Everyday movement, p.15
Everyday Movement, page 15
Hung Yi was so shocked to hear this she turned back to have another look at the panda. “It’s just a joke. Lighten up,” Ah Mak said.
The next day, Hung Yi began junior high. At the start of the first period, the teacher asked each student to stand up and introduce themselves in English. Her new classmates seemed confident and funny. Hung Yi was a bundle of nerves. When it was her turn, she sprang to her feet. She told herself to lighten up and heard herself saying, “Good morning, everyone. My name is Hung Yi. You may call me Panda.”
Part Three
The Final Class
It was a Monday night, and Ho Sam sat in bed watching Chan Yuek fall asleep. The weather had turned brisk with the arrival of October. He tucked the blanket around her. Earlier, when they were having sex, he caught a fleeting expression of pain on her face. Thinking of it, he reached for her hand. He had assumed that he knew how to decode all her side comments and little gestures by now. While it turned out that wasn’t yet the case, it was certainly true that Ho Sam felt bonded to this headstrong young woman.
Lately, he noticed Chan Yuek had been running faster and faster. They had been going to rallies together for a couple months now, but for the most part, they blended into the crowd and often stayed in the back to support the injured. But ever since Chan Yuek recognized one of the arrestees via a group chat, she was spurred into rushing closer and closer to the front and was overall more involved in the action. She put out small fires and doused unexploded tear gas canisters with water. Ho Sam always followed her closely and tried to match her energy, but he was puzzled.
“If I don’t run faster, I’ll never catch up,” she explained.
“Catch up to what?” he asked.
Chan Yuek told Ho Sam the arrested man was her ex-boyfriend, Ah Mak. The one she had accused of not taking enough of a stance. Was she feeling guilty? Did she have lingering feelings for him? Ho Sam couldn’t figure out the answers to these questions, either, and he didn’t want to ask. He gently squeezed her hand and slipped out of bed, making sure not to wake her. He tiptoed to the living room and sat down at his desk to grade his students’ essays.
* * *
—
In September, Ho Sam began teaching a junior high five-week writing course. Every week, he gave the class a writing assignment. The prompts, he knew, were not particularly inspiring. But he was okay with it, knowing his students would reciprocate with their safe, predictable writing. The lack of passion was mutual. However, there was one exception. A petite girl, Ning Yuet, always chose ambitious subjects and expanded well beyond the required length of eight hundred characters. The topic he assigned last week was “Scenes on the Bus.” Ho Sam wasn’t surprised when he saw Ning Yuet had turned in another long essay.
…A squad of police officers boarded the bus, shouting at everyone to freeze. They demanded passengers produce their IDs, as though everyone present were heinous criminals. A baby began to cry, only to be scared into silence by an officer’s menacing glare and brandished baton. A teenager in a black shirt had his backpack violently snatched; the officers dumped every last item onto the floor in an insulting manner. They discovered a utility knife inside his pencil case and used it as grounds for arrest…
Ho Sam pressed his temples to focus. He found Ning Yuet’s papers hard to read. On top of the difficult subjects, she always submitted messy, handwritten drafts on grid paper. Her pen strokes leapt from one character to the next, sprawling across five, six pages of four hundred–character grid sheets.
…A few passengers stepped forward, trying to stop the officers from taking the teen away. The police immediately blasted their faces with pepper spray…
Ning Yuet’s stories never strayed outside of three categories: condemning the violence of the regime; extending sympathy to the heroic protesters; concluding that justice would inevitably triumph over evil. No matter how dark the previous passages were, Ning Yuet always ended the essay with a strangely upbeat statement like a sun cap over a raincoat.
In the first class, Ho Sam told students to write about “Empty Seats.” Most students wrote about dead grandparents or courtesy seats on public transportation. Not Ning Yuet. She wrote about a classmate who used to take the seat next to her.
He had been absent for a long time. Everyone just assumed he got sick. Well, yes, something did happen to his body. When he was arrested during a street protest, the police put him in a chokehold and beat him with batons. He had multiple fractures in his body. When I visited him in the hospital, his wrists were bound to the bedrail with metal handcuffs. How cruel! How could they treat a teenager like this?
That essay also ended with “One day we will have democracy!” Perhaps, Ho Sam thought, it was a prayer in the disguise of a statement.
* * *
—
Ho Sam spent his first couple of years after graduation working at a bookstore and then a publishing house. He tried to write a novel, but it drained him. Wrestling all day with ideas and world-building on the page was a terrible way to live, he decided. A new outlook was established: He wanted an inauthentic, comfortable existence. Eventually, he landed a job as a teaching assistant at this school. He didn’t have much passion for teaching, but it was, overall, a comfortable way to make a living.
When he was new, he was a little nervous. After all, schools were places that prized rules, order, and discipline above all else. Everyone put on a professional front during work hours: shirts pressed crisp, ties knotted tight. At first, he was stationed in the administrative office. The office used an open floor plan, and thanks to the public-facing information area fronted with a large pane of glass, the space was like a giant fish tank. Anyone passing by could see what everybody was up to. Ho Sam handled odd jobs, such as photocopying worksheets, sorting mail, and replying to emails. He was also put in charge of a few extracurricular activities. One Saturday morning, for example, he took students to a Red Cross first-aid training at seven. He endured these unwanted tasks as small inconveniences for an overall comfortable life.
He was the youngest among the administrators. There were about ten of them in that office: the secretary, the accountants, and clerks. They were all over forty. Their conversations revolved around TV shows and cooking. Ho Sam kept overhearing things like “Tonight I’m making chicken feet stew with peanuts” or “Watercress is in season now. Throw in some duck gizzard. It will make such a nourishing soup.” Boring people never get tired of talking about boring things, Ho Sam thought.
The next year, Ho Sam was promoted to teach Chinese literature to junior high students. He was given a desk in the teachers’ office but had to share it with another new hire, Lee. Lee seemed to be a sunny person. He had always wanted to become a teacher, he liked to tell people, and his dream had come true when he returned to his alma mater. Sometimes Ho Sam saw him playing basketball with the students. He looked like their older brother.
He must be one of those sincere, passionate types, Ho Sam thought. They made him uneasy. Just like Chan Yuet did on their first date. They seemed to live with a kind of conviction that Ho Sam didn’t understand. They treated everything in life as a race with a clear beginning and a red ribbon at the finish line. They seemed to approach all goals as achievable. It was only a matter of time and effort. He normally wouldn’t bother arguing with them—otherwise, they’d go full missionary on him.
To Ho Sam, life was an endlessly whirling wheel, repeating similar casts of characters and turns of events, spinning the living into dizzying despair. Therefore, he saw sincerity as a dangerous trait. It made people spend all their energy aiming for an unreachable apex on the ever-turning wheel. They kept trying until they became burned out.
* * *
—
Previously, Ho Sam thought breakfast—to be more precise, sitting down at a table to eat a full meal in the morning—was a waste of time. He always sacrificed this ritual for sleeping a little longer and grabbed a bun on the go, chewing it as he waited for the bus. But ever since Chan Yuek moved in, many things in his life began changing.
Chan Yuek had made a point of cooking breakfast each morning. On this Tuesday morning, she got up early as usual. She put on her fuzzy slippers, which were remarkably quiet when she walked around the flat. She shut the bedroom door before turning on the morning TV news and opened a can of cat food for Hanta. Then, she started making toast and scrambled eggs. She had some extra time and juiced a few apples too.
When the food was ready, Ho Sam had already finished washing up. They ate together and talked about current affairs from near and far. Ho Sam came to rely on these conversations to keep him sane. A morning dose of sobriety got him through a day of colleagues’ mindless yapping. (The latest obsession at the office was hairy crabs and the “best recipes” to prepare them.)
“A teaching assistant from my department is going to run for district council,” Chan Yuek said before taking a bite of her toast. Citywide elections took place every four years, and the next one was scheduled for late November.
Ho Sam wasn’t particularly enthusiastic. He thought the entrenched powerholders were like territorial old snakes who fended off any new animals coming to their caves. Typically, pro-establishment camp politicians had a stronghold over district council seats. They courted local residents through personal and business connections, highlighting policies that would yield minor life improvements, such as increasing the number of recycling bins or building new rain shields at bus stops. Ahead of each election, they launched flashy projects, handed out gift boxes to residents, and organized day trips for local seniors, enticing voters with small favors. They categorically avoided talks about “democracy.”
The young generation was generally disenchanted with the process. In recent years, many of them refused to vote at all. This year, however, things might be different. The movement had lit a fire inside the caves of local politics, rekindling people’s hopes for elections and social change.
It was also Chan Yuek’s first election after she became eligible to vote. She was excited about her university’s homegrown candidate. “He’s only in his early thirties. He has a good public image, and a lot of classmates and alumni have come out in support. Everyone calls him ‘Little Professor.’ He pledged to host community reading groups, vegetarian days, and build gender-inclusive bathrooms.” Having finished eating the canned food, Hanta leapt onto the table, tufts of his tail fur drifting down onto Ho Sam’s scrambled eggs. “He talked about creating pet-friendly public spaces too! We could take Hanta outside to play,” Chan Yuek added.
Ho Sam took a sip of apple juice to stop his jaded feelings from spilling out of his mouth. Apart from not having much faith in the meaning of elections, he suspected that openly advocating for these progressive policies wasn’t the best way to win over the constituents. He didn’t voice any of these thoughts, however. “I didn’t know Hanta longed to be outside,” he said.
He wasn’t holding back due to some kind of condescending sympathy for Chan Yuek. He was drawn to her will to build a beautiful life and a bright future. He considered her visions to be radical, perhaps extremist in their optimism, but still, he was drawn to them, or to her. His vantage point was much closer to the ground: The present was crumbling down and he didn’t know how to hold things together. Perhaps she was holding it together for him. After all, it was her who radicalized his morning routine. “In tumultuous times, we need a life with a clear sense of order all the more,” she said. He ate quickly because he had a new duty at the school starting this morning.
When Ho Sam arrived at the teachers’ office, his colleagues were talking about an incident from the previous week. At a protest, the police were using live ammunition and shot a high school student from their district. The bullet lodged a mere three centimeters from his heart. The latest news from the hospital said the student was going to survive.
“How close is three centimeters exactly?” the biology teacher said as he steeped Earl Grey in a glass teapot. “Imagine the diameter of a coin.”
“That kid is beyond fortunate to be alive. Surviving a close call like that, he’s bound to have some serious luck coming his way. If I were his mom, I’d go buy a Mark Six lotto ticket tonight.” Director Choi had no filter. But since he was retiring next year, everyone was just putting up with him until then.
“My class is filled with students who are eager to stir up trouble out there. I tell them: Right now, your role is to be a student. If you want to fight to have a say, this isn’t the way. When you’re nobody, who’s going to listen to you? Don’t you see the cops going straight for the kids during arrests? It’s because they have no power and no influence. Crushing them is like squashing an ant. Zero consequences. You should focus on getting into university first. One day, you become professionals and gain some social standing, and who is going to mess with you then?” Mr. Chan chimed in as he inspected the stocks on his phone.
Despite Mr. Chan’s views, the near-fatal shooting sparked an intense reaction from students across the district. They handed out flyers and masks, put up posters, and marched around their respective campuses. There was even a rumor of an upcoming multischool protest. At Ho Sam’s school, teachers were worried that the situation might spiral out of control. During a meeting on Monday, a faculty member asked, “If we let things brew, aren’t we basically harboring a new generation of ideologically driven fanatics like the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution?”
After the meeting, the principal’s office announced the campus should be a neutral space and banned any form of political expression. Starting Tuesday, Ho Sam and another teacher were assigned to stand at the school gate each morning to inspect students’ belongings. Any posters or protest gear were to be confiscated. Students wearing black masks would be ordered to remove them before entry.
Ho Sam got to the school gate in time to screen the earliest arriving students. He opened a trash bag for the masks. Students looked incredulous as they approached him to dispose of them. He thought of what Chan Yuek had said about her experience at Tamar Park. Until tear gas canisters were actually fired into the crowd, no one believed it would happen.
For these students, the previously unthinkable had become reality: A fellow student was shot, and now there was a blanket ban of political expression on campus. Indignant, they felt betrayed by their government and their school. Ho Sam didn’t feel he stood on either side of this betrayal, but as he held out the trash bag, he realized by maintaining his passive status, he was siding with the adults.
* * *
—
Lately, Ho Sam had often felt torn. His normal instinct was to recoil from overtly earnest people. People who were quick to assign moral values to ambiguous realities; people who were loud in professing their virtuous opinions. In fact, he had lived his life as a master of evading earnestness. The trick was to perch on a ground far away from the definitive moralities and automatically deflect any sincerity onslaught with a joke or a shrug.
This week, however, he came to the realization that he wasn’t exactly the opposite of being earnest. For one thing, he still went to protests. And this morning, he found Chan Yuek’s talks about Little Professor’s aspirational proposals a lot more bearable than his colleagues’ comments along the lines of “right now, your role is to be students” or their obsessions over watercress or hairy crabs.
He felt torn when enforcing the school’s new policy. He wasn’t sure if he should show sympathy to the students. He wanted to lend them moral support—there was nothing wrong with speaking up for a student wounded by police brutality. But would his gesture of encouragement embolden the students into dangerous confrontations with the school or the police?
He recalled an argument with Chan Yuek. It was a midsummer weekend. Many protesters gathered to march across Hong Kong Island to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Umbrella Movement. When the crowd passed by the police headquarters in Wan Chai, hundreds of protesters surrounded the building, blocking off sections of Harcourt Road to its north and Queensway to its south. It shut down much of the traffic on the island. The police tried to clear the space with tear gas.
Supporters of the protest surged into this area from its western end, forming a human chain. They stopped near the junction of Tamar Street and Queensway about five hundred meters from the standoff. When Ho Sam and Chan Yuek arrived, they could see tear gas smoke in the distance. Some trees were apparently hit by canisters and caught fire. A few protesters threw Molotov cocktails at road barriers on the avenue to delay police advancement.
A man who had carried a telescope with him acted as a lookout. He positioned himself on a nearby footbridge and periodically shouted updates on how many meters the police had advanced or how many more emergency police vans had arrived. With each report, the spectators receded westward and dwindled in number.
Chan Yuek and Ho Sam heard a commotion break out behind them. Turning around, they saw a squad of half a dozen protesters in motorcycle helmets, masks, and gloves advancing against the direction of the dispersing crowd. Armed with fiber shields, batons, and umbrellas, they wore long-sleeved shirts and pants strapped with elbow and knee pads. Steadily, they marched toward the standoff to provide backup.
Stunned by this development, people moved aside to make way for this valiant squad to pass through. It was like Moses parting the Red Sea if the Red Sea were made of cheerleaders. They were met with applause and shouts of encouragement.
