During Melbourne’s long blockade, I became addicted to an app that delivers live views from someone else’s window somewhere in the world. I liked the azure shock of the Aegean Sea or the red leaves on the South Korean mountain slope.
One day I snapped when I suddenly got a sunset shot from a seaside apartment complex in Up Lei Chau, Hong Kong. I heard the comforting hum of Cantonese, the flame of a gas flame, the squeak of frying. I couldn’t bring myself to close the window. I left it there, watching the birds fly by and the sky turn from pink to gray and black. It was a portal to the past, to a home I could no longer return to.
After the blockade ended, a Melbourne movie showed a series of films by Hong Kong-directed art house director Wong Kar-wai. I walked in the evening after night. I realized almost immediately that I could identify the Hong Kong people in the audience. Often, like me, they came alone. They chose places that were a little different from other people. Once the movie begins, you can hear them crying softly in the dark, mourning the lost city on the screen in front of them.
One night, series curator Christy Mathison gave a short presentation of Happy Together. Filmed in Buenos Aires and released in 1997, the year of Hong Kong’s return to China, it tells the story of a tortured gay relationship that many read as an allegory of Hong Kong’s relations with China. The couple lives in exile in a kind of floating limb, with no known rituals or significant moments to mark the passage of time. Mathison concluded with a quote from Wong describing the mood in 1997, before Hong Kong returned to China: “We wanted to escape, but the more we wanted to escape, the more inseparable we became from Hong Kong. Wherever we went, Hong Kong was always with us.
The 1997 film ‘Happy Together’, by Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai © Alamy Stock Photo
This is a condition known to new exiles in Hong Kong. The city’s population of 7.4 million is shrinking rapidly. Some residents leave so suddenly that they abandon their expensive cars in parking lots. Almost 150,000 people have left (in net terms) since the end of 2021, including more than 50,000 people in the first half of March alone. According to the Hong Kong Institute for Public Opinion Research, almost a quarter of the city’s residents plan to leave the city.
One impetus is the draconian regulations for Covid in Hong Kong. Until recently, Covid-positive people were sent to quarantine camps, while a charity in Hong Kong estimated that up to 2,000 infected children had been separated from their parents in hospital.
The bigger factor remains the political climate after the mass protests in 2019. In June 2020, Beijing imposed Hong Kong national security legislation banning secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign powers. These crimes are so poorly defined that slapping during a court hearing is now clearly a rebellious act, as is criticizing the Covid government’s reaction on social media, or wearing a T-shirt or holding stickers with the popular protest slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of our time ”.
Protester in Causeway Bay in May 2020 waving a flag with the slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of our time” © Zuma Press / eyevine
One database lists 183 people arrested under the National Security Act since its introduction, a third of them for speech crimes. Civil society organizations were forced to disband, and the city’s fierce legislature was made unrecognizable as a patriot-only body after 47 political activists were arrested for subversive activities to hold a primary vote. Because national security law is extraterritorial in nature, the potential threat it poses extends far beyond Hong Kong.
When national security legislation was announced, I had a Zoom interview with my study group. We are a small collection of Melbourne-based PhD students in Hong Kong attached to a number of Australian universities, and our research revolves around the identity of Hong Kong. During the blockade, we met once a week at Zoom to read and discuss academic papers. But after the new legislation was announced, we stopped meeting, we stopped reading documents, we stopped discussing Hong Kong’s identity.
Our study suddenly seemed out of place. After all, how can you explore something whose expression alone can be criminal? It was difficult to know what the new legislation would mean for us – at the academic or personal level – but it was clear that it would not be positive. It was difficult to even focus on these circumstances, and one by one my friends applied for leave to study. Their parents called to warn them not to go home.
Despite my previous existence as a journalist in China for the BBC and NPR – negotiating Beijing’s changing political sensitivities every day for a decade – I had no useful advice. The unpredictability of Hong Kong’s national security legislation means that its red lines are in constant motion, stretching and bleeding in the Red Sea, flooding an ever-expanding list of activities. In a sense, I am an intruder in this community; I was not born in Hong Kong, although I grew up there in the 1970s and 1980s with a Chinese father and an English mother. Still, I shared their fears, both diffuse and specific.
Hong Kong CEO Kari Lam is among the staff at the opening of the National Security Office of the Central People’s Government in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in July 2020. © Getty Images
In addition to worrying that our study might be in conflict with the National Security Act, we were concerned that we might unknowingly endanger those who participated in it by bringing their views to the attention of the authorities. We had existential fears about whether there was a future in the work we were doing. But there was no way to find answers. National security legislation is administered by an Orwellian body called the National Security Service of the Central People’s Government in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, which suddenly arrived in Hong Kong in the dead of night, capturing a hotel for its use. week after the entry into force of the law.
It soon became clear that the contours of national security legislation would only emerge once they were violated, leaving silence as the only guarantee of self-preservation.
Seeking greater clarity on the dangers of discussing Hong Kong overseas, I turned to Eric Yan-ho Lai, a Hong Kong law fellow at Georgetown University who maintained a national security database. I was amazed at how carefully he weighed his words in response. “If you do not return to Hong Kong and live in a country that does not have an extradition treaty with Hong Kong or China, you can still enjoy some freedom to express or discuss Hong Kong,” he said. He then added a disclaimer: “But the danger or risk would be in terms of surveillance by Chinese embassies or their agents.”
This fear of surveillance by Chinese agents is real for Hong Kong students, who are at record highs in Australia thanks to the Australian government’s decision to provide new permanent residences following the promulgation of national security laws. As early as 2019, while protests rocked their city, Hong Kong students clashed with students from mainland Australian campuses on several occasions. A student here told me that he never talks about the political situation in Hong Kong until he knows the position of each person in the room. “We are afraid that if we say something that the Chinese government does not like, it will threaten our parents, our friends and relatives. [back in Hong Kong]”
We know we are different. We know that we are destined to be free because we have been free
My small group has hardly spoken in months. But when Melbourne finally came out of isolation, we gathered in a park, blinking grimly in the unfamiliar sun as we ate sweet, sticky mango slices. When the restaurants reopened, we shared plates of thick steamed dumplings. We did not talk about our study. At Christmas, we listened to Cantopop as we dipped a lotus root and fish balls into the turntable. In the middle of the meal, someone arrived with warm egg waffles and we distributed them around the table as a communion, each of us carefully breaking a few bubbles of dough so we could enjoy the taste of home together. Slowly, painfully, we imagined the existence of our little Hong Kong.
Other newcomers do the same. Just before the lunar New Year, I went to a pop-up Hong Kong market in Melbourne, held under the domed roof of a 19th-century meat market. Hong Kong-run companies advertised their gardening services, waited in long lines to buy curry fish balls, and had a booth selling “The Power of the Powerless” by Vaclav Havel, along with a biography of Lee Ka-shing, the tycoon who during the protests, mysterious advertisements were printed in front-page newspapers that were seen as coded criticism of Beijing’s strategy for Hong Kong.
At the back of the market space was Lennon’s wall, mimicking the protest walls that emerged during the 2019 protests. Like the originals, he carried lines of Post-it notes with forbidden phrases such as “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Time.” But the one that caught my eye was an orange note with a rough sketch of Hong Kong’s silhouette, under the English words “I miss Dom Kong.”
Notes pasted on Lennon’s wall at a market in Hong Kong’s Melbourne in January. . . © Louise …
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