背景 The View from 2010

In 2010, the second morning of the Year of the Pig is the day after Valentine's. Hong Kong's in a good mood. On ATV Home, Harmony News broadcasts a senior citizen activity organized by a Christian social welfare group. Its goal—to reproduce past times by displaying personal possessions these seniors have preserved and staging pop songs and dances they perform, sporting makeup, wigs, and clothing from their youth. One woman could still wear her wedding dress.

Today, ATV no longer exists, this free-to-air television station with two language channels—Cantonese Home and English World. The station died on April 1, 2016, its license renewal denied by the Hong Kong government. Home couldn't compete with more commercially popular TVB Jade, though World gave TVB Pearl a run for its money. ATV World was perhaps too good at broadcasting all our news in English, the global language, news too readily rebroadcast worldwide, because by 2016, protests in my city had grown louder, and discontents simmered to a dangerous boil.

But on the second day of that Pig year, I am watching Home because mornings are when I catch up on local news, harmonious or contentious, in Cantonese, the language of my city's heart. Our minority language, English, has less to say locally in the mornings, and the Anglo channels—CNN, BBC, Australian Broadcasting, as well as France 24, NHK, Arirang, Al Jazeer, DW, all that foreign media—have fewer correspondents than in days of yore, when Britannia still ruled waves, and us.

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It's impossible, if not heretical, to consider my city today without that "view from behind" of our 背景, as Chinese articulates a background or backstory. In February 2010, I move home once again to live in my birth city; it's the last time I'll do so. My personal 背景 of courage, cowardice, and compromise is this insider's entry path to reflect on our chaotic present.

It takes courage for protesters to wave the British flag in 2019, when the world is witnessing the largest and most prolonged protests by the citizenry, some of whom perpetrate the worst violence in Hong Kong's history. Nineteenth-century gunboat diplomacy—how unequal treaties were signed in favor of the colonizer—seems tame by comparison. Is it Dutch courage or true heroism Grandma Wong displays, this sixty-plus-year-old who consistently appears, wielding a large Union Jack? She will not compromise: Hong Kong under England, she claims, had a future. Many protesters do not agree; as a colonized people, we were second-class citizens. Likewise, the courageous minorities on different spectrums—those demanding independence, freed of Chinese rule; those resorting to violence, risking arrest, because only then will they not be ignored—they, too, cannot compromise. Most protesters disagree, but the more recalcitrant the local government's stance, in line with China's unwillingness to accede to demands for greater democracy, the more likely the protests and strikes will be prolonged, with perhaps more violence and even louder cries for independence.

The ball is in the Hong Kong government's court, more than it's ever been in the history of our city, and they must find the right compromise. It troubles me to see such outrage in our streets, grassroots courage, a courage that should have manifested much earlier in our short history. To mount a real revolution, as opposed to the polite tea parties¹ of Hong Kong's numerous protest marches. The Chairman knew: revolution was the Long March, bloodshed and sacrifice, something Hong Kong's youth are finally discovering late, too late.

Should I have had the courage to abandon my family and city when I was younger, as young as many of these protesters are today? In the journey of my private revolution, I, too, did not find courage soon enough to completely transform my life.

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I left Hong Kong for good in the fall of 2018. Since my first departure at the age of seventeen, it's been a lifelong shuttle, mostly between New York and Hong Kong, in my quest to live...