It became real for most of us the moment the first tear gas was fired.
Pop!
Time slowed. We went silent for a long second, trying to process, in disbelief.
"What the fuck?!"
Then the anger came, almost in unison. We looked to the source of the firing, and saw fully geared special force police lined up on the bridge above, all in black, fully masked, uniformity distanced, inhuman.
"Shame on you!!" We started yelling. More hurt and heart-broken than anything - so it comes to this now. They are attacking their own people.
The faceless police stood erect on the bridge, leering down at us, almost celebratory.
"Are you human?! Fuck you!!!"
We held our middle fingers as high as we could in the air.
It was minutes before 6pm I remember. We had been passing supplies to the "frontline" for a couple of hours now. We formed two long winding lines of human chains almost all the way from the Admiralty MTR station to Harcourt Road, one of the busiest highways in Hong Kong. The supplies we passed included surgical masks, plastic goggles, bottled waters, contact lens solutions, and what in time would appear on the cover of Time magazine and became the symbol of our movement: umbrellas.
For a few hours, the supplies seemed to flow endlessly from the Admiralty station. A day later, the pro-establishment media would insinuate that the supplies came from the local pro-democratic rich (like all two of them?); some even said they were sponsored by the U.S. government. But we knew where they came from: they came from us, tens and thousands of us, who ourselves came from different MTR stations from all parts of Hong Kong. "We" were merely distressed residents of Hong Kong.
The back story
Most of us, including myself, didn't expect ourselves to be there that day a year ago on 9/28. In fact, no one expected any occupying would happen at all, let alone on the busiest blood vessel of our international city like the Harcourt highway. Sure, the idea of Occupy Central, proposed the previous year by law professor Benny Tai Yiu Ting, had been avidly discussed by the pro-democratics in Hong Kong. Still, when the Chinese government announced the new Hong Kong political reform proposal as if it was a decree on 8/31/2014, the pan-dems in Hong Kong were seriously concerned, but nothing bigger than small protests by the democratic core took place.
The fact that tens of thousands of Hong Kong people were occupying both directions of a 4-lane highway, probably the first occupy of such kind in history, was the outcome of pure chance and the arrogance of the Hong Kong government. The night before 9/28, about 100 student protestors climbed into the heavily guarded and fenced up public space in front of the Legislative building next to the government complex in Wan Chai, near the Admiralty station, in protest of the 831 political reform proposal. It was a defiant move by Hong Kong protesting standard, but there was a legitimate reason for their aggressiveness: the 831 proposal was supposed to be the answer to "gradual and orderly progress" in our electoral reform promised in the Basic Law, our city's consititution agreed by the Chinese government, Hong Kong people and the British government (Hong Kong was a British colony until 1997) to ensure that Hong Kong enjoyed "one country, two system" status for 50 years, until 2047. With existing rights to elect district council members in our neighbourhoods and legislature representatives into the increasingly undermined Legislative Council, the logical next step in the "gradual electoral reform" would be allowing Hong Kong people to elect our own Chief Executive. Beijing's 831 reform proposal promised universal suffrage in the next Chief Executive election in 2017, but dictated that the 2 - 3 candidates allowed to run must be selected by 1,200 super elites in Hong Kong. That meant if the proposal got through, 0.017% of our 7.188 million population got to decide who we could elect for the next Chief Executive. Needless to say, these 1,200 super elites, hand-picked by the Chinese government and collectively called the Election Committee, were comprised of pro-government politicians and the super rich in Hong Kong, whose collective interest was to safeguard their own privileges through supporting the Chinese government. So although the proposal was packaged and sold hard by Beijing and the Hong Kong government as a significant democratization step, anyone with half a functioning brain could see that this heavily "filtered" nomination process deemed that there would be no true democracy in the upcoming Chief Executive elections.
Those 100 student protestors, forerunners of the later famed Umbrella Movement, were violently pepper-sprayed by the police when they entered the public space in front of the Legislature building. That seriously enraged the pro-dem people in Hong Kong. Unlike in the US or Europe, where it is not uncommon for protestors to burn police cars or break into governmental buildings, Hong Kong, international but still pretty much a mildly-conservative Chinese community, has a long tradition of peaceful demonstration, most notably the June 4th Memorial Vigil commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. The general Hong Kong public has a distaste for any level or form of violence from the protestors or the police in political activism. When we saw on television that those students were pepper-sprayed like they were criminals the previous night and were unreasonably arrested on the morning of 9/28, we were furious - first you tell us that you are fucking us up with a fake, "Iranian-style" election with no room for negotiation (Beijing even called it a "decision" rather than the proposal that it was), then you are assaulting our young for protesting against that bullshit "decision". Enough is just enough! (It didn't help also that the spectacles of our most recognized student leader, the skinny and kiddish-looking Joshua Wong, who later became the cover of Time magazine himself, were hit off and broken by the police, resulting in hours of fruitless searching and temporarily lost of clear sight.)
An accidental revolution
But the government had clearly prepared for protests near the government buildings in Wan Chai. Their tactic of preventing the protest from becoming larger than the few hundred people gathered there was to cut off foot traffic to the government complex. The police blockaded the only passenger bridge that connected the Admiralty station to the government buildings, effectively "starving off" the sieged protestors on the other side of the bridge. That morning we received many SOS messages sent from the core protestors in Wan Chai on What's App and Facebook. Their mood was somber and forlorn - they didn't have enough people and were surrounded. The moment the police started to "clean up" the place, the protest would be over. The little momentum that had been built up to that point would be depleted.
What they didn't know was that although the connecting bridge was blocked, thousands of people supporting the students and their cause rushed to the Admiralty MTR station anyway. Since they couldn't cross the bridge and join the protestors on the other side, they were stuck before the Harcourt highway. Around mid-day, there were so many people gathered that neither the heavy traffic of Hong Kong nor the fortified police force could stop us from marching over, this time not over the pedestrian bridge, but through the highway itself.
So the occupy movement that started on 9/28 last year was not planned, but the result of concerned citizens coming out to support sieged protestors and the arrogance of decision-makers whose plan to cut off the protest backfired, blowing up big time in their faces.
Now the political heads in Hong Kong, led by current Chief Executive Leung Chun Ying, had a big problem. Beijing's intention was clear: it wanted Hong Kong people to accept the 831 proposal without too much of a fuss so it could continue to effectively "appoint" the Chief Executive of Hong Kong, only in the future it would be in the name of democracy. So Leung and the "political reform team" were tasked to sell, lure, con, and if push came to shove, coerce us into complying.
With tens of thousands of enraged Hong Kongers suddenly occupying a major highway next the main government buildings, the government itself was besieged (talk about karma), there was no definite end of protesting in sight, and the bargaining dynamics of government vs. pro-dem might reverse. At the time, the people of Hong Kong were at the receiving end of this "831 decision" and had a definite lower hand. The umbrella movement was (beyond) the occupy protestors' wildest dream and Beijing's worst nightmare.
In this context, it was not arbitrary that the first round of tear gas was fired at peaceful protestors before 6pm. Hong Kong usually gets dark around that time of day and 9/28/2014 was a Sunday. If the protestors on the highway were to stay into the night and overnight, they would be blocking traffic come Monday morning, possibly paralyzing the business traffic going to financial centre Central. This was bound to be international news.
Someone at the top made a swift if nasty executive decision: disperse the crowd in one big flow so protestors would scatter and be weakened, then they could be contained and arrested in smaller groups. Divide and concur.
Holding our ground
I, together with my brother, was among those tens of thousands who rushed to Harcourt Road to support the pioneer protestors. When my brother and I arrived around 4pm, a stretch of the highway were already full of people, so we followed the new joiners to form human chains to pass supplies to the "frontline". The frontline consisted of the brave souls, many of them secondary school and college students, who volunteered to stand face to face with the police at the edge of the protesting crowd. For a few hours, they had been pepper-strayed like they were pests by the police. The only protection they had were the supplies we passed up: face masks and plastic googles over their face, raincoats over their body, and umbrellas over their heads. Heck, we even passed up plastic wraps for wrapping around their heads (some of us eventually became pretty skilled in this). These protective supplies, bought from grocery stores all over Hong Kong, were naturally no match for the anti-terriost grade pepper strays that the police were using. So as the supplies were passed up, many at the frontline went down in great pain and various levels of injuries, and they had to be rushed to the backend behind us to be treated. Those of us on the fringe witnessing all these were pained by the sight, however, the front protestors didn't back down. As soon as the first row was sprayed down, the second row went up, not giving in an itch to the police. We all understood in the back of our minds the significance of this accidental occupy movement: should it fail, the momentum would be gone, and the Hong Kong public would only become more pessimistic and hopeless about having control of our own future. There was simply no room to back down on that highway. Our back was already up against the wall.
Even in this dire situation, when so many in the frontline were burnt and blinded by pepper strays, the protestors at the front still asked us supplies-passers to pass only short, retractable umbrellas - the sole reason being that the police spraying the frontline with their professional, tax-paid weapons was at the same time accusing us of "attacking them with umbrellas" (to be followed up by the conviction of a female protestor of "assaulting the cops with her breast" a few months later, now an international joke). So no long umbrellas, only the short flimsy ones that would flip and break in strong wind please. Yes, we were that ridiculously peaceful.
That was why when the puppet masters in the dark ordered the police to fire tear gas on us, we couldn't believe it. It was too reminiscent of Tiananmen Square: firing weapon at its own people who were peacefully protesting for democracy. At that moment, the government was no longer just trying to control a demonstrating crowd, it had made a decision to turn itself against the public for its own political agenda.
I don't know if you have ever been tear-gassed. It has this foul, sour smell that was sad and unbearable. Reluctantly, the frontline dispersed a little. Protestors at the fringe like us had to fan out to make room for them. More and more people at the frontline went down. The medical support people at the back were overwhelmed. My brother and I went over to support the medical backend for another hour of so. Nobody asked us to do anything. We just took the initiatives to help each other. The brave went to the front, the not-so-brave supported, those with medical experience took care of the fallen... We were all new to this - remember most of us had only peaceful demonstration experience and we didn't expect to be there that day at all - but because we were all motivated by a single, uncompromizable goal: fighting for a true democratic election, we found and filled our own places in the movement and became very resilient against a brutal police force. Our efficiency and solidarity posted an interesting contrast to the highly-trained and masterminded moves made by the police.
In chaos, the day turned into night. Although scattered and constantly attacked - the police confirmed that they fired tear gas 87 times that night - the protesting crowd remained. None of us wanted to go away.
Terrorism in Hong Kong
I remember sitting by the supplies with other protestors that night, feeling scared by the unknown threats lurking in the dark. The pepper strays and the tear gas were only the beginning. The police hoisted a flag over protestors that said "Disperse, or we fire". They had obviously loaded up guns with plastic bullets for us. Undoubtedly, whoever made those calls wanted to stop the occupy movement from forming at high costs, including injuring the people of the city.
7pm. Most of us supporting the frontline had retreated to the underside of a large bridge, one block from the Harcourt highway. Our new duty was to guard the enormous supplies resulted from a whole day of attacks by the police, so that should the conflict between the frontline and the police begin again, we could back up and treat the frontline protestors. Despite the fact
that there were hundred of us under the bridge, we were relatively silent. Occasionally a student connected to the student coalition would yell out news about the frontline, or the latest announcements from the government. Otherwise, we were just checking our phones and Facebook pages, which were flashing like crazy with the latest news or rumors. A long night was ahead of us, and we didn't know what was going to happen.
Around 8 or 9pm, a student came over to tell us the latest news: someone had spotted special anti-terrorist police taking over entire MTR trains. The rumour was that they would come out through the various Admiralty MTR exits all around us in a surprise attack to overpower us. On our Facebook pages, we saw pictures of special force police, fully suited and in masks like the ones we saw earlier on the over-bridge, loading up the MTR train like an absurd and surreal scene from 1984. Now you have to understand that the MTR is the most common shared space in our city. The trains go to almost all parts of Hong Kong and the majority of our population takes it daily. We do everything from meeting our friends to making online shopping drops inside MTR stations. To have a public transit that you take daily turn into a military transport containing fully-armed special police dispatched specifically to outmanoeuvre you, armless protestors with, what? plastic food wraps? It was terrifying.
(I am writing this so we won't forget how viciously the government had treated us for its own political agenda.)
If we had nothing defensive in materials, we at least had resourcefulness and resolution. Again, the young and the brave started working almost immediately. They masked their heads with towels, so the CCTV at the MTR exits won't be able to pick up their faces and incriminate them later. Then they started moving construction fences found nearby to blockade the MTR exits. A couple of hours ago, the MTR trains had already stopped services to Admiralty to stop more protestors from coming to the occupy area (how the supposedly independently-run MTR company had agreed to these governmental requests is still unclear today - investigations should really follow). Exit gates were already pulled down and locked by the MTR staff. With the added blockade made with construction fences (which would became important defence materials throughout the 79-day occupy movement to the point that the government had to lock them away), we hoped that the police wouldn't be able to surprise-attack us through these nearby exits. Of course, we had no way of stopping them from materializing from the next Wan Chai station and outflanking us.
Silence fell upon us again after the blockades were made. If earlier today we found ourselves unexpectedly joining an occupy movement, now we were suddenly the movement's supplies-guards expecting a military attack from the Hong Kong special police.
Loss of innocence
More and more messages about the police's plan to fire plastic bullets at us came up on Facebook. There was even an image of a tank, apparently driven by the Communist army, crossing over the Cross-Harbour Tunnel towards Hong Kong Island. Later it was confirmed that the image was taken on the day of handover in 1997, when the People's Army officially entered Hong Kong. But at the time, it all seemed very plausible and real after witnessing the brutality of pepper-straying and tear-gasing by the police. We the protestors were isolated in an apocalyptically empty centre of our usually overcrowded city, like fishes waiting to the shot at in a barrel.
Those of us guarding the supplies began talking about retreating to another place instead of waiting for the police to come and attack us. We wanted to move to Causeway Bay, a busy shopping district about half an hour of walking distance away. This way at least part of the supplies would be secured and we might even be able to start another occupy area, ensuring that the movement could continue in case Admiralty fell into the hands of the police. Midnight will come soon. Many of us began to manually move the huge amount of resources to Causeway Bay. My brother and I, together with some friends, didn't want to just go. We wanted the make sure that those who were still occupying the Harcourt highway a block away were safe. We decided to take some supplies and walk up to yet another bridge overlooking a main road to scout out the police - if they matched over, we would run; if not, we would stay.
Midnight came with increasingly threatening rumors about the police. A young guy who were on the bridge with us told us with full conviction that his dad or brother (I can't remember which), a policeman, confirmed that they would surely fire at us if we stayed. He urged us to leave for the sake of safety. Even the Occupy Central leader Professor Dai, who earlier that day announced the beginning of the occupy movement, asked us to leave on social media - it was simply too dangerous out there. Being still very green and absolutely naive about the conniving ways of our opponents, I became very concerned with everyone's safety. Incidentally, a small, aggressive group of protestors who called themselves "moving occupy central" were at the time under our bridge yelling slogans with a loudspeaker to keep up their morale. I ran over to them to ask them to warn the others with the news. Their leader refused: why should I use my equipment to announce your news? All you are doing was asking us to go. How do I know this news is reliable but not deliberately spread to disband us?
Time would soon tell that they were right and I was wrong. For many others received the same warning from either a brother or father serving the police force on social media. The police on MTR trains with loaded plastic guns was real. The rumor about police tear-gassing the HKAPA, at the time a neutral ground taken up by medical professionals to treat injured protestors, was real (tear-gassing an enclosed space can kill. Those bastards!) But all the other rumors about firing were deliberately and methodically flooded into social media to scare us away (imagine the organized network of rumor-spreaders and masterminds behind all these messages). In believing in them and asking people to retreat, I too foolishly served as an agent of their scare tactics at that moment.
But like George W. Bush once said: fool me once, shame on you; fool me - you can't fool me again! We protestors learnt very fast in the following weeks and months… we had to given the blows we would receive.
When thugs (yes thugs) were sent to the third occupy area Mongkok to beat us up the following weeks, we learnt to surround them peacefully and sing a birthday song to wish them well.
When the police yelled at us to incite chaos (also in Mongkok), we learnt to keep calm and carried on.
When the police use their batons to push back our crowd (again in Mongkok), we learnt to avoid a tragic stampede by moving quickly into a mall.
When we were slandered systematically and tirelessly by the media, we countered by making viral photos and videos for the social media.
When our friends didn't understand why we were on the streets, we wrote them an expressive song to explain.
When our requests met with a deaf ear, we made a beautiful Lennon Wall to showcase our hopes and dreams.
We also learnt to build plastic shields, power study rooms lights with a bicycle, repeatedly put up banners on the Lion Rock, made creative umbrella arts and crafts to cheer ourselves up…. anything we needed to stay sane in face of oppression and kept up the good fight.
Becoming the walking dead
My companions and I stayed on the lookout bridge for another hour or so. Nothing happened. The police didn't match over and fire at us as rumored (I think because they didn't want Tinanmen Square 2.0 since it would enrage more Hong Kongers and might attract unwanted international attention). We learnt online that a new occupy area in Causeway Bay was established by those who moved supplies over there earlier. They were calling for more people to come to secure the place. So around 2 or 3am, our little group started the walking-dead march to Causeway Bay.
The roads we walked were unusually quiet and empty. We were tired and didn't want to talk. I felt this acute sense of entering the post-apocalyptic world of the Walking Dead. Death had came to our naivety that night. When the tear gas was fired, the very fabrics of our city was destroyed. Our city had its own independent legislature process, financial system, judicial system, etc. Since 1997, pro-Chinese initiatives had gradually infiltrated all aspects of our lives, but our independent political, financial and legal systems were still relatively holding up, as the last fortresses protecting us from totalitarianism. Now these systems were seriously undermined by directives coming directly from Beijing - if one country, two systems was still alive, it survived in critical conditions. Many tragedies followed as a result. Such as the beating of one of our protestors by seven policemen on 10/15, although filmed and broadcasted on television, almost one year later no one was prosecuted, a clear sign of the police corruption and failing of the judicial process. The Hong Kong police, famously portrayed as heroes in movies like Jacky Chan's Police Story and Andrew Lau's The Infernal Affairs, had been reduced a political baton used by the government to enforce its political agenda and had lost all its credibility - these days when I see the police in the street, I feel scared and disgusted at the same time.
We spent the remaining of that night resting in a 24-hours McDonald's near the newly-established occupy area in Causeway Bay. The place was overrun by exhausted protestors, lining up to use the washrooms, dozing off in the seats, waiting for breakfast time to start, generally looking and acting like displaced refugees in our own city.
After the umbrella movement that followed, the government declared that young people in our society were too discontented and needed their "support". The hidden agenda of course was that they wanted to prevent another umbrella movement by influencing the minds of the young - the equivalent Chinese policy of this would be "grabbing them since they are babies".
Yes, the umbrella movement was basically a revolution of and by the young. While the Occupy Central leaders were mostly middle-aged and occasionally pan-dem Lego politicians made cameo appearances in the occupy areas, the vast majority of the protestors - I would say over 80% - were under 40. During the movement, when centralized decisions had to be made to mobilize protestors or protect our areas (usually we mobilized ourselves individually), we mainly listened to student leaders who were under 25.
So what drove us to the streets? I think it was our increasingly estranged city that steadily changed for the worse for the people who lived here. In the past 10 years or so, we saw the disappearances of landmarks and public spaces for the sake of "development", mushrooming of shops and malls built for Chinese tourists rather than locals, doubling of housing prices while our salaries remained pretty much the same, education reforms that brainwashed our kids rather than preparing them for the future, monopoly of the service industry and decreasing diversity in job opportunities, long working hours that were not compensated, media that spoke for the government rather than for the people, continued erosion of freedom of speech and the democratic processes, depletion our treasury for thousand-billion-dollar white-elephant constructions that would benefit the Pearl River Delta region of China rather than Hong Kong… The list went on and on.
The result was a city that was a wonderland for real estate developers, Chinese investors (who used Hong Kong to "wash out" their hot money) and pro-Chinese businesses, but hellish for the general working public, especially the younger ones, who were trapped in long-hour service jobs and multi-million-dollar mortgages.
The umbrella movement was the young saying "NO" to the established older generations. No, you don't own us. No, you don't get to call all the shots in here. No, we don't want impossibly expensive housing, malls and constructions we do need, brainwashing of our kids, enslavement in our jobs, TV with only one lying station... This is our city too and we are not going anywhere; we have the right to have a say in the future of our own home.
That's why the umbrella movement was basically an intergenerational conflict in our society. Older people in Hong Kong, especially the middle-class ones, had in their younger years occupied comfortable positions when Hong Kong was thriving in the 80s or 90s and had bought their homes at much lower prices. They already had it made and didn't want things to change. After the movement, many of us went into local communities to explain the importance of civil participation. More than once I had encountered comfortable middle-class people hatefully yelling at us for "rocking the boat". To me, they didn't seem to see the erosive changes that had already happened to our city. They still felt that Hong Kong was pretty much the same as it was in the 80s and 90s and would continue to be so.
That's also why our government administration, made up by comfortbly-salaried middle-age bureaucrats, will never be able to address the root causes that keep driving young people to the streets. They just don't get it. And they don't have any incentives to reform.
I often think of the young in Hong Kong as survivors on a 21st-century modern boat, surrounded by an indifferent sea of outdated 20th-century attitude, which in turn is quickly being devoured by an almighty storm of 20th-century totalitarianism. If we ever get lucky enough to storm through this antagonistic sea, we will find that the rest of world also lives in the 21st century with us. But we'd have to survive this bad water first and things are not looking good.
Daybreak
In the Causeway Bay McDonald's on the early morning of 9/29, my friends, brother and I hadn't heard much news from Admiralty. We were worried that the police would "clean up" Admiralty before dawn and decided to walk back to support.
We walked through the same empty streets, now dotted with early risers hurrying to work. We must have looked pretty wild and out-of-place, since some of them looked at us as if they saw zombies.
Finally we got back to our lookout bridge, then the bridge where we rounded up all the supplies. They were pretty deserted as well. My heart stopped for a second - were the protestors still occupying the Harcourt highway?
Then we walked over one last block, and saw tens of thousands of people still on the highway, packed like they were the day before. The sun rose behind them, leaving each of them beaming with a special light.
We were not going anywhere until our requests were met.
That night of the walking dead would eventually stretch out to 79 days of sleepless nights in the streets, during which we experienced attacks by the police and the thugs, public forums discussing the future of our city, Spartan-like defence of our occupied grounds, outburst of creativity and humour art, building of an ideal community, disillusionment after failed negotiations with the government, internally splitting power struggles, and much, much more…
Despite the hardship we would go through during the movement, we remained generally calm, good-spirited and caring for one another as we were on the first night. On top of owing it to ourselves for being so incredibly civilized and awesome, I think we also partially owed it to Occupy Central for cultivating the motto of "love and peace". It really set the tone and baseline for our movement.
A couple of small activist groups including Civic Passion and the localists contended that the principals of love and peace made our movement lame and ineffective. I disagree whole-heartedly. As evident on the evening of 9/28, it was our shared conviction, mutual support for each other, as well as individual drive that made us strong, helping us storm through malicious attacks from the government and the police. We should never forget what gave us our greastest strength throughout the movement: solidarity in hope for an equal and just society.
Aggressiveness and bravery might have started the revolution, but it took much more to sustain it. We needed those 100 students climbing over into the civic square to inspire more people to come, but we also needed all the tens of thousands of us who stayed on the Harcourt highway to make the revolution an city-wide movement. To say bravery and aggression are all you need is not seeing the forest for the trees. When I think back to the many days and nights on the streets, my heart is still warmed by the humanity we have shown for each other: how we always gathered orderly, shared food, beverages and phone chargers with one another, picked up our own trash, took shifts to man the occupy areas, and had intelligent discussions to deepen our civic knowledge and skills. If all we ever did was to fight with the authority and argue amongst ourselves how peace and love didn't work, the movement wouldn't be able to last for as long and make such a big and, I would say, enduring impact on our society. When an aggressive act of civil disobedience fails to yield the desired effects, participants often get disillusioned and lose steam, as we did after the Lun Wo incident near end of the movement. But when you are driven by a deeper conviction and fighting for a just cause side by side with other rational, loving people, it makes the hardship worthwhile and you can go on for much longer.
This love and respect for fellow democracy-fighters I met during and after the movement are what drive me to go on still. After the umbrella movement had ended, many of us continued to fight for "real universal election". A large number of "post-umbrella" groups sprung up, chipping at building a more just and equal Hong Kong from different angles. Our resolution, no doubt, was founded in the umbrella revolution. The umbrella movement was an unfortunate and unexpected serendipity that happened upon our beloved city.
And we do love our city and the people who call this city home.
Forward and beyond
On the dawn of 9/29, I was very relieved to see that Admiralty was holding up and doing well after a terrorizing night of attacks and threats. I still had to go to the office at 9am, so I bid my brother and friends goodbye.
Suddenly, the protestors were clapping. We looked up to where they were all looking - and saw that on the top of a commercial building next to the Harcourt highway, a Chinese flag was hoisted upside down.
There was a palpable sense of optimism that morning: all of us were finally standing up for ourselves after years of abuse. For a moment, we the underdog seemed to have a shot at being in control of our own fate.
As fate would have it, the voting of the "831 decision" in the Legislature council about 9 months later eventually finished with a divine comedy: because of a What's App miscommunication, the pro-Chinese Lego members, who controlled 2/3 of the seats, didn't come back to the Legislature council in time to vote for the political reform proposal. This mistake resulted in an embarrassing 28:8 veto (thanks to pan-dem Legco members who kept their promise), slapping the face of the Hong Kong government which pulled all the stops in the past year to sell the proposal. I guess that's what you get when you assemble a bunch of self-serving, blindly-loyal opportunists united only by a thin layer of financial interest to work together - the puppet masters behind these people must have sadly realized that they were controlling a bunch of brainless morons, who after the vote lied and cried and pointed figures in an ugly PR show to beg for their masters' forgiveness. Karma is a bitch, with a wry sense of humor.
As to the umbrella movement itself, the general consensus agreed by the protesters was that it had failed. It is true that our demands were not met. There is no foreseeable path in the future to attain our one goal in the movement: have real elections for the Chief Executive, complete with the rights to nominate candidates as well as the right to vote. The political reform in Hong Kong is standing still, with little hope of evolving.
However, I personally think that the umbrella revolution was altogether a fortunate twist of fate for us Hong Kong people, especially considering no one expected it to happen in the first place. If nothing else, the movement:
- Set the tone for not accepting the 831 political reform proposal - by not passing it, at least we are not giving the next Chief Executive a false anthentication that he/she is chosen by the public
- Sparked widespread discussions of the future of our city by the people in the city
- Let us see that so many of us shared the same goal and were willing to fight for the same goal
- Awakened many of us to take actions and get involved in civic movements in our own ways
- Unveiled the masks of our opponents and made clear how far they were willing to go to obtain complete control
- Revealed at the same time that the wizard behind the curtain was not as almighty as we thought, and we the underdog were not as weak as we thought
- Demonstrated beautifully that even in the worst of situations, there were still a lot of moving parts that could change at any moment - so never give up!
That said, I do have serious concern about the future of our fight. During the umbrella movement, there were a lot of internal power struggles and arguments about how to bring the fight forward. As a direct result, the student union and pro-democratic groups that inspired the umbrella movement and helped organized protesting efforts had broken up and lost credibility respectively. While not having a centralized coalition shouldn't matter theoretically, since most of us are self-driven anyways, the lack of consensus and solidarity leave the umbrella people ununited after the movement, limiting the impact of our continued efforts.
If there is one thing that I had learned that night on 928, it was that solidarity motivated a pure heart for equality and fairness was very powerful thing.
I hope the umbrella people would remember our lessons, continue to have discussions with each other, and unite for our shared goal.
As my favorite local commentator Lee Yee said in a recent article: our attitudes determine our fate. If we have the courage to protect our core values, fate will favor us. The umbrella revolution was the perfect example.