46 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019
his brows creased. “Don’t you know
what’s going on?” he said. “They’re mad-
men destroying this city. It’s clear you
aren’t a patriot, otherwise you’d pay
more attention to matters of the state.”
Before I left, a friend of Ah Ying’s
stopped by, a stout, round-faced woman,
also from the mainland, bearing a
satchel of fruit. She passed around some
grapes while she complained about the
steep decline in customers at the food
stall that she ran. It had been like this
for two months, she said. The women
consoled themselves by talking about
a trip they would take back to their re-
spective home regions for the Chinese
New Year, in January. Hong Kong, they
agreed, never felt festive. People kept
to their tiny apartments. There was no
renqing wei—a phrase evoking a col-
lective human spirit. Ah Ying’s friend
nodded, and said, “It just never feels
like home.”
O
n the thirty-second floor of a sky-
scraper in Hong Kong, a financier
in his mid-sixties led me to a confer-
ence room with a view of Victoria Har-
bor, the sun glittering on the water and
on the expensive real estate, with a thin
ridge of mountains visible in the dis-
tance. He took a seat at the head of the
table, his fingers lightly playing over
the white case of his AirPods.
The financier was one of a handful
of prominent businessmen who have
been instrumental in bringing West-
ern ideas about capital and manage-
ment to China. Born in Beijing, he
came of age during the Cultural Rev-
olution, which deprived
him of the opportunity to
attend high school. But,
thanks to Deng’s reforms,
he was among the first
batch of Chinese students given the
chance to study in the United States.
After attending graduate school in Cal-
ifornia, he worked at a series of estab-
lishment institutions and American
banks. When he returned to China, he
gained a reputation not only as a for-
midable dealmaker but also as some-
one culturally attuned to both the East
and the West—in a sense, a quintes-
sential Hong Konger.
The financier began by inquiring
about my own history: how I’d landed
at a place like The New Yorker; why I
hadn’t taken an English name. It was
clear that he was more comfortable
asking questions than answering them,
but I steered the conversation toward
what I’d come to discuss: Hong Kong’s
economy and its evolving relationship
with China. He asked what my angle
was. I said that I didn’t have one yet,
and that interviews were a way for me
to absorb multiple perspectives. “So let
me save us some time,” he said, put-
ting up a hand. He called out for his
secretary to print a copy of an op-ed
that he’d written. I read it while he fid-
dled with his phone.
I asked him about his assertion in
the article, in opposition to the pro-
tests, that democracy meant compro-
mise. He sighed with impatience. “I’m
not into debating,” he said. “Everyone
is entitled to their opinion, whether
there is a basis or no basis.” I asked
what he made of the protesters’ de-
mands. “I don’t take very seriously the
demands by a small group of people
who engage in violence,” he said, and
called the appeal for amnesty “totally
ridiculous.” After all, he said, Hong
Kong “prides itself on law and order.”
In his view, the pro-democratic pol-
iticians in the Hong Kong Legislative
Council had had an opportunity to gain
universal suffrage in 2014 but bungled
it. That proposal, however—though it
set out the possibility of a direct pleb-
iscite for the position of Chief Execu-
tive—mandated that all candidates be
endorsed by a nominating committee
that tends to be loyal to Beijing and the
city’s business élite. When I brought
this up, the financier stud-
ied me for a long moment.
“To suggest that there is
this idea—that Hong Kong
wants universal suffrage
that Beijing doesn’t want—is wrong,”
he said. “That’s simply not the truth!”
I wanted to understand how a move-
ment of a few radicals could come to
swallow an entire city. “You are not in-
terviewing me,” he said. “You are mak-
ing arguments with me.”
On it went. He insisted that he was
interested only in facts and data while
I seemed intent on pushing my preju-
dices. I was surprised to find myself in
an argument about the protests, given
that I’d begun with questions about their
economic context. Still, I’d met few
Hong Kongers who were on the fence.
People espoused their views wholeheart-
edly and tended to regard the existence
of an alternative opinion with baffled
exasperation. In a way, I felt that the
financier was less outraged by the is-
sues than by the fact that we were ar-
guing at all. To him, I was insolent. Just
to ask about the protests was to chal-
lenge the established order, much like
the protests themselves—another sign
that everything was coming apart.
As I headed to the elevator, the
receptionist averted her eyes. On the
ground floor, I was surprised to see the
financier again, at the elevator bank.
“You are not permitted to use anything
from our conversation just now,” he
said. I objected. “I told you, you can-
not use it!” he said, raising his voice.
He stared at the phone on which I’d
recorded our discussion. “You are being
disrespectful,” he said, in a low voice.
“Very disrespectful.”
I
left Hong Kong briefly in late Sep-
tember, and returned just before the
October 1st protests. Now the city felt
as if it were pulled taut. Blockades pre-
vented my taxi from getting all the way
to my hotel, and, walking the remain-
der of the route, I found that the side-
walk had been freshly dug up. The wide
road, normally bustling with traffic and
pedestrians, was deathly quiet except
for the footsteps of the riot police.
On the mainland, the seventieth-
anniversary celebrations proceeded with
an almost religious sense of national
purpose. But in Hong Kong damage
control was the priority; the annual
National Day fireworks had been can-
celled, and a flag-raising ceremony had
been moved indoors because of secu-
rity concerns. Speculation was rife that,
if things got bad enough, Beijing would
send in troops.
A little past noon, I walked to a soc-
cer field where protesters had gathered,
wielding black flags and chanting. “Oc-
tober 1st is not an occasion of national
celebration but one of national injury,”
someone had scrawled on the sidewalk.
National mourning was the declared
theme of the day. People threw fake
paper money around, something that
is traditionally done to commemorate
the dead. I saw protesters clamber up
the scaffolding of a building to tear
