I just watched Stephen Green’s Right Angle on Hong Kong. Totally moved. I should know. I just returned from Hong Kong early August, 2019. I’ve been traveling to HK since 1998, just after the handoff and this was my 61st business trip to Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and also yes, what I call “mainland China”. In 2 weeks, it’ll be my 62nd trip. For a California native with 45 years in the professional skateboard biz, 62 trips to Hong Kong has made me feel nearly like a HK local.
I love the Hong Kong people. Well, most of them. The old merchant lady who screamed at me to stop taking photos of her cat for fear it was stealing it’s soul….not my favorite… but still, quirky in a memorable way. I love the city, the scenery, the architecture and most of all the thriving concept of free market capitalism from the top of the highest business skyscraper to the leather goods salesman on the ground floor in Sham Shui Po neighborhood, no city I’ve seen, certainly not in USA nor mainland China, exemplifies this free market feeling as much as Hong Kong.
But since the hand-off, from Britain to Beijing, I have seen a change. It’s the frog in water metaphor. It’s happened slowly over the years, but there has been a change. Maybe I see it because I’m only there 4 times a year. Little less free, little more rules,a lot more cameras, little more looking over one’s shoulder. Not enough to be obvious, but it’s there.
So I, too, kind of blew off the protests at first as being a bunch of whiners whipped up by the likes of Lisa Fithian of Berkeley’s Ruckus Society, or the folks behind Code Pink, or the WTO protests before that, or Occupy after that. But on my , last trip to Hong Kong which just concluded, it struck me like a “club to the back of my head” that these folks are taking a stand. A hard stand, one which pits a few million folks against their own government…. A government which for 99 years for better or worse, at least had the Hong Kong People in mind, but now is a government forsaking it’s citizens, and willing to accept a puppet’s role for Beijing, for trying to pass a law which says mainland can extradite any Hong Kong citizen for whatever reason, and to do them whatever Beijing wants. These normal people are up and taking a stand and it’s inspiring. Really inspiring. And makes me laugh and cringe at our spoiled little Antifa’s here in the US.
The late Anthony Bourdain did a “The Layover” show on the CNN years ago, in Hong Kong. The episode had a clip with a young woman, in front of the beautiful Victoria Harbor with the island skyscrapers in the background, and she said while talking to the cameras, “I hate it when people call me Chinese…..I’m not Chinese…..I’m from Hong Kong, it’s totally different…I’m quite Pissed about that…..
I thought to myself, wow, that young 20 something really has spirit, a love of her culture and her country. So when I look at the protesters now, I don’t look at them as Antifa, or Occupy or Code Pink….I see this proud young woman, fighting for her freedom, fighting for the life she knew and grew up with, fighting for her special culture and quite possibly, fighting for her life.
I stand with her.
2 replies on “I’ll Stand With Hong Kong”
Great post Tim
Thank you, Tim.