Hong Kong is my home. I will stay even as the clouds gather
Luz Yee lost her job as a journalist, and watched as friends and colleagues killed themselves or were jailed. She wonders if the authorities will come for her.
The political crackdown in Hong Kong has changed my home city for ever, and not only in the most obvious, terrible and newsworthy ways. In the five years since the mass democracy demonstrations against the territory’s pro-Chinese government, I have lost two friends to suicide, and seen many others arrested, charged and imprisoned.
The damage done to Hong Kong goes beyond the prominent trials of people like Joshua Wong, the democracy activist, and the newspaper proprietor Jimmy Lai. The rushed passage last week of the new security law known as Article 23 will no doubt lead to more trials and convictions. And countless ordinary Hongkongers will continue to pay a price that is impossible to calculate, in careers lost, education interrupted, parents and siblings separated, and mental health ruined.
I finished my postgraduate studies in Britain and returned to the city shortly before the democracy movement erupted in 2019. I was born and raised in Hong Kong, but until that moment I had never had a strong identity with the city. But after those immense and dignified demonstrations, this place and its people would never be the same.
Within a single week, two of my friends jumped to their deaths in a desperate and despairing plea for the voices of the protesters to be heard. As the situation escalated, more and more people I know were arrested. Some of them have finished serving their term, some are still months — or even years — from release.
The Covid-19 pandemic and the imposition by China of a National Security Law stifled the demonstrations. The tear gas and pepper spray had gone, but a bigger and heavier cloud loomed.
Independent media outlets shut down one after another. Apple Daily, for whom I worked as an editor, closed in June 2021, then Stand News after Christmas, and Citizen News on the second day of the new year. Some of the most respected editors have since been put behind bars. It has been more than two and a half years since they were charged under the national security law imposed by Beijing. The trial is continuing and the date of the verdict is still not clear.
There have been widespread arrests, including among the media
Along with hundreds of others, I lost my job. Not just a job — the whole profession was crushed. People like me were deemed “unwanted” by other news organisations because of where we had worked. Some colleagues have changed careers, and more have joined the broader exodus and moved abroad via the visa “lifeboat” schemes offered by western countries including the UK and Canada.
So has my family. My brother made the decision to leave a promising career and stable salary after my nephew came home from school one day and said the teacher hushed him when he said that Hong Kong was a British colony. New textbooks printed for local schools insist that China has always had sovereignty over Hong Kong and the British only “imposed colonial rule” on the territory.
I remember seeing them off at the airport. At the check-in were queues of people pushing trolleys with hills of giant suitcases, topped by young children dangling their feet and fiddling the shoulder straps of brand-new colourful backpacks — practical farewell gifts for the emigrants. It was the moment when the world was still rattled by the pandemic. Perhaps it was because they were masked, but I could not sense any excitement about the new adventure that these people were embarking on. Like my brother, they were not going on holiday: they were uprooting themselves and leaving behind the life they knew.
Many have chosen to uproot their lives and families and move abroad, taking advantage of visa “lifeboat” schemes
lives and families and move abroad, taking advantage of visa “lifeboat” schemes
My octogenarian, wheelchair-bound grandmother was not at the airport for the send-off. But I saw many, many grandmas and grandpas hold tightly onto the younger ones before they parted, weeping as their loved ones disappeared beyond the departure gate. Last week, research by the Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention at the University of Hong Kong identified a rising trend of suicide among elderly people, which could be attributed to the feeling of abandonment caused by younger people moving away.
I meet my grandma at least twice a week now. I am her only grandchild left in town.
Most of my family and many colleagues and friends have left, a bitter reality that I have to live with every day. For the past few years, I have been spending weekends visiting friends in prisons in some of the most remote parts of Hong Kong.
The new Article 23 security law is expected to lead to more trials and convictions
During these visits, it is strange to meet my former colleagues also visiting their former colleagues. It is almost like being back in the newsroom — except that we are in a high-security facility, and none of us are journalists any more.
When Article 23 was ushered through on Tuesday, my phone was bombarded with messages from former colleagues. Instead of words, they consisted only of emojis. People who used to write for a living have been made wordless. Events are so extreme that it feels as if there is nothing left to say.
Events are so extreme, Yee says, that it feels as if there is nothing left to say
“Are you leaving?” has become a standard conversational opening for Hongkongers these days. My answer was always no. But over the past few weeks, as I studied the draft bill of Article 23, and saw how it was being rushed through, I began to have second thoughts. Could I be charged for my present work, freelancing for an overseas organisation? Do I need to second-guess and self-censor before I have even written a word?
I asked a friend the same questions on our bus ride to yet another prison visit. Unlike me, she is a mother; but like me, she has been struggling to find a media job because of where we both worked. She fell into silence. And as I started staring into the cloudless sky, she said: “Let’s wait and see, shall we? Let’s stay here, and wait and see.”
Luz Yee is a pseudonym
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hong ... -59jkgh2bk
