INTERVIEW: 'I played dumb and cute and said I was going to Disneyland'

Two former students remember the 2019 Hong Kong protests as seen from democratic Taiwan.

Taiwanese citizen 'Amy' spent 10 days in Hong Kong documenting the 2019 protest movement.
Taiwanese citizen 'Amy' spent 10 days in Hong Kong documenting the 2019 protest movement. (Courtesy of Amy)

Five years after millions of people took to the streets of Hong Kong over plans to allow extradition to mainland China, the movement has largely gone into exile.

Many people are still leaving the city amid an ongoing crackdown on all forms of public dissent, while some former protesters continue to keep a low profile for fear of endangering loved ones back home.

Five years after the protests, two former supporters told RFA Mandarin that the movement changed their lives forever.

A former Taiwanese college student who gave only the nickname Amy for fear of reprisals still vividly remembers boarding a flight to Hong Kong in September 2019 to lend her voice to the protest movement, which sprang up as a form of resistance to the erosion of the city's promised freedoms.

She'd heard that there would be some large protests on Oct. 1 that year, and packed for the occasion.

Little did she expect to be hauled in for questioning at the border and asked about the purpose of her trip.

"I felt like Oct. 1 was something I had to witness in person," she told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview. "On Sept. 30, I was stopped as I went through immigration in Hong Kong."

"The officer took me to a small room, where there were two or three other groups of Taiwanese being questioned," she said.

The officer took Amy's passport, copied it, and asked her a string of "very detailed" questions.

"[They] asked me who I was with, where I was going, the address of my hotel, and so on," Amy said. "I was really scared, and my whole body was shaking."

Amy was worried that her bag would be searched and her laser pointers and small protest placards discovered.

"Fortunately, I had thought about how I would deal with this, so I played dumb and cute, and said I was going to Disneyland, and then everything was fine," she said. "They questioned me for about 40 minutes before letting me go."

‘They were ready to fight’

Amy stayed in Hong Kong for 10 days, ignoring her friends' concerns, and taking part in protest activities every day.

She was touched by the extent to which local protesters looked out for her when they heard she had flown in from Taiwan, helping her to leave the area when police started firing tear gas.

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Crowds gather outside the Sogo department store in the Causeway Bay shopping district during the 2019 protest movement in Hong Kong. (Courtesy of Amy)

What she saw was an intense and organized operation, run by local people who were fighting the erosion of their freedoms.

"There was a point where protesters were demolishing a public building, and Chinese tourists were taking photos," she said. "The protesters shouted at them fiercely, telling them to delete the photos."

"Only then did I realize that this demonstration was different from the ones in Taiwan," she said. "Hong Kong was serious -- it really felt like they were ready to fight."

"The intensity was really different from some of the marches in Taiwan that were about demands," she said.

By the time she got back to Taiwan, she was deeply overjoyed to be on free ground again.

"When I arrived at Taoyuan International Airport, I was like, ‘oh my god!’ I could shout out loud, 'I love Hong Kong, come on Hong Kong!'," she said. "In Taiwan, I didn't need to be afraid, and there wouldn't be any tear gas."

‘A first for me’

A Chinese national who was studying in Taiwan at the time of the 2019 protests who gave only the nickname Tom for fear of reprisals told RFA Mandarin that the Hong Kong protests changed his life, even though he didn't attend in person.

"I had just arrived in Taiwan, and I didn't expect to have this democratic baptism right away," he said. "Back in China, I had never seen a group of citizens sitting down together to discuss how to resist the government. That was a first for me."

"I was amazed, and shocked, but it was an education."

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Slogans and messages supporting the 2019 Hong Kong protests are displayed on a Taiwanese university campus. (Courtesy of Tom)

Under Chinese Communist Party rule, Tom had been trained along with the rest of his generation never to speak or think about politics, because it was too dangerous.

Suddenly, he was at university with fellow students from Hong Kong, who held public and passionate debates about what was happening back home.

"When I saw my Hong Kong classmates expressing themselves so bravely, and loudly talking about the five demands [of the 2019 protests], not one less, I was shocked and excited," Tom said. "I could feel their enthusiasm so strongly."

So Tom started turning up to events organized to support the protests in Hong Kong.

"I stood beside them, and shouted along with them," he said.

‘It’s dictatorship that is fragile’

Yet he still had to keep quiet in front of fellow students from China, for fear of being reported to the authorities back home.

"It would have been very dangerous to actively recruit other students from China to take part in [supporting] the Hong Kong protests, because under Chinese Communist Party rule, everyone's factory setting is 'little pink,’" Tom said, in a reference to young, nationalistic supporters of Beijing.

"Unless they have some kind of awakening, Chinese students are pretty incompatible with a democratic society," he said. "A lot of them were very unhappy whenever we talked about what was happening in Hong Kong, and were very rude about Hong Kong and Taiwan."

"There were some Chinese students at my university who ripped down our Lennon Wall and beat up students from Hong Kong," said Tom, in a reference to the walls of sticky colored messages and artwork that were a feature of the 2019 protests.

"I couldn't just stand up and say that I supported Hong Kong, because the little pinks would have reported me," he said. "I did say it when I was talking to my Taiwanese classmates."

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The slogans 'The CCP is not China,' 'Red terror,' and 'Resist the CCP, protect our country,' are displayed on a Taiwanese university campus in support of the 2019 Hong Kong protest movement. (Courtesy of Tom)

The movement made such a big impact on Tom that he decided he wouldn't be going back to China after graduation, and moved to live in another country.

But while the movement was suppressed and replaced with a citywide crackdown on all forms of public dissent, Tom doesn't think the movement could have done much more to defend the city's traditional way of life, which is now a thing of the past.

"Hong Kong's failure wasn't Hong Kong's fault, because mobilizing more than two million people to take to the streets was already about the limit of what it could do," he said.

"The anti-extradition protests were more like a seed that continues to inspire us, ignites our courage, and teaches us that it's dictatorship, not democracy, that is fragile," he said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.