The cursed generation
Originally published at Mekong Review on Aug. 7, 2021.
Text and illustration by Jessie Lau
A few days ago, I was texting a fellow Hong Kong friend I’ll call ‘Grace’, watching the sun fade from the window of my London apartment, when she told me she had made what we used to say was an impossible decision: never to return home to Hong Kong. ‘I want to come to terms with being in self-exile,’ Grace said, messaging me from the United States, where she has supported the city’s pro-democracy movement as an activist. ‘I’m done living under that cloud of not knowing whether I can or cannot go home.’
My chest tightened as I read Grace’s messages, which came in short bursts of rapid fire. She told me her last relative in Hong Kong was dying, and while in ‘normal’ times she would fly home, the uncertainty of whether she could do so safely has become a weight too heavy to carry. She was tired of living in fear of the Chinese government and wanted to do things that felt right to her in the moment, instead of constantly self-censoring in a desperate attempt to stay safe.
As I sat with Grace’s thoughts, exhaustion rolled over me, and I felt my body sink with a familiar heaviness. Since Beijing clamped down on large pro-democracy protests and imposed a sweeping National Security Law last year, criminalising various forms of dissent—from participating in informal democratic primaries to singing protest songs—our home has been in free fall. State authorities have arrested pro-democracy activists, politicians, lawyers and supporters en masse, banned protests, overhauled the electoral system, censored the film industry and shut down one of the most outspoken newspapers in the city.
Thousands have left to brave a new life as immigrants. Many of the millions remaining are constantly asking themselves whether they should stay or go, while those of us who are overseas but still have the luxury of going back are asking: when, for how long and if we should return.
In this era of constant crackdowns that has become the new normal, the ‘red lines’ of the security law and who or what is ‘safe’ in the city seem to shift by the hour, by the minute. It makes questions of whether to stay, leave or return impossible to answer definitively. Trying to do so is like attempting to solve a moving puzzle; every time you find all the pieces and fit them together, something slides out of place. The game never ends, and everybody loses. The finality of Grace’s decision is a noose around my neck: a reminder that time is running out for Hong Kong, and a tightening realisation that no matter what we decide, we may forever be split, and never feel whole.
With the mass exodus come a growing number of Hong Kong exiles settling across the world, writing the origin story of our nascent post-2019 social movement diaspora, trying to answer questions of who we are and where we go from here. For The Love of Hong Kong: A Memoir From My City Under Siege by Hana Meihan Davis, a journalist and architect raised by a family of pro-democracy elites, is one such undertaking.
Davis’ parents—Hong Kong-born political scientist Victoria Tin-bor Hui and Michael C. Davis, former professor of law at the University of Hong Kong—are prominent pro-democracy activists. Her godfather, Martin Lee, is a veteran politician known as the city’s ‘father of democracy’. Born seven months after the handover, Davis identifies as part of ‘Generation HK’, a label coined by Benjamin Bland in a book of the same name describing children ‘born in the blurry threshold of pre-and-post 1997’, with no memories of colonial Hong Kong and little attachment to China.
I’m also part of this floating generation of Hongkongers, who came of age in a time when local identity was fluid and blossoming, and were powerfully galvanised by the political changes that took place. It’s a generation that was wrenched from the illusion of a stable ‘One Country, Two Systems’, forced to wrestle with the complexity of Hong Kong identity—and fight for the right to actualise it before we even had a chance to create it.
Perhaps more darkly, Davis also stands on the periphery of what Hongkongers call the ‘cursed’ or ‘chosen’ generation—depending on who you ask— which refers to those born in the year of the handover. To some, they’re ‘cursed’ because their childhood was marred by unfortunate developments, from illnesses like the Sars epidemic to political unrest. To others, they’re the ‘chosen’ generation, destined to ‘sacrifice’ themselves on the front lines of the pro-democracy movement. Either way, they’re a generation doomed by fate; and this unspoken sentiment creeps over her words like a silent, looming shadow.
While Davis’s place within the city’s inner pro- democracy circle makes her far from typical, her journey through Hong Kong’s fracturing, post-1997 political landscape is one that I, and many others, have also made. In 2012, when Beijing sought to implement a national patriotic education, Davis stood with a ‘sea of black- clad protesters’ demonstrating against the proposal. The protest was led by Scholarism, a group of secondary students that included Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow, who have both since become pro-democracy icons.
Davis was sixteen when the Umbrella Revolution calling for universal suffrage took off, and a university student when the 2019 social movement erupted. At the time of the national security law’s passing, Davis and her family were in the US. They remain there now, locked in exile, still advocating for their dream of Hong Kong democracy.
For The Love of Hong Kong is far from a critical text on the social movement and Hong Kong identity, and does little to grapple with Davis and her family’s positions within the pro-democracy space. But it does movingly capture Davis’s political journey and her memory of this incredibly charged moment in our city’s history—one that all Hongkongers will always carry with them. Her narrative encapsulates our collective sense of loss for a disappearing home that was never truly our own. Her sorrow reflects that of a generation cursed and chosen, forever changed.
As I write this, an exodus is unfolding. Many of the thousands who make up this emerging diaspora aren’t prominent activists in exile; they’re ordinary Hongkongers who have varying degrees of engagement with the pro-democracy movement, but are nevertheless searching for a safer, freer future.
I’ve interviewed many such Hong Kong arrivals here in the UK, from young asylum seekers to pensioners, from bankers to warehouse workers. Most have taken advantage of a new pathway to citizenship offered by the British government to those with British National (Overseas) passports. The documents, not recognised by the Chinese government, are a colonial legacy allowing those born before 1997 and their dependants to migrate and apply for citizenship after five years. Their journeys differ, but all irrevocably bear the pain of being uprooted from Hong Kong.
‘Michael’, a protester in his twenties, told me that the thing he misses most about Hong Kong is his cat, which he left behind in a split-second decision to flee before he was arrested. He’s now in ‘self-exile’ and seeking asylum in London. His cat is with his family, and he no longer contacts them for their own safety. ‘Rosa’, a woman in her forties who migrated so that her two primary school-aged children wouldn’t be ‘brainwashed’ by Hong Kong’s schools, has been agonising over how she and her husband can return in the coming years to care for their ageing parents. For now, though, she’ll try to put it out of her mind and focus on finding a job, she said, forcing a smile. She and her husband have interviews at a local supermarket soon.
When I envision Hongkongers as an imagined community, I see a floating island of people with their hearts cut into two. One half is red and alive, the other black and broken, carrying visions of a home that doesn’t exist. One carries the weight of the other, which pulls at us like a phantom limb, forever shaping the way we breathe and move through the world.We are a people tied together by the story of a city with boundless shores of grief and longing; by a baton of traumas and distant dreams that we will surely carry to our graves, before reluctantly passing it on to the generations to come.
I used to think of diaspora communities as snapshots of singular identities and cultures frozen in time: people telling stories of places that have long moved on without them. Now, I’m beginning to understand that time leaves nothing behind, and that identities and cultures have always been—and forever will be—fluid, contested and changing.
At the end of her memoir, Davis writes about Hong Kong as a state of mind. She says: ‘Hong Kong lives as long as its story does, as long as we are here to tell it.’ Hong Kong isn’t and can never be dead, only changing. The city’s story, both past and present, shapes us as a community, whenever and wherever we are. And we, its characters, shape it too. Together, we’ll shape it forever.
