On a really positive day, I ascended Lion’s Rock, an iconic peak in Kowloon which affords beautiful vistas of Hong Kong to the mettlesome hiker. In 2019, the grandiose cliff face was generally draped in scream indicators. Steadying myself in opposition to a tree trunk, I in actual fact really feel my thumb hasten proper right into a groove. I gape up, and, squinting, see etched into the trunk, “八三一,” the Chinese language language characters for 831. Adore Neo finding out to be taught code, the identical numbers started to change with the motion prior to my imaginative and prescient as I ambled down the trail, uncanny and insistent, carved into tree after tree: 831, 831, 831. I whipped out my cellphone: 8/31, the date of the “Prince Edward Incident,” when police brutally bludgeoned protesters on the Prince Edward subway residing, then sealed it off to first responders.
Googling 831 led me like a flash to 721, the Yuen Prolonged incident on July 21, which furthermore fervent violent clashes between police, protesters, and counterprotesters. Democratic Celebration chair Wu Chi-wai condemned the arrest of Lam Cheuk-ting, a Democratic Celebration politician on the time, declaring that “the prosecution is ‘calling a deer a horse’ and twisting ethical and glide.”
My thoughts whirred, clicked help. Months prior to, listening to an indie band favored for his or her politically subversive lyrics led me to a espresso store in Kowloon they negate about. A couple of doorways down, I’d considered a queer T-shirt in a retailer window: It had a picture of a deer captioned “proper this is a horse.”
I used to be beginning to fragment points collectively, to value how the businesses and people round me had been marking themselves—how they caught their tongues out at leaders by sticking their tongues of their cheek; how coded interactions allowed them to leer each numerous out and produce neighborhood.
Some weeks later, I’m nodding distractedly alongside in some unspecified time in the way forward for a dialog when my acquaintance sighs, “You merely can now not level at a deer and make contact with it a horse.” My eyes dawdle up. They retract my gape. “You understand what I’m saying?” they search information from meaningfully. “I notice,” I replied. We alternate silent, shiny nods, every comprehending that one thing essential has handed between us. Surveillance promotes distrust, and dialog on account of this truth most steadily happens best between the traces. Faraway from an act of cowardice for now not “speaking one’s thoughts,” these coded gestures are a profound measure of perception, a dedication to remembering collectively.
As Milan Kundera as soon as wrote, “The struggle of man in opposition to vitality is the struggle of reminiscence in opposition to forgetting.” Throughout the face of Beijing’s will, this is able to perchance perchance perchance very successfully be all that’s left to those on this metropolis who took to the streets with a passion ethical three years throughout the previous. However it’s now not nothing. Faraway from it. Learning to see one thing the construct nothing is there sounds paranoid, however certainly it’s the most straightforward bulwark in opposition to revisionism in a metropolis the construct one has to take care of doublespeak from the perfect workplaces. Closing yr, two trustworthy newspapers had been shuttered inside per week, and their employees had been arrested. However Carrie Lam, then the supervisor govt of Hong Kong, claimed that whereas the newspapers compromised nationwide safety, their shuttering had nothing to current with the Nationwide Security Legislation or censorship. Addressing questions referring to the novel elections being a “one-man streak,” the construct best one candidate stood for elections, Maria Tam, deputy director of China’s NPCSC Basic Legislation Committee, talked about, “Having ethical one particular person working for [chief executive’s] place of job does now not suggest now we possess fewer picks,” in a semantically illogical assertion.
Paradoxical doublespeak in Hong Kong today happens now not best as a sprinkling of remoted incidents, however is deeply existential. Earlier this yr, information broke referring to novel textbooks for schoolchildren in Hong Kong that can communicate that Hong Kong was by no means a British colony. In his speech on the handover anniversary celebrations, President Xi Jinping asserted that “appropriate democracy” in Hong Kong best started after Hong Kong was returned to China. When puzzled by a UN rights committee about press freedoms and disbanded NGOs, the secretary for constitutional and mainland affairs, Erick Tsang, retorted defensively that “in actual fact, democracy has taken a quantum soar forward because the return to the motherland in 1997.” All this presents a catastrophe of rhetoric and of ideology. If Hong Kong was by no means a colony, it couldn’t “be returned,” but when this was so, then what was being neatly-known on the predominant of July? In the meantime, pro-democracy activists are deemed unpatriotic and persecuted. Is one to value if democracy is sensible or now not? And does Hong Kong possess one, or now not?