THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019 49
ings they aroused were so fervent that
the ultimate withdrawal of the bill could
not stem the tide. “You do see people
talk about the demands,” Kevin Yam, a
former head of Hong Kong’s Progres
sive Lawyers Group, said. “But, ulti
mately, the thing that motivates people
more than anything else is police bru
tality.” In other words, the current pro
tests may now, at the most basic level,
be driven by what the act of protesting
has revealed about the authorities.
Kitty Hung, a writer who was ar
rested in 2010 for her activism, talked
to me about her worries regarding the
protests. Their decentralized structure
had been good for eluding the author
ities, but it didn’t empower anyone to
negotiate productively on the protest
ers’ behalf. Hung worried about the
frontliners in particular; many she’d
talked to came from deprived back
grounds, with very modest educations
that would leave them vulnerable in
a highly competitive society. “What
made me sad is that, even if Hong
Kong were independent, their lives
wouldn’t change,” she said. “I can’t see
their future even if their political de
mands are met.”
For now, Hung went on, the main
land served as a common enemy to
rally against, but she believed that this
animus forestalled a reckoning
with collective issues, especially
inequalities in income and edu
cation. No one was thinking
about how to turn a political rev
olution into a badly needed so
cial one.
Concerning the questions of
identity that so many young dem
onstrators were raising, Yam pointed
out that the Hong Kong identity was
a product of a particular historical mo
ment: “Since its founding, Hong Kong’s
population has always been transient,”
he said. This was something that had
started to change only when the place
became an international financial cen
ter. Yam continued, “People in their
teens, twenties, and early thirties are
probably the first few real generations
of Hong Kongers whose lives haven’t
been punctuated by waves of migra
tion.” Now that migration is increas
ingly a twoway exchange with the
mainland, rather than with the rest of
the world, it may be that homogeni
zation with mainland culture is inevi
table. If so, the current flowering of
Hong Kong identity could one day
look like a brief historical anomaly.T
he “2047” actor who was later ar
rested had mentioned that there
was another play that I should see, “Lu
ting: Goodbye History, Hello Future.”
According to regional legend, Lu
tings—half man, half fish—were the
original inhabitants of Hong Kong. An
earlier tetralogy of Luting plays were,
according to their author, Wong Kwok
Kiu, an attempt to grapple with Hong
Kong’s past not as faithful textbook
history but as a meditation on the
meaning of metamorphosis. This one,
more playful than polemical, ellipti
cally considered the question of the
territory’s future. It was in eleven acts,
which, apart from the first and the last,
could be performed in any order. “No
story is ever a straight story,” the di
rector, Chan Chu Hei, told me. “Re
ality is scrambled.”
The venue was a cluster of squat,
tiled buildings arranged around a court
yard—a former slaughterhouse that
had been converted into an arts village.
When I got there, audience members
were milling around, in the syrupy night
air, waiting for the show to start. Seem
ingly out of nowhere, an unshaven
man with a ponytail darted through
the crowd and onto a platform,
crying, “Give me liberty or give me
death!” This wasn’t Patrick Henry,
exactly. It was the progenitor of the
Luting clan, a mythic rebel gen
eral named Lu Xun, who swam to
Hong Kong Island from the main
land. “I would rather be drowned at sea
than ensnared by tyranny!” he declaimed.
In the next act, “Awakening,” an
actor led the audience down a cob
blestoned footpath and into a dark,
dilapidated building. Gradually, we
could make out the figure of a Lu
ting, with a manateelike head lolling
above a fragile, human body. Roused
reluctantly from a long sleep, he asked,
“What era is it now?” As we watched,
he grew aware of the noxious smell
of the seawater, of himself as an en
tity capable of asking questions about
his state of transition from sea crea
ture to land creature. “To be human
is too painful!” he cried, protesting hisfate even as he unwillingly sprouted
human limbs.
The play veered between the dream
like and the satirical. In one episode,
a Luting runs for office on a platform
of economic and social reforms deemed
naïve by his political opponents. In
another, a Luting reservation is estab
lished, but public interest in Luting
heritage quickly turns the site into a
tourist trap. When a Luting accuses
the tourists of defiling sacred ances
tral ground, they sneer that the Lu
tings should be grateful for the eco
nomic development. At one point, the
audience was split into two groups,
separated by a curtain, and shown two
separate performances, one titled “Dic
tatorship” and the other “Democracy.”
As Chan remarked, “No one gets to
choose what kind of society they have
to live in.”
Was the Lutings’ liminal state, nei
ther human nor fish, a symbol for
Hong Kong—caught between East
and West, in China but not of it? Chan
didn’t want to be pinned down, but he
admitted that the protests had stirred
him to think about the nature of Hong
Kong’s existence. “Hong Kong came
into being through the dreams of
greater powers in the East and the
West,” he said. “But, if our existence
is created out of someone else’s dream,
what does that mean for us, the hap
less creatures birthed in that dream, to
wake up?”
The final act looped back to the be
ginning: another awakening. A Luting
was racked by existential crises. It was
up to him to help bring the next gen
eration of Lutings into being, but he
wasn’t sure if doing so was morally re
sponsible. “Can they survive this world?”
he asked himself. “We can’t ask the
next generation if they want to be born
or not, just as my parents have never
asked me if I want to be born.”
At the end of the play, the audience
was ushered up onstage, and the Lu
tings threaded between us, chanting
over and over, like a prayer, the final
lines of the play: “What decision should
I make? Can you tell me what to do?”
Their voices, at first a chorus, rose and
fell, until they became a single barely
audible whisper: “You humans are
smart, you must have a good answer
for me. Tell me. Tell me.”