caded the middle of the road with them.
We stood on one of the city’s many
footbridges and watched the crowd
pass beneath, a torrent of open um-
brellas. People on other footbridges
stretched out their arms toward the
protesters and chanted their support.
Reflexively, I took out my phone to
snap a picture, even though it was an
image I’d seen in a dozen newspapers.
Then I noticed a thicket of tripods and
cameras pointed at the footbridge I was
on. TV crews and photojournalists had
determined that the outstretched arms
above the battle-ready figures made a
compelling picture.
Behind us on the bridge was a group
of Filipino and Indonesian women
sitting on flattened cardboard boxes—
domestic workers who, on their one
day off, usually gathered in the pub-
lic squares that were now given over
to protests. The women had moved
to the elevated bridge to chat, stretch
their legs, and snack on sunflower
seeds. They looked on with expres-
sions of equable semi-curiosity. No
one looked at them.
It was clear that the main action
would take place on Tim Wa Avenue,
which runs between the headquarters
of the Chinese People’s Liberation
Army and the offices of the Chief Ex-
ecutive of Hong Kong, Carrie Lam.
Makeshift stations had been set up to
hand out water and other supplies.
Riot police patrolled behind barriers,
looking almost imprisoned in their
bulky gear. At a few minutes before
five o’clock, the police raised a black
flag, the warning signal that they were
prepared to use tear gas to break up
the demonstration.
Soon, tear gas was misting around
the crowd in great gray plumes. The
protesters hurled bricks and a few Mo-
lotov cocktails at the police. Lines of
flame flashed on the street. A water
cannon sprayed an obscenely beauti-
ful arc of aqua blue. Before long, I heard
the pop of beanbag rounds and rub-
ber bullets being fired. At one point,
a tear-gas cannister landed by my feet.
I felt like I couldn’t breathe. A first-
aid worker doused me with saline and
told me to take shallow breaths, as
deeper ones irritate more lung tissue.
The next phase of these confron-
tations invariably comes after night-
fall, when the main front between pro-
testers and police splinters into smaller
skirmishes—a game of Whac-A-Mole
played out on the city streets. Where
people ran in the next hour was de-
termined by what they were reading
on their phones—updates via Telegram
groups, Twitter feeds, and L.I.H.K.G.,
a local messaging board. There were
reports and rumors of arrests, beat-
ings, and small, temporary victories.
Where we were, in the main shop-
ping district, the action was garishly
illuminated by the LCD displays of
global brands.
Soon, the action shifted to North
Point, where a band of Fujianese men,
possibly intoxicated, wielded butcher
knives when they saw protesters ap-
proach. Elsewhere, protesters sur-
rounded a man suspected of being an
undercover officer. There is a kind of
logic to the way the crowds move, react,
and move on. Wherever there was a
commotion, reporters and camera crews
rushed in, followed by legions of curi-
ous onlookers brandishing selfie sticks.
Eventually, the police would show up,but by then another commotion had
usually broken out somewhere else,
and the scene would shift.A
way from the protests themselves,
the most potent expression of
Hong Kong’s burst of creative dissent
is at the so-called Lennon Walls, which
have sprung up around the territory.
The walls are covered in protest art
ranging from Post-it mosaics to life-
size installations. (They take their name
from a wall in Prague that was made
into a memorial after the murder of
John Lennon.)
One Saturday, I visited Tai Po, a
coastal suburb in the New Territories,
an area of Hong Kong that borders
mainland China. Situated in an un-
derground passageway, Tai Po’s Len-
non Wall seemed like a psychedelic
mashup of a bazaar and a contempo-
rary art “happening.” The surface was
so thickly covered that the layers of
Post-its and flyers seemed organic, like
mold or ivy. Someone had made hun-
dreds of black shirts out of origami
paper, accompanied by the words “We“Don’t worry. It’s lemming fur.”