Fiona’s rebellion against the People’s Republic of China began slowly in the summer months, spreading across her 16-year-old life like a fever dream.
The marches and protests, the standoffs with police, the lies to her parents. They had all built on top of her old existence until she found herself dressed in black, her face wrapped with a homemade balaclava that left only her eyes and a pale strip of skin visible. Her small hands were stained red.
It was just paint, she said, as she funneled liquid into balloons. The air around her stank of lighter fluid. Teenagers hurled Molotov cocktails toward police. Lines of archers roamed the grounds of the university they had seized — now and then, they stopped to release metal-tipped arrows into the darkness, let fly with the hopes of finding the flesh of a police officer.
Illustration: Mountain People
Down below Fiona, rows of police flanked an intersection. Within a stone’s throw, Chinese soldiers stood in riot gear behind the gates of an outpost of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
Fiona joined her first march on June 9, a schoolgirl making her way to the territory’s financial district on a sunny day as people called out for freedom. It was now Nov. 16 and she was one of more than 1,000 protesters swarming around and barricaded inside Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU).
Night was falling. They were wild and free with their violence, but on the verge of being surrounded and pinned down.
The children — which is what most of them were — buzzed back and forth like hornets, cleaning glass bottles at one station, filling them with lighter fluid and oil at another. An empty swimming pool was commandeered to practice flinging the Molotov cocktails, leaving burn marks skidded everywhere.
When frontline decisions needed to be made, clumps of protesters came together to form a jittering black nest — almost everyone was dressed from hood to pants in black — yelling about whether to charge or pull back.
They were becoming something different from what they were, a metamorphosis that would have been difficult to imagine in orderly Hong Kong, a territory where you line up neatly for an elevator door and crowds do not step into an empty street until the signal changes.
With each slap up against the police, each scramble down the subway stairs to avoid arrest as tear gas ate at their eyes, they hardened. They shifted back and forth between their old lives and their new — school uniforms and dinners with mom and dad, then pulling the masks over their faces once more. It was a dangerous balance.
“We may all be killed by the police. Yes,” Fiona said.
At the crucible of the university, Fiona and the others crossed a line. Their movement has embraced the slogan of “be water,” of pushing forward with dramatic action and then pulling back suddenly, but here, the protesters hunkered down, holding a large chunk of territory in the middle of Hong Kong.
In their hive of enraged adolescence, they were risking everything for a tomorrow that almost certainly will not come — a Hong Kong that cleaves greater freedom from an increasingly powerful Chinese Communist Party.
In doing so, Fiona found moments bigger than what her life was before.
“We call the experience of protest, like at PolyU, a dream,” she later said.
However, to speak of such things out loud, without the mask that she hid behind, without the throbbing crowds that made it seem within reach, is not possible outside, in the real Hong Kong.
The protesters have left traces of their hopes, confessions and fears across the territory, in graffiti scrawled on bank buildings and bus stops.
One line that has appeared: “There may be no winners in this revolution, but please stay to bear witness.”
The impact of Hong Kong’s protests is this: Children with rocks and bottles have fought their way to the sharp edge between two nation states expected to shape the 21st century.
The street unrest resembles an ongoing brawl between police and the young people in black. Police have fired about 16,000 rounds of tear gas and 10,000 rubber bullets. Since June, they have rounded up people from the ages of 11 to 84, making more than 6,000 arrests. About 500 police officers have been wounded in the melee.
Hong Kong police officials have said all along that their operations are guided by a desire to maintain public order, rejecting accusations they use excessive force.
They issued a plea lat week, saying: “If rioters don’t use violence, Hong Kong will be safe and there’s no reason for us to use force.”
After the US Congress was galvanized by the plight of the protesters, it passed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which US President Donald Trump signed last month.
The law subjects Hong Kong to review by the US Department of State, at least once a year, on whether the territory has clung to enough autonomy from Beijing to continue receiving favorable trading terms from Washington. It also provides for sanctions, including visa bans and asset freezes, against officials responsible for human rights violations in Hong Kong.
The protesters were delighted, carrying US flags and singing The Star-Spangled Banner in the streets of Hong Kong. Beijing was furious.
Beijing quickly banned US military ships from docking in Hong Kong, a traditional port of call in the region. The protesters, including many as young as Fiona, had changed the course of aircraft carriers and guided-missile destroyers.
The stakes for the children of Hong Kong go well beyond a moment of geopolitical standoff. When Britain passed the territory to China, there was a written understanding that for 50 years Hong Kong would enjoy a great deal of autonomy. The deal expires in 2047.
For Fiona, this means that in her lifetime she will live not in the freewheeling territory to which she was born, but, quite possibly, in a place that is just another dot on the map of China.
Chants at marches revolve around five protester demands, such as universal suffrage, but conversations soon turn to a larger, more difficult topic at the root of their complaints. China.
“They’re all involved with this shit,” said Lee, who gave only her surname, the 20-year-old nursing student covering her mouth after the obscenity, embarrassed to have said it out loud in the middle of a cafe. “Of course China is the big boss behind this.”
“If China is going to take over Hong Kong, we will lose our freedoms, we will lose our rights as humans,” she said.
Police had taken her information when she surrendered outside the university. She did not know whether that would lead to an arrest on rioting charges, which could bring up to 10 years in prison.
“In my view, violence is the thing that protects us,” Lee said. “It is a warning to those, like the police, who think they can do anything to us.”
When Fiona first heard about a bill that would allow criminal suspects to be sent from Hong Kong to mainland China, the initial trigger of the protests, she was not concerned. It was the sort of thing that troublemakers worried about.
“The extradition bill seemed good to me,” she said.
Her mother, a housewife from mainland China, is the product of a communist education system that, as Fiona puts it, does not “allow them to think about politics.”
Fiona’s father, a Hong Konger, drives a minibus taxi. He has concerns about creeping Chinese control, but his urge to “treasure our freedom” leaves him afraid of anything that might provoke Beijing’s wrath.
“He keeps saying we should not do this and we should not do that,” Fiona said.
It was much better, everyone in her household agreed, to avoid politics.
On weekends, Fiona usually went shopping with her girlfriends from high school. They looked for new outfits. They chatted and had tea together, but when Fiona saw the news that more than 3,000 Hong Kong lawyers dressed in black had marched against the proposed extradition bill on June 6, she wondered what was going on.
She clicked through YouTube on her smartphone. She stopped on a Cantonese-language video uploaded less than a week before by a young, handsome guy sitting on the edge of a bed.
The Chinese Communist Party might use this new linkage between the court systems to come after ordinary people who were exercising their freedom of speech, something protected in Hong Kong, but not Beijing, he said.
“You may be extradited to China because of telling a joke,” he said.
Fiona was alarmed.
Just a few days after her YouTube awakening, on June 9, she took the subway with a group of friends from high school to Hong Kong island for a march.
“Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong,” the protesters yelled: “No China extradition. No evil law.”
Fiona was astonished. She could not believe so many people had shown up.
The swell of the crowd, the boom and crash of its noise, was adrenaline and inspiration — “all of us were having the same aim,” Fiona said.
Beijing-backed Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) would have to relent, Fiona thought. Faced with the will of so many citizens Lam would have no choice but to meet with protesters and address their concerns.
That is not what happened.
Three days later, the Hong Kong police shot rubber bullets and tear gas into a crowd.
On July 1, protesters wearing yellow construction hats and gauze masks stormed the Hong Kong Legislative Council building on the 22nd anniversary of the handover from Britain. They smashed through glass doors with hammers, poles and road barriers, painting “Hong Kong is not China” on the walls as the chaos churned.
MORE VIOLENCE PREDICTED
On the night of Nov. 16, as Fiona sat on the university terrace, a teenager slouched at his post on a pedestrian bridge on the other side of the school. Reaching across a highway between the back of the university and a subway stop, the bridge could be a point of entry for police, protesters feared.
The road underneath the bridge led to the Cross-Harbour Tunnel, a main artery linking Hong Kong island and Kowloon. The protesters had blocked that route, hoping to trigger a territory-wide strike. It was becoming clear that would not happen.
The teenager on the bridge, Pak, had the sleeves of his black windbreaker rolled up his arms. His glasses jutted out of the eye-opening of his ski mask. The 17-year-old had been kicked out of his house after arguing with his parents about the protests.
They are both from mainland China, Pak said.
“They always say: ‘Kill the protesters, the government is right,’” he said.
There was a divide between him and his parents that could not be crossed, he said.
As a Hong Kong student, he received a liberal education, complete with the underpinnings of Western philosophical and political thought.
“I was born in Hong Kong. I know what is freedom. I know what is democracy. I know what is freedom of speech,” Pak said.
His parents, on the other hand, were educated and raised in mainland China.
“You know, we should love the party, we should love Mao Zedong (毛澤東), blah, blah, blah,” he said.
In his downtime, Pak hunched over an empty green bottle and poured lighter fluid inside. He gestured to containers of cooking and peanut oil, and said he added them as well because they helped the fire both burn and stick once the glass exploded.
On a board leaning against the side of the walkway in front of him, a message was scrawled in capital letters: “EYES OPEN.”
Where did he think it was all headed?
Pak put the bottle down and said he saw nothing but struggle ahead.
“I think the violence of the protests will be increased, it will be upgraded, but we have no choice,” he said.
When Pak was 12, he watched news coverage of a massive, peaceful protest in Hong Kong, the 2014 “Umbrella movement” that called for universal suffrage. The movement ended with protesters being hauled off to jail.
The nonviolent tactics got them nowhere, Pak said.
Did he worry that the violence was taking place so near to a PLA barracks?
Not at all.
That morning, a separate barracks in Hong Kong was in the news when some of its troops, in exercise shorts and T-shirts, walked out to the road carrying red buckets and helped clean up debris left by protesters near Baptist University.
“I think they are testing us. If we attack the PLA, the PLA can shoot us and say: ‘OK, we were defending ourselves,’” Pak said. “If we don’t attack the PLA, they will cross the line, again and again.”
However, if the protesters continued ramping up violence against the police, maybe the PLA would be called in. That would hand the protest movement victory, he said.
“Other countries like British and America can protect human rights in Hong Kong by sending troops to protect us,” he said.
It was, under any reading of the situation, a far-fetched idea.
However, Pak was right about one thing.
Police officers later massed on the other side of the bridge, piling out of their vehicles and walking in a long file to the head of the structure. The protesters lit the bridge ablaze. People screamed. A funnel of black smoke filled the air.
The next night, Pak did not reply to messages. A day later, he still did not answer notes asking where he was.
The day after that, the same. Pak was gone.
On the afternoon of Dec. 1, life was sunshine and breeze at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre.
Inside, a youth orchestra was scheduled to play its annual concert. Out front, facing the water, a band played cover songs. Couples strolled on the boardwalk. The palms swayed. A shop sold ice cream.
There was Pak, sitting on a bench.
He had been arrested trying to flee PolyU in the early hours of Nov. 19. After a day spent in a police station, he made bail and moved back in with his parents.
Out in the open, in blue sweatpants and a gray sweatshirt, he was a pudgy teenager with the awkward habit of pushing his eyeglasses up the bridge of his nose as he spoke. He also was now facing a rioting charge and had to report back to the police station in a few weeks.
Since his disappearance, the siege at the university had ended. The protesters simmered down. There was an election for local district councilors and pro-democracy candidates won nearly 90 percent of 452 seats.
However, two weeks after his arrest, Pak had shown up ready to protest again. A march was scheduled to start in a couple hours. He had taken a bus down from one of Hong Kong’s poorest districts, with a black backpack that held his dark clothes and mask.
The lesson of the elections, he said, was that most Hong Kongers not only back the protests, but “accept the violence level.”
Otherwise, he said, they would have rebuked the reform ticket and cast their lot with pro-government candidates.
“I think the violence of the protesters needs to upgrade to setting off bombs,” he said.
He had been reading about the Russian Revolution and Vladimir Lenin. If he saw irony in studying the architect of the Soviet Union’s communist dictatorship while contemplating his own fight against the Chinese Communist Party, he did not say so.
“The protesters, I think, will need some weapons, like rifles,” he said.
If it was not possible to buy them, it seemed easy enough to ransack police vehicles or even stations to steal them, he said, describing how that could be done.
The protests that day veered back to confrontation. The scene in Kowloon “descended into chaos as rioters hijacked public order events and resorted to destructive acts like building barricades on roads, setting fires and vandalising public facilities,” a police account said.
Any hopes that the elections might bring peace seemed fragile. The month was off to a turbulent start.
NO CHOICE BUT TO FIGHT
In the weeks after walking out of PolyU and slipping past the police, Fiona kept coming back to the heat of the protests. An assembly to support those who protested at the university. A rally to stop the use of tear gas, which featured little children carrying yellow balloons, and a march past the Hong Kong Legislative Council building. On the last day of November, a gathering of students and the elderly at Chater Garden.
The park sits among thick trappings of wealth and power — the private Hong Kong Club, rows of bank buildings and, just down the street, luxury-goods stores. Fiona was with a friend toward the back, on the top of a wall, out of sight of the TV cameras. Her face was hidden behind a mask, as usual. Even between protesters, they usually pass nicknames and nods, with nothing that identifies them in daily life.
Her friend, a boy who goes to the same high school, held forth on revolution and the perils of greater Chinese influence in Hong Kong. Fiona listened, quietly. She nodded her head. She looked out at the crowd. It felt good to see that she was not alone, Fiona said. Though it was hard to tell where the movement was headed.
It could grind into a sort of underground movement, or it could erupt in the boom of Pak’s bloody fantasy.
For Fiona, she knew there was always the danger that police might track down her earlier presence at the university, ending her precarious dance between homework and street unrest, but sitting there, as the chants echoed and the sun began to slide down the sky, Fiona said there was no choice but to keep fighting.
A week later, on Dec. 8, Fiona was at Victoria Park, almost six months to the day since her first protest started there.
Hundreds of thousands of people had come for the march. It took Fiona an hour just to get out of the park as the throngs slowly squeezed onto the road outside.
When they saw messages on their phones that police had massed down one street, Fiona and three friends threw on their respirator masks and goggles. As they jogged in that direction, a stranger in the crowd handed them an umbrella, another gave them bottles of water. They joined a group of others, clutching umbrellas and advancing toward police lines, then came to a halt.
No tear gas or rubber bullets came. The police looked to have taken a step back.
Fiona and her friends dawdled, unsure of what to do.
They joined the march, a great mass of people churning through Hong Kong, at one point holding phones aloft, an ocean of bobbing lights. They screamed obscenities at police when they saw them, with Fiona showing a middle finger and calling for their families to die. They watched a man throw a hammer at the Bank of China building and heard the crash of breaking glass.
Someone pulled out a can of black spray paint. In the middle of the road, Fiona and her friends took turns writing on the pavement. They left a message: “If we burn, you burn with us.”
Additional reporting by Felix Tam
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