My face mask is strapped wrong such that the yellow bands strain awkwardly on the back of my skull, bunching up my hair into a silly-looking poof, but I don’t notice because there’s a whirring machine in front of me, looping a pad of gray foam in quick circles, ready to brush something. I am pinching a small rectangular metal pin between my fingers and nudging it up to the foam pad trying to brush it at the right angle, with the right force.
The pin, sized for a jacket pocket or a backpack, is shaped like a street sign, which, in Hong Kong, are written in traditional Chinese and English. The artist who made the pin intentionally put it through a condensed oxidation process so that the whole thing is crusted with a sea foam-colored rust, looking like a museum-worthy relic — old but made to last. He checks my brush job, offering instructions on how to target the right spots to clean the rust where it should come off, avoid the parts where it should stay on, guiding me according to his artistic vision. He is affirming but I am surely disappointing. I check my own work too much, flipping the pin over every three to four brushes to read the pin’s message: Hongkonger 香港人.
Kit, the artist, was supposed to be off today but he opened up his art studio since I’m only in Hong Kong for a few days.
Kit participated in the 2019 movement in Hong Kong against the new extradition bill proposed by the Beijing-friendly Hong Kong legislature. This bill, if passed, would have allowed any Hongkonger suspected of a crime to be tried on the Chinese mainland. The proposed bill triggered millions of people — an estimated one-third of Hong Kong’s population — to take to the streets in support of the swelling pro-democracy movement. The longer the people sustained, the less patient the legislators grew, and the more violently the police behaved. Over a galiant nine months of sustained resistance, the people were tear gassed, beat up, shot by rubber bullets and real ones. Some died, some were injured, many were arrested.
While Hong Kong burned, I could only clutch my heart and watch the conflagration from my laptop in New York. I texted. I wrote to friends and family in Hong Kong to check in, believing that they were relieved that people around the world cared. I managed to write an article bragging about the ingenious technologies protesters adopted in the movement. I shared stories and videos with my community so that at least in my sphere, the news of Hong Kong’s fight would reverberate.
Kit’s studio, tucked in an old, unassuming warehouse-style building, is not listed in the lobby directory. I assumed this was to avoid being tracked. The studio is bright and crowded with pleasant-looking things. At the entrance there is a small glass case displaying some of Kit’s work. There is a coaster made of cement with Chinese characters that read, “all the way to the bottom of the pot”; a soy sauce dish with a single character in the middle: 撐, a colloquial way to say “support.” There are pins shaped like raised-up fists that read “Motherf*ckers, let’s go!”, allegedly the words spoken by a Cantonese army general setting off a battle against the Japanese imperialists. Above the case hung a small curtain, blue and beige, that read “you can’t get rid of Hongkongers.” Everything is written in his signature “kickass type,” each phrase or word steeped in meaning from the 2019 uprising. Five minutes after walking in, I think to myself — as I learned to say in my youth — HK ALL DAY.
I am surprised to learn that my suspicion was wrong. No, he says, I wouldn’t mind listing my studio in the directory, I just haven’t gotten around to it. Kit’s ease and unbothered matter-of-fact-ness doesn’t make sense to me.
I want to know, after everything in 2019 — the censorship, erasure, imprisonment, false charges, disappearances — how is his studio still operating? What about surveillance? Many activists who’d been active during that time have left, only a few remain in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong police routinely visit “suspicious” locations, leaving in their wake a nagging sense of caution among the now-silenced freedom fighters. Kit said his Facebook page receives frequent cyberattacks by bots based in Nigeria, hired by China.
“For those who wanted to leave Hong Kong, the UK offered a special visa,” Kit tells me. Many Hongkongers, especially those with children, could not bear the thought of having their children raised by the inevitable Chinese nationalist curriculum, nor in a new Hong Kong where the schools would be just a microcosm of its society that, sooner rather than later, would be subject to the same propaganda. “Many of my friends are gone. Or they’re in prison awaiting bogus trials for bogus sentences, but I don’t want to leave. This is my home.”
My own family left Hong Kong thirty years ago in 1994. A few years earlier, Beijing massacred students fighting for democracy in Tiananmen Square. With the Hong Kong “handover” to China imminent, many, including my family, felt apprehensive about the future of a Beijing-governed city. Given their track record, Beijing’s slogans and promises of autonomy rang hollow to many. To put things into perspective, Kit reminds me, “you were part of the first wave of migration.” Now we can see that our fears had been realized. Set apart by three decades, the events of 1989 and 2019 saw the same rise and fall: the same burgeoning courage of youth-led movements for democracy and self-determination, and the same violent tactics of oppression to silence them. Until 2020, Hong Kong had been the only place on Chinese soil that held a vigil of remembrance to commemorate the martyrs at Tiananmen Square. Today, the vigil is no longer permitted.
We sit at Kit’s artist table, which is covered with bottles of black ink and holders of differently-sized brushes, tools used for Chinese brush painting and calligraphy. Kit’s signature typography, the “kickass type,” is a stylized take on traditional Chinese calligraphy. Its strokes disobey the rules of tradition, adding girth and removing weight in unconventional places, evoking an attitude of rebellion through punchy asymmetry. He plants each confident stroke, skinny or wide, out of order. More than his artistic talents, he possesses an ability that I don’t: a command in the deconstruction and reconstruction of Chinese characters afforded to those most intimately familiar with it. Apropo to his work, his type was used to write protest messages and banners in 2019. His calligraphic street art, equal parts made of and countering tradition, became one of the symbols for Hong Kong’s modern freedom movement.
I settle a small brush into my left hand, my palm and fingers naturally finding their position around it like a ballet dancer perfunctorily settles into third position.
“That one is for characters,” Kit points to one of the ink dishes, “and that one is for designs,” pointing to another dish with diluted ink.
Thirty years after leaving HK, long after slipping out of regular use of my native Cantonese, after many embarrassing stalls searching for long-forgotten or never-learned vocabulary, and possessing no such intimacy with the Chinese language as Kit’s, I am just proud of the simple skill of remembering how to write my Chinese name with each stroke in the traditional order. I manage the three characters of my name 鄧穎恆 in a handwriting locked from age ten, the age I left. Kit tells me I have good handwriting and I blush a little because it’s embarrassing to be an adult and still feel like a kid getting a gold star in class. I return some self-deprecating comment to deflect his compliment even though later, I would pin up my little name card next to other memorabilia, like a parent hanging up their kid’s drawing, and I would think, for being out of practice, my handwriting is pretty good.
Recently it dawned on me that at the risk of dilution, repression, and eventual erasure by a totalitarian regime, retaining my language is more than personal history reclamation, it’s a political act. I was reminded that the dynamic tonal Cantonese, plus our snarky cultural irreverence leave much room for linguistic play. Cantonese is a really fun and ridiculous language.
I downloaded a Cantonese app to help me connect the dots of my language. To know any Chinese dialect is a complicated thing: each character has a particular way it is written, its design only knowable either by association of some prefixes or by memory. In Cantonese, this character is pronounced in one of nine tones. If you skew the tone, you say something different. This character, standing alone, could have its own loose meaning, but more likely it would become enlivened, more specific, when paired with other characters, forming handfuls of terms, phrases, and meanings. Formally, there are nearly 50,000 characters in standard written Chinese, 5,000 to 6,000 of which are used in common exchanges. Cantonese speakers add to that thousands of their own invented characters to write unique colloquial speech, where nearly one-third of Cantonese colloquial words do not exist in Mandarin. Until I can move to Hong Kong and participate in a fully immersive learning experience, I have settled for reading children’s books in traditional Chinese and practicing writing characters in notebooks. (A favorite at the moment is called “I Love Boba!” which is the truth.)
Unlike in California or New York, where my relationship to many things required negotiation before settling into comfort, my relationship with Cantonese, and — this might sound really ridiculous — its relationship with me, are effortless. Our natural possession of one another is neither toxic nor colonial, neither co-dependent nor co-opted. It’s egoless, immaterial, and fun. This is what my mother tongue feels like.
My first two decades in the US I had forgotten I was a Hongkonger. I didn’t forget the factual stuff: like where Hong Kong was on the map, the neighborhood where I took ballet lessons, notable events of 1989 or 1997, or how to order chive dumplings in Cantonese. I’d forgotten something far more informative: that the facets of socioeconomics, geography, and culture that make up Hong Kong also made up my earliest life and consciousness, forming my memories, values, and sensibilities. I’d forgotten the smell of my city, the mood of the skyline, the toothy grins of aunties in markets driving tough bargains. I lost the familiarity of home. Immigration, white supremacy, and assimilation tried, almost succeeding, but thankfully failed to sever the line that links me to my home. The city I took my first steps in, whose language shaped my earliest words, whose colonial past fuels the freedom fire in me. The city of “fragrant harbor” and I remain connected; indeed a total fracture would not be possible. The Chinese saying 藕斷絲連 – “when the lotus root snaps, its fibers remain connected,” is my life in proverb. The Chinese language wastes no words.
In response to the mass protests of 2019, Beijing passed a sweeping New National Security Law and bypassed the city’s legislative process to do so. Vague policies for broad “crimes” carrying harsh punishments have been effective in limiting the creative possibilities of art-ivists like Kit.
“The Hong Kong that we knew doesn’t exist anymore,” Kit says, still as steady as before. “I still teach calligraphy workshops but I haven’t produced new work in a while. I’m not sure what’s next.”
The Hongkonger pin sits on my palm and I rub its etchings. My sadness is overridden by something like naive determination. This pendulum has become familiar. In recent months, on my side of the world, the peak of such swings is marked on one end with immobilizing despair for the heart-wrenching deaths and destruction in Gaza arising from ethnic cleansing and genocide on the Palestinian people; on the other with a raw, near inexplicable drive to act — to do anything at all that could amount to the slightest bit of difference to matter. Everyday there is a feeling of impossibility in this task, and the pendulum swings again.
The playbook for authoritarianism is the same everywhere. They disburse your protests, imprison your fighters, ban your books, restrict your media, alter your curricula, fire your educators. They take away your mics, your drums, your chalk, your plazas. They pay off people to buy vigilantes. They murder your journalists, your writers, your poets, your truth tellers, and forbid you to mourn them. On their own accord they won’t stop. Just months ago, as the world’s attention rightfully turned towards Gaza, the fully Beijing-elected Hong Kong legislature passed an expansion of the NSL, making the punishable crimes more far reaching — even to Hong Kong residents anywhere in the world — with more devastating consequences.
After Kit’s studio I meet my friend for dinner. She spent her day visiting friends in prison — some of the almost 1,300 freedom fighters who have been arrested and imprisoned since the 2020 NSL passed. I’m not sure how much to ask, what is allowable these days. I know that she, in spite of the circumstances, is undeterred: the methods must change, the fire remains. She is away from the streets these days, working instead on a book about democracy targeting a mainland Chinese audience. I admire her. I fear for her.
“How do you keep working?” I realize my line of questions today has been uncreative. “How do you even — ” my flailing gestures finish my sentence. Whatever strength facilitates her sustained action in the face of such totalizing suppression, I want it too.
She, steady and certain, neither lowering her volume nor raising it, said — “you never know.” Her motivator is hope.
What is most remarkable to me is that people fight no matter what. They tell their own stories, hack state policies, outsmart the police. They are fluid, they are clever, they protect one another. They throw stones, slingshots, molotov cocktails. They make art, sing songs, they dance and celebrate, despite horror. They will make you listen, they are everywhere. They have hope because they must; they have hope so I do too. The hope is this: that the will of a people to determine their own lives, to make their own choices, to thrive in just societies — to be free — is as intrinsic as breath itself.