42 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019
walk together.” An unnamed ironist
had appropriated a quotation from
Mao about revolutionary war as “an
antitoxin” that “eliminates the enemy’s
poison” and offered it as a rebuke of
the solemnity of Communist propa-
ganda. This brand of sly, subversive
humor has become a hallmark of the
Hong Kong protests.
There were outbreaks of self-aware
kitsch (cartoon characters of every prov-
enance wearing gas masks), flamboy-
ant irreverence (Carrie Lam’s name
lends itself to a pun involving gonor-
rhea), and lacerating satire (a missing-
person notice for “good Hong Kong
cops,” a death certificate for Hong Kong
democracy). The sheer diversity of ref-
erences—Japanese anime, Hollywood
classics, Tang-dynasty poetry—was diz-
zying, and the sardonic delivery, laced
with anger, cynicism, and wit, embod-
ied the exuberant swagger of the move-
ment. This was twenty-first-century
agitprop, steeped in globalized culture
and designed for digital virality.
Some of the posters, cartoons, and
graffiti on the wall were hard for me,
as a Mandarin speaker, to decipher.
Although Mandarin and Cantonese
speakers generally read the same scripts,
sometimes the written text reflects the
divergences of the dialects. Hong Kong-
ers speak Cantonese, but
in school they are taught
to write using the vocab-
ulary and the grammar of
standard written Chinese.
When Beijing made spoken Manda-
rin a compulsory subject, some students
increasingly used characters unique to
Cantonese, which were incomprehen-
sible to Mandarin speakers. Language
became politicized, and Cantonese
writing proliferated—on posters, on
university campuses, and in online pro-
democracy news outlets. The Umbrella
Movement has an alternate name that
uses one of these characters, a symbol
of resistance to mainland, Mandarin-
speaking authority.
The growth of this us-and-them
mentality was evident everywhere. At
the Tai Po Lennon Wall, I saw post-
ers denouncing mainlanders as “main-
land cunts.” Mandarin speakers often
told me how unwelcome they were
made to feel, and sometimes went on
to talk about Cantonese speakers in
vituperative terms. I experienced this
animus myself a few days later, at a
daytime rally in a park, when a group
of peaceful protesters grew suspicious
of me because I spoke Mandarin rather
than Cantonese, and had a distinctly
mainland accent. (I was born in Chong-
qing and immigrated to the United
States when I was eight.) Everyone
was sure that Beijing had operatives
on the ground covertly monitoring the
demonstrations: who was to say that I
wasn’t one of them? When I told the
group that I was an American journal-
ist, they challenged me to prove it. The
most worrying moment came when I
pulled out my passport and American
press credentials. Surrounded by a tight
ring of people yelling that I was almost
certainly a Communist Party agent, I
could feel a nasty momentum build-
ing. Eventually, I began to record the
scene, which helped disperse the crowd.
But hostility lingered: I was definitely
not one of them.O
ne night, at the Sham Shui Po
subway station, in Kowloon, two
protesters in their twenties met be-
hind a pillar. One opened a backpack
and furtively pulled out several pairs of
gloves and some gas masks. The other
quickly stuffed them into his own
bag. He had weak lungs,
and his friend was wor-
ried about him, because
he coughed convulsively
whenever there was any
smoke or tear gas in the air. They’d
known each other since college, where
they shared a dorm room, and they now
worked in the same office building.
I’d met the first man earlier that eve-
ning, after messaging with him on Tele-
gram. His screen name was No Name,
and we agreed that that’s what I would
call him. This kind of reticence was
common among the protesters, who
knew that they were dealing with a
technologically sophisticated police
force. It had taken days to persuade No
Name to meet in person, but eventu-
ally he instructed me to go to a restau-
rant in Kwai Hing, a neighborhood in
the New Territories. He said he was
available only after 10 P.M.
When I arrived, I checked my
phone to see if I’d got the right place:
a public-housing complex with a se-ries of gray, brutalist columns loom-
ing above narrow alleyways, where
older folk sat on bamboo stools, play-
ing cards and eating barbecue. The
street lights were so dim that it took
me a moment to make out the rats
scampering on the asphalt. It looked
like the outskirts of any third-tier city
on the mainland—indeed, it reminded
me of the Chongqing of my child-
hood, thirty years ago. It was a world
away from the luxury towers that most
people associate with Hong Kong.
In the restaurant, I texted No Name
to say that I had arrived and was wear-
ing a green short-sleeved shirt. I was
still looking at my phone when a voice
above me said, “That’s not green, it’s
blue.” I looked up and saw a young man
wearing a black T-shirt and wire-frame
glasses. He looked no more than six-
teen and held himself with a coiled en-
ergy. He took a seat and asked for my
press credentials. For the past four
months, he said, he had not missed a
single protest.
Of the 1.7 million people who are
thought to have marched in the pro-
tests (around twenty per cent of Hong
Kong’s population), No Name esti-
mated that there were about ten thou-
sand who could be considered front-
liners. Of those, perhaps eight thousand
had set up roadblocks, painted graffiti,
or neutralized tear-gas cannisters with
traffic cones. He considered himself
one of the hard core—some two thou-
sand “proactive” protesters, who were
willing to escalate confrontations with
the police and to engage in activities,
such as throwing Molotov cocktails or
sabotaging surveillance cameras, that
could result in serious prison sentences.
He coördinated his efforts with about
a dozen fellow front-liners via Tele-
gram. Some members of this group
had been arrested recently, he said, but
there was no shortage of others to take
their places. The bigger problem was
guarding against infiltration by infor-
mants. During the summer, he had set
up a screening process for people who
wanted to join the struggle. He checked
their I.D.s, quizzed them on their back-
grounds, and asked them if they had
thought through the possible conse-
quences. Everyone should know that
arrest and injury are not only possible
but almost probable, he told me.