One day, I clicked when he suddenly handed me a sunset shot by a beach house in Hong Kong’s Ap Lei Chau. I could hear the comforting roar of the Cantonese, the bursting of a gas flame, the squeaking of a cigarette. I could not bear to close the window myself. I left it there, watching the birds pass by and the sky change from pink to gray to black. It was a gateway to the past, to a house I could not return to. Following the lockdown, a Melbourne cinema screened a series of films by Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai. Night after night, I was going. Almost immediately I realized that I could recognize Hong Kong in public. Often, like me, they came alone. They chose positions that were slightly different from other people. As soon as the movie started, you could hear them crying quietly in the dark, mourning the lost city on the screen in front of them. One night, series curator Kristy Matheson made a brief introduction to 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 homosexual relationship that many have read as a metaphor for Hong Kong’s relationship with China. The couple lives in exile in a kind of floating vacuum, without familiar rituals or important moments that mark the passage of time. Matheson ended 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 we became inseparable 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 Photography This is a state known to the young exiles of Hong Kong. The city’s 7.4 million population is shrinking rapidly. Some residents leave so suddenly that they abandon their expensive cars in the parking lots. Nearly 150,000 residents have left (in clear terms) since the end of 2021, including more than 50,000 people in the first half of March alone. According to the Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute, almost a quarter of the city’s residents plan to leave. A boost is Hong Kong’s draconian Covid regulations. Until recently, Covid-positive people were sent to solitary confinement in quarantine camps, and a Hong Kong charity estimates that up to 2,000 infected children have been separated from their parents in hospital. The biggest factor remains the political climate in the aftermath of the mass protests of 2019. In June 2020, Beijing enacted national security legislation in Hong Kong, banning secession, overthrow, terrorism and collusion with foreign powers. These crimes are so inadequately defined that applause during a court hearing is now obviously a tumultuous activity, as is criticism of the government’s response to Covid on social media or wearing a T-shirt or wearing stickers. the popular protest slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of our times”. Protester in Causeway Bay in May 2020 waving a flag with the slogan “Liberation of Hong Kong, revolution of our times” © Zuma Press / eyevine One database lists 183 people arrested under national security law since its inception, a third of them for speech crimes. Living civil society organizations were forced to disband and the city’s dynamic legislature was transformed beyond recognition into a patriotic body only, following the arrest of 47 political activists for overthrowing them in a by-election. As national security law is extraterritorial in nature, the potential threat is far beyond Hong Kong’s borders. When the national security legislation was announced, I was on a Zoom call with my study team. We are a small group of Melbourne-based Hong Kong PhD students affiliated with a number of Australian universities and our research revolves around Hong Kong identity. Throughout the lockdown, we met once a week at Zoom to read and discuss academic work. But after the announcement of the new legislation, we stopped meeting, we stopped reading newspapers, we stopped talking about Hong Kong’s identity. Our research suddenly seemed irrelevant. Finally, how can you find something whose expression could be criminal? It was difficult to know what the new legislation would mean to us — either academically or personally — but it was clear that it would not be positive. It was difficult even to focus under the circumstances, and one by one my friends applied for leave from their studies. Their parents called, warning them not to return home. Despite my previous existence as a journalist in China for the BBC and NPR – negotiating Beijing’s changing political sensibilities every day for a decade – I had no helpful advice. The unpredictability of Hong Kong national security legislation means that its red lines are constantly moving, extending and bleeding into a Red Sea that is flooding an ever-expanding list of activities. In a way, I’m an interlocutor in this community. I’m not a Hong Kong native, although I grew up there in the 1970s and 1980s with a Chinese father and an English mother. However, I shared their fears, both widespread and specific. Hong Kong CEO Kari Lam is among the officials at the inauguration of the Central People’s Government’s National Security Assurance Bureau in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in July 2020 © Getty Images In addition to the concern that our investigation might be in breach of national security law, we were concerned that we might inadvertently endanger those involved by putting their views before the authorities. We had existential fears about whether there was a future in the work we did. But there was no way I could find any answer. National security law was administered by an Orwellian body called the National People’s National Security Assurance Office in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, which had suddenly arrived in Hong Kong at night, ordering a hotel for its overnight use. law’s. It soon became clear that the outlines of national security legislation would only appear after they had been violated, leaving silence as the only guarantee of self-preservation. Seeking greater clarity about the dangers of the Hong Kong debate abroad, I approached Eric Yan-ho Lai, a Hong Kong legal associate at Georgetown University who maintained a national security database. I was impressed by 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 a degree of freedom of expression or discussion in Hong Kong,” he said. He then added a disclaimer: “But the danger or danger 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, many of whom are high in Australia, thanks to the Australian Government’s decision to grant new permanent accommodation after the announcement of national security laws. Back in 2019, as demonstrations rocked their city, Hong Kong students clashed with students on the mainland on Australian campuses on several occasions. A college student here told me that he never talks about the political situation in Hong Kong until he learns the attitude of each person in the room. “We are afraid that if we say something that the Chinese government does not like, they will threaten our parents, friends and relatives. [back in Hong Kong]. » We know we are different. We know we have to be free because we were free My small group was barely talking for months. But when Melbourne finally came out of the lockdown, we gathered in a park, blinking dimly under the unknown sun as we ate sweet, sticky slices of mango. When the restaurants reopened, we shared dishes with chunky steaming pasta. We did not talk about our research. At Christmas, we listened to Cantopop as we dipped lotus root and fish balls in the rolling boil of a hotpot. Halfway through the meal, someone with hot egg waffles arrived and we passed them around the table like a mystery, each of us carefully breaking some sourdough bubbles to enjoy the taste of home together. Slowly, painfully, we imagined our own little Hong Kong. Other new arrivals are doing the same. Shortly before the Lunar New Year, I went to an emerging Hong Kong market in Melbourne, held under the vaulted roof of a 19th-century meat market. Hong Kong-run companies advertised their gardening services, long queues waited to buy curry balls, and there was a bookstore selling Vaclav Havel’s Powerless Powerhouse along with a biography of Li Ka-shing, the tycoon who, according to During the protests, it printed cryptographic front-page newspaper ads that were seen as a codified critique of Beijing’s strategy in Hong Kong. At the back of the market there was a Lennon wall, mimicking the protest walls that popped up during the 2019 protests. of our times “. But what caught my eye was an orange note with a rough sketch of the Hong Kong skyline, under the English words “I miss Home Kong”. Post-it notes on a “Lennon Wall” at a Hong Kong market in Melbourne in January. . . © Louisa Lim. . . expressing longing for “Home Kong” © …
