THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019 45
tween the state and the family remains
strong in China, and Beijing’s empha-
sis on the protesters’ youth betrays its
inability to see political resistance as
anything other than filial disobedience.
“The intra-household, intergener-
ational struggle in Hong Kong is some-
thing that’s almost unprecedented,”
Ryan Manuel, a political scientist who
runs a research center in Hong Kong,
told me. “Many parents of today’s mil-
lennials were refugees fleeing from pov-
erty or political chaos—their one goal
is survival and stability. But their chil-
dren were raised in one of the world’s
most cosmopolitan cities. They grew
up in the epicenter of globalization,
privy to first-rate social services, med-
ical care, and most of the pillars of a
liberal society. They speak three lan-
guages at least. They’re culturally so-
phisticated, and have a sense of them-
selves as individuals.” Older generations,
whether in Maoist China or colonial
Hong Kong, grew up without any ex-
pectation of political empowerment.
Out of a sense of self-preservation, they
kept their distance from politics. To
their children, this position seems like
unforgivable quietism and complacency.
“I would be happier if my mom went
to pro-government rallies or if she
lashed out at me,” a twenty-six-year-
old protester named Sa told me. “You
can’t argue with a void.” An only child
who’d had little contact with her father
growing up, Sa had an extremely close
relationship with her mother, which
she described with a proverb: Xiangyi
weiming (“Mutual reliance for exis-
tence”). But, in June, when the police
teargassed crowds for the first time, she
was in a restaurant with her mother,
and, as she started to sob—friends were
sending her texts from the scene—she
noticed that her mother became sud-
denly impassive, even playing a game
on her phone to avoid acknowledging
that anything was amiss.
Sa knew that her mother was un-
sympathetic to the protests. The two
women had always avoided talking
about politics, but now Sa decided that
things had to change. “I thought that
I needed to show the impact of poli-
tics on her insulated, domestic sphere,”
she said, describing how she later told
her mother that a loss of Hong Kong
autonomy could have terrible economic
consequences and deplete her life sav-
ings. The older woman merely shrugged,
saying that, even if this happened, there
was nothing she could do about it. Sa
tried again: “If you don’t care about
yourself or your savings, how would
you feel if someday the police came to
arrest me?” Her mother shrugged once
more, and said, “What can I do but let
them take you?”
“I felt completely cut open,” Sa told
me. The years of Xiangyi weiming were
obliterated, and, as the two women
tried to pretend that nothing had hap-
pened, Sa had the uncanny feeling
that they were merely acting out their
roles of mother and daughter. Within
a few weeks, they had stopped talking
altogether.E
ven away from the demonstrations,
Hong Kong life had become frac-
tiously political. Cabdrivers, shopkeep-
ers, hotel doormen: everyone had an
urgent opinion and pressed me for mine.
I tried to sound neutral, the better to
elicit the opinions of others, but any-
thing you said—whether you referred
to “protests” or to “riots,” for instance—
was bound to upset someone. If I spoke
Mandarin, people assumed that my
sympathies lay with Beijing; if I spoke
English, I was clearly a Western liberal
hostile to the Communist government.
At the airport, when I told a cabbie
where I was going, he responded in
Cantonese: “If you can’t speak Canton-
ese, I can’t speak Mandarin.” I switched
to English, but he didn’t seem to speak
it. A dispatcher approached to find out
why we hadn’t moved and soon started
yelling at the driver in Cantonese. I
could just make out the gist, which was
that the man could speak Mandarin
but was refusing to do so. I offered to
take another cab, but no one was lis-
tening; the argument had developed a
life of its own.
In the polarized atmosphere, people
talked about how they could no longer
face going to a certain shop, or restau-
rant, or barber, because the owner’s views
outraged them. Apps and social-media
groups have sprung up that mark local
businesses as blue (pro-government),
yellow (protest-supporting), or green
(neutral), to help users navigate the in-
creasingly divided city.
One day, I stopped by a massageplace in a shopping district at the south-
ern tip of Kowloon. I was the only cus-
tomer, and a giant flat-screen TV was
set to TVB, Hong Kong’s largest broad-
caster, which is mistrusted by protest-
ers for its perceived pro-Beijing bias.
My masseuse, a middle-aged woman
who went by Ah Ying, had tattooed
brows and wide cheekbones, and smiled
when I spoke in Mandarin. I learned
that she was from a farming village in
northern Hunan, and didn’t know or
care much about the protests. To the
extent that she thought about them at
all, it was to lament their effect on busi-
ness. Working twelve-hour days, six
days a week, she was used to at least a
dozen customers a day. Now she was
lucky if she got six.
Ah Ying was one of many main-
landers who, after 1997, came to Hong
Kong hoping to make good in a wealthy
city. Between China’s continued boom
and a slowing of the territory’s econ-
omy, however, she’d begun to feel that
she’d made a bad bet. She had family
back in Hunan who, thanks to govern-
ment resettlement subsidies, were doing
better than she was. When she showed
me to the bathroom, we passed by the
windowless room, the size of a janitor’s
closet, where she and her husband slept.
Ah Ying mentioned her daughter,
who worked as a waitress nearby and
had recently given birth to a boy. Al-
though her daughter liked Hong Kong,
Ah Ying preferred the mainland. Even
after a decade and a half, she didn’t feel
as though she had assimilated. What
did her daughter make of the protest
movement? I asked. Ah Ying shrugged.
It wasn’t something that they discussed.
Did she know if her daughter had
joined any of the marches? For the first
time in our conversation, Ah Ying
tensed visibly. “I would beat her to death
if she dared,” she said.
A while later, a man clutching a cup
of tea wandered in from the back, where
he’d been playing mah-jongg with an-
other masseuse. Speaking to Ah Ying
in Hunanese, he turned up the volume
of the TV, which showed protesters
burning the Chinese flag. “Fucking ter-
rorists,” he muttered. Turning to me,
he repeated the statement in Manda-
rin, perhaps expecting an easy nod of
agreement. When I said that I was still
trying to make sense of the situation,