Everyday movement, p.17
Everyday Movement, page 17
A boy at the door grabbed his schoolbag and charged toward the staircase. The others followed suit. They walked down the hallway and passed by Ho Sam. One of the girls turned around and shouted at the teachers, “I’ll never forgive you!”
When the students were out of earshot, the teachers relaxed, clearly pleased that they successfully averted a crisis. “Whew, what a hassle,” one of them said. Another rolled his eyes: “Talk about not forgiving. What is this, an elementary school breakup?”
“That’s just how teenagers are. Weren’t we all young once? They see adults as enemies. When they grow up, they’ll realize adults have their own hardships too,” the vice principal said as he gestured for everyone to get out.
* * *
—
After Ho Sam got home, he couldn’t concentrate. Chan Yuek wasn’t back yet and hadn’t returned his texts. Normally, to unwind, he put a record on the stereo and leisurely cooked dinner. But he didn’t feel like doing so that night. In this strange and restless pocket of time, Ho Sam flashed back to a few hours earlier, when the teachers had waited by the printer, queuing up like students to collect printouts of the Education Bureau notice. History, it seemed, had demanded that they sew their lips shut and stay in their place obediently.
While waiting for word from Chan Yuek, Ho Sam took out this week’s essays from his students and read them carefully. He was surprised to see Ning Yuet’s latest essay showed marked improvement. It was still about the protests, but no longer stuck in the rut of hollow slogans and self-satisfying moral victories.
Ho Sam had asked the students to imagine being someone other than themselves—or something, as Ho Sam now realized this additional possibility—by filling in the blank in the subject line of “If I were a…” Ning Yuet wrote her essay in six sections, each from the perspective of an anthropomorphized object: a bullet, a police uniform, a camera lens, a press conference microphone, a tree in the park, and a body part that had been shot. The six voices complemented one another, working together to reconstruct the police shooting of the student. Unlike before, Ning Yuet’s tone was restrained, and the effect was quite ironic.
I am a bullet from a police officer’s gun, always waiting to rid the world of evil. I often imagined myself being fired at a critical moment, successfully preventing a serious hostage situation or a criminal’s escape. But when I was finally fired, I entered a small body, so full of life—wait, wait. Isn’t—isn’t this a child? I tore through his veins, and just before piercing his heart, I started to scream: Stop! Someone stop me! This isn’t what I wanted! Just when the blood and tissue slowed me down, I felt a violent jolt. The body I’d entered had collapsed. God, won’t someone help him? Please forgive me. This was never my intention.
Another section began with:
I am a police uniform. When the bullet pierced that rioter, the blood bloomed across me like a glorious badge embroidered on my body. I felt a surge of blazing honor.
Ho Sam was contemplating how to grade this unusual essay when the door opened. Chan Yuek came in limping. Apparently, she had gone out to protest and was caught up in police fire. A stray bullet grazed her right calf. She didn’t want to go to the hospital, fearing police presence there. A paramedic at the scene had helped her to safety and roughly cleaned the wound before bandaging it up.
Ho Sam slowly unwrapped the gauze, revealing a patch of open flesh soaked with fluid and blood. “We have to get you to the hospital,” Ho Sam said. But Chan Yuek still refused. Her teeth were chattering, and her face was pale. She didn’t even have the strength to speak.
Ho Sam felt so angry. He wondered if the police officer who fired the shot ever thought of his victims. Did his uniform get bloodied today? The line from Ning Yuet’s essay rang in his head. The blood bloomed across me like a glorious badge. I felt a surge of blazing honor. “Honor,” what a hollow word, Ho Sam thought. There was no sense in shooting people at a protest. Or being shot, for that matter. It occurred to him that Chan Yuek might take her injury and suffering as proof of her commitment, but that was beside the point now. He decided to call a trusted doctor friend for a private visit.
After the doctor left, Ho Sam put Chan Yuek to bed and sat down at his desk to finish grading the last few essays and prepare for the final class. He scrapped his original lesson plan. He wanted to do things differently now. No more video clips, corny jokes, or pointless writing exercises to fill the time. He would demand the students’ attention and not let it slide when they dozed off or used their phones. He was no longer concerned about being the good guy.
Normally, if a student wrote an interesting essay, he would read it aloud in class. But in this new world, according to the notice, the school is not a place to express political ideas. He sneered at the thought of it. Sure, he wouldn’t read Ning Yuet’s essay to her classmates. He would offer some notes for improvement in private and encourage her to submit it to journals or newspapers.
For next week’s class, he thought he would share an excerpt from One Hundred Years of Solitude. If questioned by his supervisors, he would make an argument that it didn’t count as political ideas. He recalled a part of the novel vividly. After witnessing the banana company massacre, José Arcadio Segundo desperately tried to tell everyone about the blood and the bodies. But his fellow villagers treated him like a madman. They said it never happened.
Snoopy Friends
It was Tuesday, seven days since a sixteen-year-old boy at Sai Mui’s school had been shot by the police. After class, Sai Mui noticed some stalls set up on the sports ground. It looked like a little market. People were handing out cookies, braiding friendship bracelets, and twisting balloons into animal shapes. There was also a booth with a sign that said Free Space. A young woman with shoulder-length hair sat in the booth. Next to the sign, Sai Mui noticed, was a family pack of a popular brand of marshmallows in the shape of Snoopy. Each pack came with a sticker of a Peanuts character inside. She wondered which one was in this pack. It was a pity that her friends couldn’t join her. They commuted to school from Shenzhen and had to rush off after class to catch the northbound train to get home.
Last Tuesday was National Day. A schoolmate was at a protest when a crowd of protesters surrounded a policeman in an alley. Feeling threatened, he fired his gun. A bullet struck the sixteen-year-old close to his heart. He was rushed to the hospital. While undergoing emergency surgery, he was charged with rioting.
The next morning, school administrators called a press conference. It quickly turned into chaos. Reporters and concerned citizens flooded the campus, demanding that school management issue a statement to condemn police brutality and to pledge protection for their students. But the principal insisted on remaining “neutral,” refusing to make any commitments. Most shocking of all was his remark: “It’s like conflict in a family. If the parents make a mistake, does that mean their children have the right to smash up household items? Does being injured provide impunity for the children’s actions?”
The live broadcast became the talk of the internet. Later that day, Sai Mui rewatched the conference with her sister, Panda.
One detail stood out to Sai Mui. A female teacher broke down into tears while talking about the injured student’s condition. A sympathetic member of the audience offered her a packet of tissue. The teacher was just about to take the tissue when the principal, who sat next to her and was getting hammered by the attendees, snatched it and pulled out a sheet to dab at the sweat on his forehead.
“You can’t make this up,” Panda said.
For the rest of the week, the students’ emotions ran high, and teachers struggled to get them to focus in class. Many graduates reached out to their alma mater, offering various forms of support. A group of alumni coordinated to create a space for students so they could release their stress and talk about things. That was what the booths were about.
As Sai Mui stood alone on the sports ground, the woman at the Free Space booth waved at her and offered her a marshmallow.
“Shall we play a game?” she suggested in Mandarin, gesturing for Sai Mui to sit down.
“You can speak Cantonese. I was born in Hong Kong. I understand it perfectly well,” Sai Mui responded in Cantonese.
At Sai Mui’s school, about 70 percent of the students, including most of Sai Mui’s friends, were either new immigrants from mainland provinces or commuters from Shenzhen. An average class only had a handful of local students. The common tongue was Mandarin and some students also spoke other Chinese dialects. After school, they messaged one another on WeChat. Many students struggled with traditional Chinese characters, as they had been used to the simplified version back home. During break, they chatted about mainland variety shows, internet influencers, shopping livestreams, and trending topics on Weibo.
To fit in, Hong Kong natives like Sai Mui made an effort to speak Mandarin. Their pronunciation wasn’t perfect, and classmates made fun of them for it. In private, Sai Mui and her peers joked that they were a minority people.
That was just how things were in Hong Kong now, Panda had told Sai Mui. In the years since 1997, a booming industry emerged to help mainlanders migrate to Hong Kong, or to at least give birth there, so their offspring—the so-called anchor babies—would be granted legal status to live in Hong Kong and have better lives. Many young couples—parents of Sai Mui’s classmates—had bought into the promises of quality education, health care, and the opportunities that came with a more advanced economy. They were convinced that as long as they managed to pass the border checkpoints and gave birth on Hong Kong soil, a bright future was guaranteed for their children.
About seven years ago, a mainland cousin from Mom’s side became part of this birth tourism. Panda, who was a teenager at the time, had told Sai Mui their story. Mom went through quite the hassle to secure her a hospital bed. Once she checked in, Mom, Auntie Lan, and other family members in Hong Kong took it upon themselves to take care of her.
After a baby boy was born, the new parents made the painful decision to entrust him to a Hong Kong relative’s family. Back then, they believed this sacrifice would prove worthwhile. They saw Hong Kong as a blessed land that would offer their child a higher standard of living, strong English skills, and easier pathways to studying abroad.
Just a few years after this fateful decision, however, the winds shifted. Hong Kong was no longer viewed as a prodigy child, the pride of the country. Instead, it had turned into the spoiled kid riding on the back of the motherland. As the mainland economy took off, the fortune of the cousin’s family changed. Their farmland was bought up by the government to build a train station. The poop-laden paths in the fields where chickens used to run were now paved over into a glossy shopping mall.
The cousin and her husband used the money from the government to open a restaurant that was so successful it became a chain. They owned multiple properties in Guangdong Province. They no longer needed to save up to visit their child in Hong Kong. They could easily afford frequent luxury expeditions to the city. They also began to think about raising him on the mainland.
When they looked into it, however, they found out their son wasn’t eligible to attend any mainland public school, due to his status as a resident of Hong Kong. Their sacrifice turned out to be for nothing. The privilege they bought their son became a liability. So the son continued to live with relatives in Hong Kong and received money from his parents every month.
Mom had taken Panda and Sai Mui to visit the boy a few times. He was born in Hong Kong, just like Panda and Sai Mui, but he seemed to live a lonely life in the city. He didn’t speak Cantonese well and longed to be with his parents.
At the booth, the woman switched to Cantonese. “You don’t see many Hong Kong students these days!” She proposed a game. “How about we each share three things about ourselves? Two truths and a lie. The other person guesses which one is a lie. If you win, I’ll give you another marshmallow.”
Sai Mui nodded, and the woman volunteered to go first. “Okay, I’ll start. One, someone I know recently lost his freedom, and it made me really sad. Two, I gave up a certain coffee brand. Three, I’m a man.” She winked at Sai Mui.
“The third is a lie!” Sai Mui answered right away and winked back. “One, my big sister lives at home. Two, my best friend, Mei Yan, has been mad at me. Three, I once talked to the boy who got shot.”
The woman tapped her chin. “Hmm…is the third one the lie?”
“Wrong!” Sai Mui was thrilled to have managed to trick a grown-up. She took another Snoopy-shaped marshmallow and popped it in her mouth as she continued speaking. “The first one’s the lie. My sister ran away from home a few months ago. She started to come back to visit last month though. Once or twice, she even stayed overnight! As for the third, the guy who got shot was the head of a students’ club. We said a couple of words to each other during a sporting event.”
From there, the woman asked Sai Mui about her life. Why did her sister run away? How were things at home? Then, she asked Sai Mui to describe her feelings using colors. Sai Mui sailed through the questions and ate more marshmallow Snoopys in the process.
Of course, she glossed over some details she wasn’t eager to share, such as the fact that her cousin Ah Mak had been fired from his job for some reason. Having nothing better to do, he visited her family every week. He often brought along his new girlfriend, a university student who helped Sai Mui with her homework. Sai Mui hadn’t talked so much with anyone in a long time. She almost forgot how satisfying this felt. When she was leaving, the woman handed her the sticker—it was a Snoopy—and said the booth would be here for another couple of weeks and she was welcome to drop by again. She promised to bring another pack of marshmallows for her.
“Thank you, big sister. What’s your name?” Sai Mui asked.
“I’m Chan Yuek,” the woman said.
* * *
—
After spending an afternoon on campus, Chan Yuek was struck by the gloomy mood there. The victim, she learned from students coming to the booth, had been a cheerful, warmhearted person, a well-liked figure. His family moved to Hong Kong when he was in elementary school. He got on well with both local classmates and mainlanders. For the students’ club, he organized workshops to teach the Cantonese romanization system and invited popular teachers to come share Cantonese slang and jokes.
After the shooting, his high school classmates left garlands of paper cranes, fresh flowers, and sympathy cards on his empty desk. His friends flared with anger like they had swallowed dynamite. In class, they provoked teachers, caring little when they were scolded or punished. They were simply looking for a fight. Many younger junior high students didn’t fully comprehend what had happened. When they tried to ask about it in class, their teachers often brushed their questions off. The truth was they didn’t know what to tell the children.
“Teenagers are the most helpless group in the movement,” a volunteer in the alumni support group told Chan Yuek when she joined. “On the subject of politics and protesters, they often don’t feel comfortable to speak candidly with their parents or teachers. There’s a power imbalance. When they talk about it with their fellow students, it often spirals into raw emotion. It’s not healthy to keep everything bottled up for too long. It’s important for us to help them feel understood.”
Each day that week, when Chan Yuek didn’t have classes at her university, she staffed the booth. At first, she was assigned the post because she couldn’t walk or stand for long stretches of time due to her leg injury, but she turned out to be quite good at the role. Each day, more and more junior high and high school students felt emboldened to stop by. She was humbled by how much each of them was carrying on their minds. One afternoon, a girl waited around and only walked up to Chan Yuek when the other students had left. After she sat down, Chan Yuek noticed a few scars on her arms. She was one of several school friends who had gone to the protest with the boy who was shot. “Why are we attending class like nothing happened while he’s lying in a hospital bed?” she said.
The volunteer work made Chan Yuek think about her own childhood. Like when she greeted Sai Mui, Chan Yuek always initiated conversations in Mandarin to be welcoming. She spoke Cantonese fluently now, but her first few years in Hong Kong had been filled with trepidation. She often stayed quiet to avoid exposing her poor Cantonese. At school, classmates always called her “the mainland girl.” A few boys liked to mockingly imitate her accent. They said she talked like the auntie from the nearby rice noodle shop. In the bright, clean classroom, the boys buzzed around her annoyingly, reminding her of the flies she swatted in the dirt yard outside her grandmother’s house.
She wanted to get rid of her accent so badly and devoted her free time to watching Hong Kong soap operas on TV. She rarely laughed or cried at these melodramas as she was too focused on mouthing the dialogue and memorizing phrases. She forced this new language down her throat as if swallowing a barely chewed date. Meanwhile, she tried to abandon the sounds of her old language. She rejected Mandarin with its words that made her curl her tongue. She diligently practiced enunciating her new language. The key was to master the Cantonese air puff. She pressed her lips almost closed and touched the back of her teeth with the tip of her tongue, enlisting her jaw muscles to force out a barely noticeable sound. Her new identity depended on it. In every sentence she spoke, every sound she made, she worked to erase her origins.
Nowadays, she was no longer the newcomer kid, and she had no doubt about her rightful place in the city. But the reflex to hide an aspect of herself in order to fit in had become entrenched in her so much that she felt an aversion rise inside her whenever she passed by a flock of Chinese tourists who spoke Mandarin loudly with no trace of self-consciousness.
