“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” appears in installments. The previous installment was “A Trial.”
10. Where have they all gone
More than two years into exile, I think of all the people I knew in HK who, like me, are no longer there. It’s a long list. From all parts of my life: friends, neighbors, fellow activists. They have scattered like shattered shards of glass—to Taiwan, Japan, the UK, the US, Australia, Canada, all trying to forge new lives and hang on to at least parts of the ones they had.
Not long ago, I saw a photo posted by Sophie on our old neighborhood group. It showed an HK solidarity protest in London. I immediately DMed her: Are you guys in the UK now? Yes, she said, they were. She didn’t say anything more, not where they were or how and when they’d gotten there or what they were doing. Everyone was so circumspect, especially online.
Sophie’s son’s the same age as my daughter. They were born a month apart in the same delivery room. It must have just about the most majestic view of any delivery room in the world, looking from the ninth floor of the hospital out over the sea. On the morning of my daughter’s, it glittered with sunlight, a view I will never forget. Sophie and her husband Alvin named their boy after that view.
They were always struggling to get by. Alvin ran an herb farm by the beach, but he had a falling out with his partner. Then he worked at the neighborhood organic store, basically running the place for the mostly absent owner. Then Sophie and Alvin opened a small tea shop no more than a few feet wide on a heavily trafficked footpath. They couldn’t make enough money just on tea: the shop had an eclectic assortment of other items that became far more popular. Every few months, Sophie travelled to Japan with big empty suitcases; on her return, they were full of all kinds of knick-knacks. Rubber erasers in an amazing variety of shapes were a huge hit with the kids stopping at the shop on their way home from school. However much they struggled, Sophie and Alvin never worked for the Man, as so many strugglers in HK—and elsewhere—ended up doing. They struggled, yes, but they struggled to find their own way. I admired that; it felt dignified.
I’d never thought of them as political. They were Christians, and when the protests started, Sophie started going, together with their son, to the hunger strike sit-in of fellow Christians near government headquarters. From then on, they were all in. When, later in the protests, the Yellow Economic Circle movement arose, their shop was featured on all the digital YEC locator apps. Sophie hung protest posters in the windows, a bold move in a neighborhood such as ours where displays of support could meet a violent response.
Maybe that was why they left, worried about the blowback. Or maybe, like so many others, they just didn’t want to raise their kid in the place that HK had become. They’re deeply HK people; I imagine they might have some difficulty adapting to the UK. Maybe being near so many other HKers will help them to adjust, that and being Christian—grassroots HK Christians are good at looking after each other. What might their lives be like now, what might they become? Surely they have to take whatever jobs they can find, or perhaps they are still making their own path, however difficult that might prove to be in a society not their own. They, like most HKers, are used to life not being easy. That toughness will serve them well.
Jane is another from the old neighborhood. She’d worked for human rights organizations for ages, for seemingly just about every one in HK. She was a veteran. Even though she lived close by, I really only got to know her through volunteering with Hong Kong Alliance. At every June 4 candlelight vigil in Victoria Park, year after year, we staffed the welcome booth for foreign journalists near the stage. What I remember most from those nights now, looking back from this distance in time and space, was the sensation of being surrounded by the intense crush of tens of thousands of people, all holding candles in the dark. I wrote about Jane in my book about the protests, Liberate Hong Kong: she was one of the “black angels”—the middle-aged women in our neighborhood who dressed in the color of the protests. They radiated fortitude, courage, empathy, humility. Once, when notified in our Signal group, Jane and the others descended on main street where violent, drunk pro-Communists were taunting me, repeatedly shoving me over. I’d found myself in that predicament after coming to the aid of others whom they’d already beaten up; now it was my turn. Jane walked on crutches—I never knew why, never asked, assumed it was due to a childhood disease like polio. She and the others simply stood beside me. They didn’t shout, they didn’t say anything. Just stood there, resolute. Something about their aura of authority made the drunken thugs hesitant; they cursed and cursed but backed off. She is in Taiwan now, working for yet another human rights organization, carrying on just as before.
Then there is Sky, the one who got me involved in Hong Kong Alliance and was pretty much its driving force. There were the well-known leaders—Lee Cheuk-yan, Albert Ho, Chow Hang-tung (all on trial now on national security law charges, already having spent years behind bars)—who would speak to the press, stand before the crowd; and there were the people behind the scenes who made it all happen and kept things rolling, first and foremost Sky. I knew nothing else about her, nothing about her personal life, only her quiet persistence and hard work year after year after year. She gave me small tasks: translating from Chinese to English statements, speeches, declarations, descriptions of items in the new June 4 Museum. I was always happy, grateful even, to do whatever I could. The last task she gave me was a translation of a mitigation letter written on behalf of one of the Alliance leaders who had just been convicted in a politically-motivated trial.
I’d already left HK by then, in fact just days before the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. That was the first time the authorities had ever banned the candlelight vigil, less than a month before the national security law was imposed. The ominous news of its impending promulgation had already come out. Though the vigil was banned, Alliance leaders announced they would go to Victoria Park anyway and called on anyone else who was willing to bear the legal consequences to join them. They exhorted everyone else to light candles wherever in the city they happened to be. In effect, all of HK was to become a candlelight vigil. Before leaving, I helped to distribute candles, the same white candles the Alliance had always handed out in the park with their paper white wax-catching cones. I’d promised to do more but then got a plane ticket and it was time to go. I told Sky I couldn’t fulfill my promise but didn’t tell her why. I didn’t tell anyone I was leaving.
Flash forward a year and more, when she asked me to do the translation of the mitigation letter, on behalf of a guy who’d been convicted of “inciting unlawful assembly” for going to Victoria Park that very night. Of course, I said. After that, someone sent me a report in Ta Kung Pao—the CCP-owned newspaper, the very one that had conducted a smear campaign against me—that Sky had fled HK. I asked her. She said she was in the UK on a trip and planned to return. Why did she say that? It seemed very unlikely. Returning, that is. Everyone else in the Alliance was either in jail or on trial, some on national security law charges. Maybe she thought because she worked out of the spotlight all those years, she was too low-level to go after, but I couldn’t believe she would be so naive. Or maybe she didn’t want to tell me she’d fled while the people she’d worked for were in prison. I sent her the translation of the mitigation letter and never heard from her again. I assume she’s still in the UK.
Old friends, James and Gerry, he a banker, she a nurse, are now in the UK. During the Umbrella Movement in 2014, I visited their tent at one of the occupation sites. They, like so many others I knew in HK, weren’t especially political…until they were. They said they were occupying the streets for future generations. At the time, they didn’t have kids. I’d already had our first, which is why I wasn’t camping out with them. Instead, my three-year-old and I would bring them breakfast in the morning. I remember racing her down the Harcourt Road flyover, devoid of traffic due to the occupation, on her scooter. Now James and Gerry have a child they don’t want to raise in HK. Gerry can probably find a nursing job in the UK, but James figures he’ll never find a banking job as well-remunerated as the one he left in HK. If even people like them are driven away, I think to myself, what future does the city have?
I frequently come across initiatives in the diaspora and find out they’re started by people I used to know in HK.
There’s Iphigenia, who over the years has gone through so many name changes I can hardly keep them straight. In fact, when I first heard about her having gone abroad—to the UK as well—, the person referring to her and said, You must surely know her? But since I’d never known an Iphigenia, I said no. In the past, sometimes she was named after a fruit, sometimes she took the plainest and most common of Cantonese surnames, the equivalent of Smith or Jones. Like Jane, she’s worked in various human rights organizations. Tenacious, reliable, ingenious, the sort who always finds a way, who seems to be able to solve the toughest problems. Brave too. I once wrote a long story about a man whose wife disappeared in China. A character strongly based on Iphigenia crosses the border undercover to find her. Now the real Iphigenia’s started an organization to support persecuted and/or dissident lawyers working under authoritarian regimes around the world.
Then there’s Gladys. I met her one night after the June 4 vigil at an Occupy Central with Love and Peace street stand just outside of Victoria Park . The year was 2014. OCLP was publicizing its upcoming referendum on universal suffrage. She recruited me to work on the international media liaison team she’d set up at OCLP. Having recently returned from studying abroad, she was among the first who realized the necessity of telling the story of HK’s freedom struggle to the world. Up to then, the pro-democracy movement had been strikingly provincial in its outlook. Typically, the leaders of OCLP just let us get on with our work with little to no supervision or direction because they didn’t really see its significance…until the streets were spontaneously occupied in September that year, going far beyond any organization’s plan or vision, and the world media’s attention turned to HK as never before. On the night of a speech by the Hong Kong Chief Executive in which he announced the government would agree to meet student leaders, with the whole world watching, I suddenly got a panicked call from an emissary for the leadership asking for the password to the OCLP Twitter account.
Gladys had left been then. I couldn’t quite understand why, but as I got to know her better I came to see that was her: She had a talent for doing something really good in a short period of time and then moving on. She bounced around, working as a journalist, going to law school—which she hated—, and working for an international human rights organization. When the national security law was imposed, it was time to get out. From her years of education in the US, she’d come to regard Americans as insufferably self-involved, self-aggrandizing, self-important—how could she live in a society like that? So she went to a remote area of Japan at the invitation of a friend. However random her ending up there might have been, she made her way in that infamously insular society, learning Japanese, getting a driver’s license, buying a home, becoming a permanent resident, all while continuing to do human rights work. She is one of those brilliant people who adamantly remain in the background, never thrusting herself forward, partly out of humility but also due to what I sense is a desire to remain hidden. There in Japan, she is hidden indeed. But the isolation also gets to her. Recently she went to the UK where she met multitudes of HKers. It was a revelation. Now she’s wondering if she should relocate, for community, opportunities, and mental health.
My frontline friends are also scattered. Few remain behind. Several absconded. The ways in which they made it out, where they ended up and how, what their lives are like now will make a good book one day. They are among those who most clearly saw they had no future in HK, but while their outlook abroad may not be so “no future” as HK, it’s unclear at best. In some ways, they’ve had the most difficult time. One managed to make it out, applied for asylum, and got an interview amazingly quickly, but then was denied asylum on the grounds there were discrepancies between his account and the official record, presumably meaning the HK government’s characterization of him as a common criminal. That countries of asylum might believe the regime more than those it’s persecuted is especially galling. A couple of others landed in Taiwan, which has proven a less than hospitable place, with no specific arrangments for people in their situation, leaving them to cobble together temporary student visas, which tide them over, but who knows what comes next. Others they know have moved on to the UK. But those who went directly to the UK have also had their share of difficulties. An under-discussed element of the 2019 protests is their class dimensions. The mass uprising involved large numbers of people from the working class, the fifty percent of HKers who live in subsidized public housing. Many of those were young people. There were of course also many university students on the frontlines, but a substantial number of frontliners came from among those with few prospects or resources. Those who fled to the UK often find themselves in precarity in regard to housing and livelihood. And while some countries have generally been quite receptive to HKers post-2019 (the UK especially as well as Australia and Canada), that can’t be said of any country when it comes to those arguably most at risk, HK asylum applicants. Of the 826 HKers I have documented as having applied for asylum in seven different countries, as of the start of 2023 only 82 had been granted asylum. A handful have been refused. Most are still waiting. And it’s not just the young and unknown. Ching Cheong, now in his seventies, is among HK’s most insightful experts on the Communist Party. He fled to the US in 2021 and applied for asylum. Given his well-documented background, his should be among the clearest of cases, and yet, more than two years on, he’s not so much been scheduled for an interview.
The elegiac tone is perhaps misleading. While I recall what I knew of these exiles’ lives in HK; I know little of their new lives, many so new it’s hard to know how they might turn. Think of all the experience that’s been uprooted, the lived lives that meshed to make HK. It’s not destroyed or disappeared but transported, transformed, all too soon to say into what, HK hearts and souls and minds and aspirations and dreams scattered to the four corners of the earth.