by Sara Tung
On 12 September 2001, the day after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the French newspaper Le Monde published a front-page editorial under the headline, “Nous Sommes Tous Americains.” We are all Americans.
In the summer of 2019, we are all Hongkongers.
I am an ABC (American Born Chinese). When the protests against extradition broke out in early June, I believed that this was not my fight. I spent many months in Hong Kong in the 1980s and lived in Hong Kong in the 1990s, but I never fell in love with the city, like so many others. Generations of refugees who had arrived with nothing had had to struggle in order to survive in Hong Kong. Perhaps that was why society seemed too money oriented, too status conscious and marked by too much inequality. Moreover, with 1997 approaching, people seemed fatalistic about their imminent takeover by authoritarian China. I wanted to leave before then, so I did.
Obviously, I had not fully appreciated this great city. Its openness, its international, multicultural identity, its sophistication, its prosperity—and its toughness—have all come about through the contributions of the refugees, natives and expats who have called Hong Kong home. This city flourished through the efforts of its hard working people under British rule of law and guarantee of civil liberties—no doubt an imperfect union, but one that managed to create a world-class city out of what was once a fishing village.
Now this society built by refugees struggles with its own survival. And in the past few months, I realised that the protests against extradition are my fight.
Like the people of Hong Kong, my family and I struggled to save our freedoms, if not our lives, from Chinese Communist repression. In fact, Hong Kong served as a refuge for my grandmother, my mother and me when each of us was forced to leave China. If not for Hong Kong, I would not be alive.
Many Hongkongers may have hoped that China would honour the Basic Law. Since the handover, however, Hong Kong has been increasingly stripped of its freedoms.
Today, millions of people in Hong Kong, unwilling to be victims, are united in protest. In fact, Hongkongers are “next generation” revolutionaries fighting to preserve their unique identity and way of life. In doing so, they are fighting for all of us who have passed through or lived in this great city, or aspired to Hong Kong’s values.
1949: Communist Bandits
In 1949, as the People’s Liberation Army completed its takeover of mainland China, Hong Kong figured prominently in my family’s plans as they prepared to flee.
When the end came, my maternal grandfather, a Kuomintang (KMT) general, thought of staying on the mainland. He had joined the army at sixteen, risen to the rank of general at thirty-two and served as commander along the Yangtze River during eight years of war against the Japanese. Tired of combat and KMT corruption and unwilling to fight his countrymen in civil war, he had declined an assignment to be commander of Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin, opting instead to head a military academy in Guiyang, Guizhou’s provincial capital. Now he could return to his ancestral village in Guangxi Province.
Luckily my grandmother convinced him to leave China by threatening to go without him. My grandparents fled to Taipei with my two oldest uncles. My grandmother then flew immediately to Hong Kong to find a way to get my five remaining uncles and aunts, who had been left with my great grandmother in their ancestral village. Ultimately relatives sent back to laojia negotiated the release of the five and brought them to Hong Kong. Before my grandmother took these five children to Taiwan, she purchased a house in Wong Tai Sin, a place for her eldest, my mother, to stay—if she made it out of the mainland.
That spring, my mother, then eighteen, had stayed on in Shanghai, well after my grandmother had ordered her to leave and join the family in Guiyang, where my grandfather was posted. My mom had been enjoying life in what was then the most cosmopolitan city in Asia. Her high school and university friends insisted that Communism offered great hope for China, especially against the corruption and bankrupt ways of the KMT. They looked forward to welcoming the victorious “people’s army” when it marched into Shanghai.
When my grandmother cut off all funds, however, my mother had no choice but to leave her life in Shanghai behind, zigzagging her way through several provinces to reach Hong Kong. From Shanghai, she crossed four provinces to the southwest to arrive in Guiyang, only to find the rest of her family gone. Following instructions my grandmother had left, she then passed through two more provinces to the southeast, before arriving in Hong Kong, nearly a month after leaving Shanghai.
My mother stayed in Hong Kong for over a year, hoping somehow to get back to Shanghai and her friends and be part of the new China. Finally, when my grandmother once again cut off funds and sold the house in Wong Tai Sin, my mom was forced to join her family in Taiwan.
My great grandmother, however, had refused to leave her home and her vast landholdings in Guangxi, believing that no harm would come to an old woman.
My father, who came from a family of landowning peasants, saw his father taken away by Communists when he was eight, never to be seen again. Afterward, when his family became poor, his older brother, also a Kuomintang general, took him under his wing. Sometime in 1949, my father fled with this older brother from Fuzhou, the provincial capital of Fujian, to Taipei, leaving behind their mother and six brothers in their laojia in Fujian.
My parents later met in Taipei in the 1950s, emigrated to the U.S. soon after and married. They graduated from university, enjoyed successful careers, bought a home and sent their three children to university—living the American dream.
When I was growing up, my mother, who had toyed with Communism in her youth, grew to hate it almost as much as my grandmother, who always referred to Communists as gongfei, Communist bandits. My father, on the other hand, thought they were great for unifying China, even though they had killed his father.
Decades later, during their first visit back to China in 1983, my parents learnt the fate of family members who had stayed behind. After the officials responsible for the release of my mother’s siblings had been executed, her grandmother was starved, placed in a bamboo cage, then thrown back and forth until she died from the trauma.
Five of my father’s six brothers, all but one KMT officers, were executed, had died in prison or had committed suicide. His mother had been starved to death. Only one brother, a farmer, had been allowed to live.
Public Security Bureau, or Why Anti-Extradition?
I understand why the people of Hong Kong would unite in opposition to the proposed extradition bill. No one would want to face charges in China under the Communist Party’s legal system, as I did in 1985.
I had grown up with stories about China from my parents, who had vastly different backgrounds and views about Communism. In university, I studied under a professor who idealised the early Chinese Communist Party. His best lectures were about the Long March in 1935–36 and the incredible odds the People’s Liberation Army had struggled against to emerge victorious against the corrupt Kuomintang.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”—this was the guiding principle of the early Chinese Communist Party.
In the early 1980s, China was beginning to open up. I really wanted to see what the country was like, especially with all the conflicting information I had received. After graduation and a student tour of China in 1982, I returned the following year to teach English at Shanghai Jiaotong University, where I taught brilliant students who were being groomed to be future leaders. Everyone, not just students, however, wanted to learn about the outside world and move on from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. It was an exciting time to be in China, as people were hopeful about the country’s future and eager to contribute to its development. Foreign companies were starting to set up offices in Shanghai. A year-and-a-half later, I became the first locally hired professional for IBM there.
In June 1985, six weeks into my job, I was called into the Gong An Ju, or Public Security Bureau (PSB), for what I thought was a routine visa matter. Instead I was questioned several times over a two-week period about my activities, my family, my boyfriend and friends in Shanghai and finally IBM’s business in China. First, a smug, young male officer named Chen interrogated me. Two days later, he was joined by a balding, middle-aged officer with a slight paunch. Then the balding officer and a middle-aged female officer in cat’s eye glasses played good cop/bad cop. Finally, young Chen returned for the final week.
At first, I was defiant. Then I was told I had violated the law—apparently I did not have the appropriate visa—and would be subject to a fine or imprisonment. My passport was taken, and I was asked to write an essay—basically a self-criticism—upon which my punishment would be determined. After submitting my essay, however, I was required to return for more questioning. After each session, I was asked to return again, without any indication of when the matter would be resolved. My colleagues, worried that I would disappear in the middle of the night, offered to stay with me around the clock. I declined their offer. However, alone at night, I wondered how long this might go on. I wanted nothing more than to resume my normal, otherwise happy life. The U.S. Consulate in Shanghai, as well as the Embassy in Beijing, advised that I go along with the questioning and continued to monitor the situation. Soon everyone in the diplomatic community knew about my predicament.
At the beginning of week two, questioning turned to IBM, and I realised this was about something bigger than me. Although, as a new hire, I knew next to nothing, I spun narratives around what I thought my interrogators wanted to hear. Ultimately, IBM’s regional personnel director flew in from Tokyo headquarters to meet with the PSB. That Friday, I was told I would be fined a nominal amount and the matter would be resolved. However, I would need to leave China until my “papers were in order.” I was being expelled from China, a country that had been my home for nearly two years, for reasons that were never made known. My visa issue, a matter for which IBM was responsible, was merely a pretext.
I spent the next three months in Hong Kong, attending a training course, then working out of the IBM office there. Otherwise I awaited word about a possible return date, if any, to Shanghai. At times, I wondered if I should return to China, go back to my family in Los Angeles or build a new life in Hong Kong, where I was safe, visited by many friends from China and befriended by other young people. But Shanghai still felt like home, even after what had happened.
One day in September, the secretary in IBM Shanghai informed me that I could return. IBM and the government of Shanghai had somehow reached an agreement, and the matter of my employment, residency and criminal offense had all been resolved—though no one told me why I had been detained. I returned to Shanghai in time to attend the grand opening of the IBM office, to which the mayor, Jiang Zemin (China’s future president), his vice mayors and representatives of many foreign corporations had been invited.
Afterward, life returned to normal, but, as it turned out, only for three months. At the end of 1985, IBM closed its office in Shanghai, and I, along with other staff, were transferred to the office in Beijing. I stayed with IBM—and in China—for another year-and-a-half—without ever getting a proper work visa.
For a while, I believed my experience with the PSB was an aberration, perhaps due to growing pains and Shanghai’s inexperience in doing business with foreign companies. It was highly unusual then for a foreigner to go through such treatment. And, yet, there was a dark history to my interrogations also. The charges against me, the threats of imprisonment, the requirement to write a self-criticism—these instruments of intimidation and coercion had been widely used during the Cultural Revolution, as well as in the Chinese criminal justice system generally. I realised, too, that I was chosen out of the IBM staff because I was junior and a huayi whose family had fled China. My interrogators must have thought their methods would be more effective on me given what they knew of my family history.
I suspect my interrogators also believed that “we are all children of the Yellow Emperor.” I was ethnically Chinese. Therefore, regardless of my citizenship or status as a privileged foreigner, I should be subject to the same treatment and conditions as all Chinese citizens. The same principle has been applied in recent years to Chinese of foreign citizenship who have been detained in China or Hongkongers abducted in Hong Kong and elsewhere to face charges in China. And the same principle could be applied should the bill for extradition become law. This is why the people of Hong Kong are right to protest—so such treatment will not be legally sanctioned.
I found out many years later that I would never really forget what had happened. The memories I thought I had buried would come back.
In 1999, I met a journalist who had been arrested in China for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was held for a week, beaten and put through a sham trial. Finally, after convincing the local authorities that he was not a spy, this journalist was expelled and banned from China.
Three days later, I was with my cousin and my sister at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. My cousin made a small joke about me.
When she began laughing, I snapped and yelled, “I want to go home! I want to go home!”
Back in my apartment, I sobbed for what felt like hours. Everything was dark all around me. I did not understand why I was in such a state and worried I was losing my mind.
After an hour or two, images of my interrogators appeared to me. There were four of them—the smug young male officer, whom I was reminded of by my cousin’s laughter, as well as the balding middle-aged man, the middle-aged woman in cat’s eye glasses and a fourth who looked like a phantom.
My interrogators had come back for the first of many unannounced visits. The impact of the Chinese criminal justice system—even my little brush with it—would stay with me.
1989: Tiananmen
Four years after my run in with the Public Security Bureau, it looked as though the phenomenon of China opening and closing would repeat itself, albeit on a national scale, with Tiananmen.
In the spring of 1989, I was a first-year student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. I was not completely done with China and decided that Hong Kong would be my next home, so I lined up an internship with Jardine Fleming for the summer. That April, the death of General Secretary Hu Yaobang served as a pretext for Beijing’s university students to fill Tiananmen Square, thus launching their demonstrations for greater openness, reform and democracy. For six weeks, peaceful protests dazzled in their scale and breadth. Tiananmen Square was occupied not only by students and workers but also intellectuals, teachers, journalists from the People’s Daily, even the police. The organisation by the students of the square reflected the kind of government they believed China should aspire to. Train and bus conductors let students ride for free. Popsicle vendors gave away their wares. After martial law was declared, the people of Beijing flocked to the square to plead with soldiers to leave the city or at least put down their weapons.
The demonstrations were the natural culmination of a decade of opening. A big part of me wished I had not left China and could join friends in Beijing who skipped work or classes to visit the square regularly to support the students, workers and other demonstrators.
Then in the early morning hours of June 4th, the massacre happened.
Although troops had occupied Beijing since May 20th, many of us never believed the People’s Liberation Army would attack its own people. During final exam week, my mind was on the soldiers, tanks and the dead and wounded that filled the newspapers and TV screen. In shock, I rushed to find out if everyone I knew was safe.
How was it possible that China, while opening to the world, would suddenly decide to kill its own children, who simply wanted what was best for the country?
I sought out my old professor, who agreed to participate in a televised public forum at the university. He explained to everyone that the Chinese leadership, who had gone through the Japanese occupation, civil war and the Cultural Revolution, among other campaigns, had acted out of fear of luan, or chaos.
Two weeks later, I was in Hong Kong for my internship, still numb. In the interim, friends had been evacuated from China and were hanging out in Hong Kong. I heard their eyewitness accounts of what had happened.
When shots were fired in Tiananmen Square, Peter had saved the life of an injured journalist by carrying him to a rickshaw driver, then rode thirty kilometres himself in a bicycle rickshaw, reaching the airport in time to be evacuated with other foreigners. After arriving in their Tsim Sha Tsui hotel room, his girlfriend tried to wash out his bloodstained shirt in the bathroom sink.
In the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel, Peter, still dressed in a T-shirt and shorts his girlfriend had carried in her daypack, looked around as we waited for tea and said, “Can you imagine what this place will be like when the Chinese take over? They’ll be spitting on the carpets.”
That summer, all of Hong Kong mourned the tragedy. One million people in black protested the massacre. My community in Hong Kong was a mix of finance types I had met through work, old friends now living in Hong Kong and friends from China who had been evacuated—all united in our collective grief. The sense of connection between us and the rest of Hong Kong was palpable. I could not walk far in Central without running into someone I knew, even vaguely, without feeling as though I was meeting a comrade in the true sense of the word. Each of us would go about our daily lives, working, then socialising at drinks or dinner parties or junk trips, acting as if things were normal. It was too difficult to talk about what had happened. Instead we did our best to kill the pain.
At the same time, Hong Kong felt like the Casablanca of Asia, with people trying to figure out their futures while the larger conflict played out on the mainland. Hong Kong natives contemplated what Communist rule might be like or their chances of getting another passport, if they didn’t already have one. Expats wondered how long they might stay in the British Crown Colony, with eight years left before the handover. And the most recent group of refugees to arrive—foreigners evacuated from China—wondered when it would be safe to return to the mainland, or alternatively if they should go back to their home countries or to a third country.
The giant up north was starting to leave its footprint on Hong Kong, and the clock had begun ticking.
In August, two months after Tiananmen, I befriended a journalist who had been expelled from China. When I thanked him for his contributions, Andrew said he was an observer, not a participant. In any case, to me, he was a fellow traveller, someone who had gotten involved with China, and had suffered for it. Andrew had also been through the Gong An Ju. We were, therefore, “partners in crime” and understood each other when we talked about China.
When Andrew and I met in Lan Kwai Fong, he hung his head, seemingly in pain over the crushing of the pro-democracy movement. Andrew was like a mirror for me, reflecting the feelings I could not face.
In September, three months after Tiananmen, I returned to China.
Darkness had fallen on the Motherland as the government continued its crackdown, pursuing anyone connected with pro-democracy, “counter-revolutionary” activities. Anyone suspected of being an instigator was hunted. Protest leaders who had not been killed or imprisoned, went on the run. So many groups had participated in the demonstrations. A hotline was set up, and the laobaixing were encouraged to report on family members, co-workers, neighbours—in short, each other.
I sat up late with an old friend in Shanghai as we waited for his fiancée, a teacher, who had gone into hiding because she had been videotaped while exhorting her students to protest. When I returned to Shanghai Jiaotong University, where I’d taught, I was relieved when I was told that my old students were out of the country in graduate school. Among former Chinese colleagues at IBM, everyone worried about their futures under the ongoing crackdown, families split over opposing views on the massacre, and one took his own life.
Everyone in China remained paralysed in this climate of fear. The rest of us with ties to the country just went on with our lives, trying to forget.
Earlier this year, nearly 30 years after Tiananmen, I met Andrew again at one of his speaking engagements in the San Francisco Bay Area. After he had finished his remarks on China, I approached him, and after a moment of surprise, we embraced, happy to see each other again after so many years.
Andrew and I caught up briefly. We were both writing, though Andrew was no longer writing about China.
“I hate China,” he said. “They won’t let me back in.”
The love-hate relationship had come full circle.
“Do you remember how we met?” I asked.
“Sure.” Then he said, “I took you to a river once. We went swimming. Do you remember?”
I nodded.
“And you also took me to a beautiful beach. I had to meet you somewhere, but I was afraid I’d get lost, so you told me to go north, towards China,” I said.
Our exchange continued for a little while longer before the event ended, and we agreed to reconnect later.
In the weeks that followed, I had a strange reaction to meeting Andrew again. For a while, I kept seeing images of him doubled over, as if he were being interrogated again, and was asked the same questions over and over.
“What are you doing in China?”
“Who are you working for?”
Then, for the next few weeks, I cried every morning over all that was lost, the China that had been our home and our hopes for the country.
2019: Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times
On June 9th, 2019, less than a week after the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen, in outrage against a proposed extradition bill, one million people take to the streets of Hong Kong. It is like the demonstrations in 1989 all over again.
Ten days later, two million people clog major arteries of Admiralty, Wanchai and Causeway Bay for miles on end, bearing larger than life banners with characters that say “No China Extradition ” or “Free Hong Kong,” just like those of thirty years ago calling for democracy. Hong Kong people, with access to resources and their own creativity, outdo themselves. A similar banner will appear on the face of Lion Rock. At the end of the month, members of this cosmopolitan society will crowdfund HK$5.5 million to promote their cause in full-page ads in major international newspapers during the G20 summit.
During these protests, younger protesters occupy the front lines, as they did in Beijing. Many are still children. But their youth belies their sophisticated methods. Dressed in improvised armor – hard hats, goggles, masks, cellophane and umbrellas – they prepare to face riot police. Makeshift barriers, bricks, and bottles meet with police tear gas – more than 1,800 and counting – and rubber bullets. Hand signals and Telegram round out their arsenal.
The earnestness of many protesters is seen in their actions. While destroying symbols of oppression in the Legislative Council chambers, protesters leave coins to pay for cans of soda. A bespectacled teenager places a traffic cone over a tear gas canister, before dousing it with water. It is a battle between many Davids against the giant Goliath, with kids using homemade tools.
“Be Water” is to today’s protesters what Cui Jian’s “Nothing to My Name” was to the activists of 1989. It is, however, more hopeful and perhaps more effective. Faced with overwhelming power, protesters must adapt to any situation.
Yet, how is it possible that children as young as twelve and fourteen have been arrested? Will they be subject to ten years’ imprisonment, charged as rioters for protesting to save Hong Kong’s freedoms?
Not only young protesters improvise. As in Beijing, where art students sculpted the Goddess of Democracy and medical students treated hunger strikers, in Hong Kong, people from all walks of life participate and apply their trades when possible. A Cathay Pacific pilot introduces his passengers on a Tokyo-Hong Kong flight to the peaceful protest at the airport, as well as the now ubiquitous chant, “Hongkongers, add oil!” Lawyers, civil servants, airport personnel, medical staff, teachers and accountants all come out to protest, just like the many segments of society that demonstrated in China.
People leave fare cards at MTR turnstiles, so protesters can ride without having to pay or be identified. Thirty years ago, students from all over China travelled for free to join the demonstrations in Beijing. Indeed, much of the protests are orchestrated by the young, as were those in Tiananmen Square. In the Hong Kong protests, everyone has a job, and litter is collected afterwards. However, unlike 1989 and the Umbrella Movement of five years ago, no one is in charge, though unity is a guiding principle.
Mothers organise to criticise Carrie Lam’s reference to protesters as spoiled children. The elderly and the middle aged will come out to protect the children, just as they did in Tiananmen Square.
It is not all exhilarating, however. From bricks and bottles, protesters turn to bamboo sticks and Molotov cocktails, not to mention the wholesale destruction of the LegCo chambers in July. The frustration of the protesters at not being heard leads to violence that is understandable but worrisome. The response of the police, triads and other thugs, and possibly Beijing itself directly, is definitely not like water. Casualties among protesters mount as a woman is blinded by a rubber bullet, and others are attacked by masked men with sticks, baseball bats and a cleaver. Hong Kong police, once known as Asia’s finest, are now condemned for their brutality.
In 1989, no one believed that the soldiers would actually shoot their own people.
Weeks later, in early August, such protests spread throughout Hong Kong, just as protests spread to many cities in China in 1989. A general strike paralyses the city as public transport and flights are disrupted, roadways blocked and shopping malls and other urban centres shut down. Protesters have borrowed from the Communist playbook, engaging workers throughout Hong Kong.
There are moments of ingenuity and beauty. Lennon walls and human chains evoke past movements in Eastern Europe, just as the Goddess of Democracy took its inspiration from America. Protest art and literature flourish.
The occupation of the airport in mid-August marks another turning point. The police and protesters face off as the airport is completely shut down. A gun is drawn. In another sign of earnestness, protesters later apologise for the inconvenience to travellers and ask for forgiveness.
The following weekend, in a great show of strength, 1.7 million Hongkongers demonstrate peacefully.
More strife follows, however. Police fire a warning shot into the air. Next weekend, water cannons are used.
Meanwhile, Beijing increasingly shows its heavy hand. In typical rhetoric, protesters are labelled terrorists, just as they were called counter-revolutionaries during the Tiananmen crackdown. This popular uprising is attributed to the work of “black hands.” Troop movements are among many ominous signs about the possible use of force.
Ahead of the 31 August anniversary, the police round up dozens of high profile activists and legislators with limited roles in the current protests, following corporate witch-hunts by Cathay Pacific and other multinationals. Already more than a thousand people have been arrested. It is like Tiananmen all over again—killing the chickens to scare the monkeys, but so far without the blood.
Carrie Lam, like Li Peng, appears to be the front person for the one(s) really pulling the strings. She does nothing without Beijing’s approval. Only, she hardly appears in public, letting the police confront the protesters. One country, two systems?
No compromise, reject all demands. Possible invocation of emergency powers would be like martial law thirty years ago, but the order will be given by a fashionably dressed sixty-two-year-old Hong Kong woman with British-accented English and Ferragamo pumps.
It is easy to understand why Hongkongers protest, given the loss of freedoms, the deteriorating rule of law and an economy that benefits the few over the many. But as we enter the thirteenth week of protests and government suppression and violence intensify, no one knows what will happen.
Like many Hongkongers, I may not always agree with the protesters’ methods, but no one can impugn their courage and determination. I would never have imagined that this city would fight with such unity and dignity.
In China, the Communist victory is called jiefang to honour the liberation of the Motherland from the corrupt Kuomintang by the revolutionary heroes of 1949.
As for Hong Kong in 2019, who are the revolutionaries and who are the representatives of the corrupt, old order?
During Tiananmen, demonstrators called for a society to which they aspired; whereas, Hongkongers act to save their society that is being ruined, fighting back against the Chinese Communist Party, which is Communist in name only. Thus, Hongkongers are an example for all of us as we face an increasingly fascist world.
While I cannot help but support Hong Kong, I also cannot help but worry. Three months into this war of attrition, will conviction alone sustain these warriors? How much more will Hong Kong lose?
“If we burn, you burn with us.”
What will Hong Kong be like when I see it again? Will it be anything like the city I once knew?
Sara Tung was recently published in Cha’s “Tiananmen Thirty Years On” feature. She studied creative writing at Stanford University, where she earned degrees in history and business. Raised in Los Angeles, she spent nine years in China, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. After teaching English at Shanghai Jiaotong University, Sara worked for IBM China, Booz Allen and Hamilton and Hutchison Whampoa. She also consulted to nonprofits in Bali and the San Francisco Bay Area. Most recently, Sara administered and mentored students in international policy, management and public service programs at Stanford. She is currently working on a novel about China.