Kris Chengby Kris Cheng
語言:
English
Photo Credit: Studio Incendo/Flickr/CC BY 2.0
FOR MOST OF this century and the final years of the last one, too, I lived in the same area in Hong Kong. For over half of that time, home was a 2-bed flat in the Tuen Mun district of the New Territories, where I first shared a bunk bed with my brother and later had my own bed and working desk after he moved out. It was a five-minute walk from the beach, where people were often angling or feeding stray cats. It was right next to the transport terminus that I used for my daily commute, often running to chase the 962X bus to Central, over on Hong Kong Island, because I was almost late for work.
My mum cooked a lot. She often made steamed fish in soy sauce and steamed spare ribs in black bean sauce. It was my dad’s habit to go to the local Cha Chaan Teng, Hong Kong’s trademark style diner, to have lunch. Sometimes I would join him, usually sitting in a booth seat like those found on trains, and he would ask me how I was doing when I was having dishes like fried rice with salted fish and cubed chicken. If I couldn’t think of anything there I wanted to eat, I would go to a favourite Vietnamese restaurant nearby. To this day I can’t figure out how they grilled those pork chops so well.
Mine was probably a life a lot like those of many who grew up in Hong Kong. People like me might move to a different area than the one we grew up in, we might get married and we might find shift around due to changing jobs, but the rhythms of our lives wouldn’t be that different from year to year or even decade to decade. Until everything started to change.
The giant protests in 2019 drastically altered my life and the lives of many people like me forever. I became part of a 200,000-strong diaspora in the UK, where I have been living since mid-2021. In the past three years, I have been uprooted and had to start again. And I have learned so much about what home is, what home can be, and what we should do for our home.
I HAVE BEEN a journalist covering politics since the early 2010s. I have often been at the frontlines of protests. In 2014, I was at the occupied sites almost every day and I discovered I have a magnificent talent – give me a surface, even a road laid with asphalt, and I can sleep on it. That year’s peaceful protests did not work. The government did not concede to any of the demands for democracy. The protests died down due to internal conflicts and a lack of a way out.
On the eve of the Lunar New Year in 2016, I was having a night out in Mong Kok, I was enjoying street food and not planning to work (I was wearing leather shoes), when the most violent confrontation between protesters and police broke out, because of the anger over cops trying to remove street hawkers who were traditionally tolerated in the area during festive days. While it was about street hawkers, the conflict was also fueled by frustration over the lack of democracy. I remember that when I heard a gunshot that night, I thought it was tear gas. I couldn’t believe the police would fire a live round in the densely populated area. But it was indeed a warning shot to deter protesters from assaulting the police. Things were burning here and there. Yet it died down as the sun rose.
These kinds of events set the stage for the 2019 protests. When the Hong Kong government, under the control of Beijing, kept denying universal suffrage that was promised under the Basic Law, the de facto constitution, it was natural that protests would get more and more violent. In November of that year, when protesters were facing off against the police at the No.2 bridge of my alma mater, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), riot police fired over 2,000 rounds of tear gas canisters. They did this for almost three hours non-stop in an attempt to stop protesters, many of whom were throwing Molotov cocktails, from getting close to the bridge, knowing that if protesters succeeded in controlling it they could cut off a major highway in the New Territories.
That was the first time when I questioned my choice of being a journalist covering protests because I was suffocating with tear gas, even though I was wearing a military-grade gas mask which was the same kind as those used by the police. It’s hard to describe the scene in front of me at that moment because to me it was all just white smoke from the tear gas.
The protests turned so violent because, on July 21, 2019, a gang of men in white T-shirts attacked random passengers at the Yuen Long MTR station. Before that, there was an apparent disinformation campaign by the wife of a police officer, claiming that protesters would demonstrate in the area. But there were no protesters in Yuen Long that day. The men in white shirts, who claimed their goal was to “protect Yuen Long”, attacked people who were on a train indiscriminately. The police were not present to stop this attack, angering millions of Hong Kongers, who believed the police were turning a blind eye even though they had received intelligence of the attack in advance.
The victims of the attack included my elder brother and his wife. This was due to a set of improbable coincidences. On that day, protesters were in direct conflict with the police in Sheung Wan, an hour away by train from Yuen Long. My brother, a freelance journalist, brought a new helmet to me to wear while covering these protests, but my head was too big for it and it wouldn’t fit, so he took it back. Normally, he would travel home on a bus, but on that night there was no bus due to the protests. So, he took a train, and it happened to be that train. He heard people screaming and went down to the lobby level and started a livestream. He saw a girl being attacked, and he shielded her from the attackers with his body. He was wearing the helmet which was supposed to be for me, and the men in white apparently thought he was a protester. The attackers used bamboo sticks, and they left my brother with a broken philtrum and countless scars on his back. If he did not have the helmet, the injuries would have been unimaginable. We later learnt that the girl was Gwyneth Ho, a journalist whom we both knew personally. (She would end up being held for years awaiting prosecution as part of the “Hong Kong 47”, the largest group of political prisoners ever tried as a group in the city, and while I write this in June 2024, she awaits sentencing.)
I didn’t know any of this while covering the Sheung Wan protests. Because of the lack of transport means, I went to my then-girlfriend’s place as it was nearby. According to her, when I arrived, I was panicking, telling her my brother had gone missing after he left Sheung Wan. I do not remember this scene at all, perhaps because it was so shocking that my brain has chosen to block it from my memory. We were distraught because there had been rumours of people missing after they went to the protests. We found out hours later that my brother’s phone had been broken during the attack and he was on his way to a hospital.
My brother would talk to the press about the 21 July attack every year so that people would remember the truth. Some of the attackers were later charged with rioting, and seven defendants were jailed for between 42 and 84 months in July 2021.
But the man who attacked him, nicknamed “Watermelon Man” for that was his trade, was never charged.
TO CURB THE protests, Beijing imposed a National Security Law (NSL) on 30 June, 2020, a month after I got married. From that point, my wife, who was a member of a pro-democracy lawyers’ group, started to consider whether to leave Hong Kong as things were getting worse and worse by the day.
Many journalists including my brother and I did not want to leave, as it was our duty to tell the stories of what was happening in Hong Kong. But there was no good news and it was harder and harder to work as a journalist. Police raided Apple Daily, the publication that the authorities saw as the biggest thorn in their side, and arrested founder Jimmy Lai. Political commentator Edmund Wan was arrested for remarks he made on his talk show and faced charges of money laundering for raising money for activists who had fled to Taiwan.
I told my wife that if the authorities started to block certain websites, I would reconsider leaving. My thinking was that internet freedom was a cornerstone of Hong Kong, if they can block a website, they can block a news outlet. That happened very soon in January 2021, as a website containing the personal information of police officers was blocked in the city.
And I was unfortunately right about what this signalled as more troubling developments followed. One was the forced closure of Apple Daily. The police used the NSL as an excuse to freeze the assets of the newspaper. This felt like the final blow to press freedom in Hong Kong. We decided to leave for the UK.
WE HAD A slight advantage compared to many Hong Kongers moving to the UK. This is because I had a relative in London so I had been coming to the city every now and then to visit here. My wife had also studied for a law diploma in London. I started working again on the second day after I landed and adjusting to life in London was not too difficult. Things have been smooth afterwards.
In a way, although I moved across the globe, my way of life hasn’t changed that much. I often joke that my workplace moved from the Hong Kong Legislative Council to the UK Parliament, but my job is still the same. I still cover Hong Kong politics, and that’s about it. Maybe I cover more about UK-China relations now, but I have been covering diplomatic news in Hong Kong for some years, and that was the flip side of the coin.
Moreover, so many of our friends have moved here that we have been able to maintain a social life. If I want to host a hot pot dinner at my flat, I can easily call up a dozen people to join, and these are just people in London, not including other friends I know in Bath, Bristol, Leeds, Manchester and Nottingham, among other places.
Because of the influx of Hong Kongers, it is much easier than it used to be to buy Hong Kong food and festive decorations in London. We are a 15-minute bus ride from a cinema that regularly screens Hong Kong films. During festivities, there are always Hong Kong community events, which connects me to the home I have left behind and to writers still based there and located in London and around the world.
Is London home? Yes, we feel safe and settled here. The flat that we moved to in mid-2021 is 600 square feet, 50% bigger than the one I grew up in, and cheaper than the flat in the middle-class Hong Kong Island neighbourhood of Kornhill that we rented after getting married. We often cook Hong Kong dishes, as we invite our friends over to share homemade steamed fish and steamed spare ribs.
I am very lucky to have a pack of journalist friends in a Signal group, who share Hong Kong news with me by the second. If something important is going to happen in Hong Kong, like in the past, I will know it in advance because of these friends. I am never too far away from my original home, even as I operate in two time zones, always thinking of both what hour it is in London and in Hong Kong.
As a typical Hong Konger, I still constantly watch two kinds of news on YouTube — restaurant reviews and property markets. I do this even though I am not sure how these are going to be useful to me if I am not going back to live in Hong Kong, at least not in the foreseeable future.
But I have to keep up with Hong Kong news. Because of this wave of migration, when Hong Kong people think of travelling destinations — other than popular places like Taiwan or Japan — many will fly 14 hours to the UK to meet their friends. At times I meet several friends from Hong Kong in a single week. I have to know what they are talking about and I ask them what I want to know about the current atmosphere in Hong Kong.
Many Hong Kongers who have come to visit have told me that they felt they were finally breathing “the air of freedom” again once they landed in the UK. They kept their mouths shut in Hong Kong fearing the NSL, and they could finally speak freely when in London, knowing that they could trust me.
How long can this “unfree” Hong Kong last? No one knows, and unfortunately, throughout history, dictatorships in all kinds of places have proved able to last for a long time. The Nationalist Party one on Taiwan lasted for decades before democracy came there, and the Communist Party one on the Chinese mainland has lasted even longer. Some people want to leave Hong Kong but do not enjoy the luxury of doing so, as their family and loved ones want to remain in Hong Kong, and they have no choice but to stay. All they can do is get a ticket to London and enjoy a safe conversation with old friends before returning to their reality.
In May 2024, I bumped into an old friend I’ll call “C” at drinks in London for people who used to be in Hong Kong. C grew up in a Hong Kong family in the UK, and she went back to Hong Kong to work over 15 years ago, and just returned a week prior. Many of her friends have left Hong Kong, “I don’t want to be the last one to leave,” she told me over a beer.
I STILL DON’T understand the reason why I am eligible for a BNO or British National Overseas passport by birth — which allowed me to move to the UK on a visa — but my elder brother was not eligible.
In August 2020, seven victims of the attack of 21 July, 2019, including former Democratic Party lawmaker Lam Cheuk-ting, were charged with rioting. This made my brother consider leaving Hong Kong, worrying that he could be next. In April 2024, a defendant was sentenced to 33 months in jail.
Worse still, both my brother and his wife did not hold the special passports. As a result, my brother chose to enrol in a program to get a second master’s degree (he already had gotten one from Lingnan University in Hong Kong years before) at the University of British Columbia to get on the lifeboat scheme to Canada.
In May 2024, I went to Vancouver to see him graduate. It was my first time in Canada, and Hongcouver, as some call it due to how many members of the diaspora are there, didn’t disappoint with the quality of Hong Kong food. My brother lives quite close to a Cha Chaan Teng where I could go to have minced beef congee and fried noodles for breakfast, and baked pork chops with fried rice for lunch. I had the latter twice in a week, it was so good.
Initially, my brother did not know a lot of people in Vancouver, but the community was so small that he quickly got to know my classmate “S” from CUHK, who used to be a secondary school teacher in Hong Kong. We were in the same year studying sociology.
When S and I were having a silky stir-fried egg and chargrilled chicken fillet at another Cha Chaan Teng in Richmond, he reminded me of a conversation that I had forgotten. I had already moved to the UK at that point, and he was enjoying a staycation holiday at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong with his wife. He said we discussed the situation in Hong Kong, I told him why I left, and how life had been in the UK, and unfortunately for him, the chat didn’t make his holiday better. In fact, that conversation made him realise he had to leave Hong Kong for his kid’s future.
S has one of the special passports so he can move to the UK, but he chose Canada as his new home. It was because he never fancied British culture and wanted his son to be a Canadian because he believed in Canada’s values. This is the new home for S, his wife, his son and a second child who was born and will be raised in Canada.
In Vancouver, I also met a Hong Kong couple, “L” and “A”, who I had known for a long time. It was the FA Cup final that day — Manchester United vs Manchester City — and another Hong Kong friend, “K”, invited L and me to watch it at his flat in Burnaby at 7 am. I had to wake up at 6 am, have breakfast, and call a Lyft ride for 25 minutes to get there. K and L were both United fans, I was neutral (I was wearing an AC Milan hoodie), but they thought I brought good luck to them, as United won 2-1.
We then went down to a McDonald’s to get McGriddles. There, L told me he didn’t have many friends and that he had been combating depression in the early days of migration. But he was better now, he said, as he’s got friends like K, S and my brother.
A was a lawyer in Hong Kong who was also a member of my wife’s group. But deep down, A and L wanted to become full-time farmers, as they had done so as a part-time gig in rural Hong Kong.
That same day, A and L drove me to see their new house outside of Vancouver and I helped them out with cleaning the grass, as their place was still under renovation. They bought five acres of farmland and wanted to create a new home there. One of their plans is to plant seeds from Hong Kong, growing Hong Kong vegetables in Canada.
I hope they succeed. I hope everyone who is having to figure out how to make a new start in a new place and find a way to make a locale that is not Hong Kong feel truly like a new home, not just a place of exile. I hope they will be happy in their new lives even if, like me, they keep time by two clocks and still follow the often sad news from their old home.