In the first moment, I’m in a glass and steel tower lobby on Hong Kong Island, a space I’d say was cavernous if it wasn’t so lit that morning by the midsummer sun. Sitting at one of a little crop of white metal tables and chairs next to a kiosk that together comprise a cafe. Besuited professionals are milling about. A busy, gleaming, global corporate setting.
What I remember that moment for is a vertical banner hanging down from the ceiling behind the escalators to the mezzanine. It’s enormous, maybe fifty feet long, though my memory could be exaggerating. It portrays a trim, clean-cut, gray-haired white guy on it, with a big smile, the picture of oblivious satisfaction: it’s an ad for a credit card or life insurance or something else moneyed. And in that moment, for some reason, I think of this fact I had recently learned about Hong Kong, which is that any person of any nationality who spends seven continuous years living and working in the territory qualifies to become a Hong Kong permanent resident, with all attendant social privileges and benefits.
On the light side (sorry, just saw Star Wars) of this fact is beautiful, admirable: as I wrote glowingly last time, it makes Hong Kong a city unanchored from inheritance, where commerce and culture are defined by whoever decides to show up. A place in that moment more free than anywhere from the biases and inclinations and tendencies of thought based on the actions of angry people in the 19th century or before.
But then there is the dark side (sorry again), where I see that content white man in the banner, and then I see myself, excited at being given permission to take this exotic place of old and new, with oceans and mountains framing its skyscrapers, and make it my own. As if my place in America was not enough; I need another piece of the world, and I can have this one.
And then, after the first moment, the next moment: my attention returns to the people I’m sitting with at the cafe, who I got drunk with the night before, who have lived in Hong Kong their whole lives. And I mention that I’m returning to mainland China later that day. My two friends wrinkle their noses, and shake their heads. Mainlanders and loud, rude, and dirty, they say. And I’m too aglow with admiration of Hong Kong’s cosmopolitanism, too able to relate to my friends’ frustration at having serenity disrupted by a tour guide wearing neon speaking into a megaphone five fee away, to be offended.
Nine years and change after these moments, we watch the protests. It’s easy to see a mass of citizens demanding better treatment from their government; this is good liberals understand. But we might also be watching a visceral, or otherwise body-bound rejection of people Hong Kong ren see as loud and dirty. A nationwide wrinkling of the nose and shaking of the head, triggered as automatic and beyond control as Mr. Park’s reaction to Mr. Kim’s smell at the end of Parasite, right before [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS].
And for the part of us good liberals, maybe we’re supporting the protesters not so much because we demand equal treatment and human rights for all people, but because we prefer Hong Kong as an open, exotic, commercial city where we can come and go as we please.
Again: I support Hong Kong, and I hope you do too. But it’s an exercise in clear and honest engagement with the world to reflect on the tribal rage and preference beneath the thin skin of our principled stand.