbeit, denn man hat das Gefängnis, aus dem man entlassen wurde, immer noch sehr geliebt.
(The feeling of triumph on being liberated is too strongly mixed with sorrow, for in spite of everything, one still greatly loved the prison from which one has been released.)— Sigmund Freud upon his successful flight from Nazi-occupied Vienna in June 1938
1. Photo of a candle
She turns to me and says, “I have a story to tell you.”
We’re at a hotpot restaurant in one of those ugly strip malls that, strewn across the country, seem to play a large role in American life. I haven’t had hotpot since I came from HK — strange to find it here, in such a place.
We’ve just been at a protest. It’s PRC national day, a big day to protest in HK, or would be, if demonstrations were not now virtually outlawed there. In the past, I should say, it was a big day. Hard to get used to talking of HK in the past tense.
I should also put “protest” in quotation marks. It was a small gathering of a couple dozen people. In many other cities around the world today, there were protests against Communist Party rule with bigger turnouts. Since arriving in the US, I’ve gone to several HK demos and found them rather underwhelming, depressing even — small, lacking in energy, spirit.
We invited Tibetans and Uyghurs, but none showed up. A few Chinese came, though; amongst them, people who had made major headlines in the past. One had a small brown poodle on a leash. He’d come to the US to try to establish an organization here but was now planning to move back to Taiwan. One was now a vocal Trump supporter. Their presence made me all the sadder. History had eclipsed them. The Chinese dissident community in exile had faded into irrelevance, riven by rivalries, factionalism, bitter disputes, missteps. It was regarded among HKers as an object lesson in what the HK diaspora should avoid becoming. How do you preserve unity, keep hope alive, maybe even do something useful, when there is little to no prospect of achieving your goal in the near term? At the outset, HK exiles have advantages over their Chinese counterparts — better English, more exposure to the rest of the world, some experience of how a liberal society works — but that doesn’t ensure our fate will be any different.
Kay didn’t actually go to the protest. She’s come to the hotpot restaurant straight from work.
There are two long tables of HKers happily consuming the meal. Jay jokes, “If we want more people to come to the next demo, we tell them there’s BBQ.”
HKers like their food. And hotpot makes them think of home. Plus, we have no neighborhood where we’re concentrated, no Hongkongtown, no place where we can expect to coincidentally run into each other on the street, no physical proximity that helps to make culture and language cohere and persist. We live spread out all over the sprawling metropolitan area. Many of us go long stretches without meeting another HKer. Getting together over food — and hotpot, no less! — there’s a joy about it, a warmth, just to smell the food, just to hear the voices, the sound of the language, the laughter.
Protests, on the other hand, are stress and work. You have to worry whether the CCP is spying on you. You’re reminded of the repression and suffering you’re protesting against. Plus, they don’t do any good anyway, do they? A few dozen people show up, chant slogans, go home — so what.
Here, you can relax. Just relax and enjoy.
“I’m moving,” Kay told me. “Across the country.”
To take a new job with a mega-corporation, the sort I’ve always associated with exploitative labor relations. Its online retail website is booming, a beneficiary of the pandemic. Now a large portion of its business involves making its site an Amazon-style marketplace for other vendors. Kay’ll be working in the anti-counterfeiting unit, checking to see if the vendors’ merchandise is legit. The salary is more than double what she’s currently making, the relocation package and benefits outstanding. Finally, someone will value her labor, not with words but with money. She’s leaving a job with an NGO, a supposedly noble enterprise where she’s been miserable.
She’s happy, radiant. Everything is falling into place. I’m happy for her, but sad she’s leaving. Her job makes me think about how complex the world is, the enormous power of forces like turbo-capitalism that shape its present, its future. We’re nothing but dust specks by comparison. I find myself thinking over the hotpot steam, How did I miss out on getting my hands on the mechanisms that might determine the fate of anything outside of my own little world? Always on the side of the losers, I don’t even manage to do them much good. But, man, that job she’s going to be doing sounds really dull.
“But that isn’t really what I wanted to tell you,” she says. “It’s about my friend in HK. A lot of people I went to secondary school with ended up going into the civil service. They’ve risen quickly in the ranks and become AOs.”
AOs: Administrative Officers — high-ranking civil servants with excellent salaries and benefits. They play key roles in the implementation of policies, some of which oppress HK people. They’re indispensable to the regime. If they withheld their labor, the machinery of government would ground to a halt. Few of them have any particularly strong political commitment. They’re implementers, not ideologues. Through years of incompetent governance by political appointees — utter mediocrities whose only qualification for office was their loyalty and subservience to the Communist Party — , I often said that the only thing keeping those elements of HK going that depend on the government was the efficient civil service; HK was like a body operating without a head. In the oppressive society that HK has become, these top civil servants are arguably complicit. Through HK’s years of mass protests, it struck me that the one thing we’d never managed to achieve was to peel the regime’s supporters away from it, whether the economic elites who got enormously wealthy through their close relations with the regime or the top-level civil servants, the AOs, the people who made the otherwise dysfunctional government function. Civil resistance theory says doing so is key to the success of popular uprisings. I’d never met an AO, it was a class I rarely had any interaction with. They existed somewhere up there above the clouds. Many come from a handful of the city’s top secondary schools, like Kay. For them, it’s a good job affording an upper-middle-class lifestyle in a city of winners and losers. One could do much worse. In fact, in HK, most do. But doing better in HK often comes with a price, usually having to do with compromising or disposing of one’s conscience.
As if reading my thoughts, Kay says, “But my friend is not like most AOs. He’s a pure-hearted soul. Let me tell you what happened to him. On June 4, he posted a photo on his Facebook page of a candle burning. No caption, no words, just the candle burning.”
It so happened that on that day, for the first time in thirty years, any public gathering to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre was banned. Thousands of police were out in the streets to enforce the ban, especially around Victoria Park, the perennial venue of the candlelight vigil. Many took to social media to express feelings that could no longer be voiced on the streets.
“A colleague saw the photo of the candle burning and reported him to their superiors. The Facebook page was private; only those he granted access to could see it. This colleague, then, was someone he trusted; mistakenly, as it turned out. His immediate superior, who had always been kind and supportive, told him not to worry about it. And for a month after he was notified of the complaint, he heard nothing.
“Then, just as he began to assume it had been forgotten, he was summoned to a disciplinary hearing and asked why he posted the photo. He told the panel it was in memory of a family member who had recently passed away. They concluded that whatever the reason, it showed bad judgment to do so at such a ‘sensitive’ time. The civil service could not risk having someone in a position such as his whose judgment was unreliable. He was dismissed from his job. He was also told that what he had done ‘may have been in breach of the national security law.’”
Three leaders of Hong Kong Alliance, the decades-long organizer of the vigil, had recently been arrested and charged with “inciting subversion” under the NSL. To be told by people working in the government that you might have broken the NSL and “endangered national security” was no joke.
“It sounds like a story straight out of eastern Europe,” I say, “before the end of the Cold War.”
“Yes, but there are lots of stories like that in HK these days.”
“It’s become so oppressive so fast!”
“After he was fired, he felt like a marked man. The remark about violating the NSL echoed in his ears — the police could show up on his doorstep at any moment. The prospect sounded preposterous — he had difficulty making himself believe it — , but then so too had the idea one might be fired for posting a photo of a candle. It is a time when one has to convince oneself to take the preposterous seriously.”
He began making plans to emigrate to the UK, just as tens of thousands of other HKers had already done. (After the imposition of the NSL, the British government initiated a BN(O) Visa Scheme: HKers eligible for British National (Overseas) passports — a substantial portion of the population — can move to the UK for an initial five-year stay with a subsequent path to citizenship.)
In a moment, his life had changed. He lost his secure, well-paying job and felt compelled to emigrate. Before that incident, many around him had talked of leaving and some had even done so, but he had never seriously considered the prospect.
“He’s going to leave before long,” Kay says.
“It’s like an evacuation,” I say.
That is what HK has come to: a place where you can lose your job or even go to prison for posting a picture of a candle burning.
TO BE CONTINUED