| |||||
|
|
“It’s only when you resist that you can see hope.” |
— Coco Wong, a protester in Hong Kong |
| |||||
This profile is part of a series looking at female protesters around the world. Look out for more profiles in the weeks ahead. |
Last November, when rubber bullets flew across the leafy campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and noxious clouds of tear gas floated over the track fields, Coco Wong was prepared. She was positioned near the riot police cordons, fighting in what she viewed as a battle to deliver her city from an increasingly authoritarian government in Beijing. |
What had begun as peaceful rallies over the summer had evolved into violent clashes between the riot police and a core of confrontational protesters known as the “braves.” |
Ms. Wong, 21, barely five feet tall with a wispy voice, counted herself among the braves — a fiercely loyal and diligent foot soldier in the demonstrations of 2019. |
| |||||
Ms. Wong hadn’t always paid attention to politics, but after she joined hundreds of thousands in a march against a contentious extradition bill, she was spurred on by curiosity. She increasingly came to fear that Hong Kong would become like every other city in mainland China, its freedoms gone. |
“Our home turf is in trouble,” she said. “I don’t have anywhere else to go and don’t have much to lose, so I might as well come out.” |
In recent weeks, the coronavirus has shrunk the demonstrations considerably, and anger has been redirected toward mask shortages and the government’s handling of the outbreak. But Ms. Wong waits in the wings for the pro-democracy protests to pick back up again, and longs for the weekends when she expects protesters will once again pour onto the streets. |
Back at the height of the protests, while some of her friends felt a wrenching split between their bustling lives during the week — juggling school, friends, part-time jobs — and the tear-gas-filled urban battles of the weekends, Ms. Wong devoted herself wholly to the movement. Up until classes were canceled over the coronavirus outbreak, she still went through the motions, attending lectures at the university, but her mind was elsewhere, and her grades slipped, prompting her to take every course on a pass/fail basis. |
Each weekend during the movement’s heyday, she donned her protest uniform — gas mask, helmet, gloves and black clothes — and slipped out of her dormitory onto the campus or the streets, where she would meet with six other classmates, her core team. |
And so began the game of cat and mouse with the police as the protests moved between far-flung neighborhoods. |
Most of the time she acted as a scout, going out first to deflect rubber bullets and tear-gas-filled pellets with her umbrella, as her teammates flung objects at police cordons in front of her. |
By Monday, she would be back in the lecture hall, barely paying attention to the teacher, or oversleeping until noon to recover from the strain of the weekend. |
“Normal people try to avoid dangerous places whenever there are arrests, but as front liners, we instinctively rushed over there,” she said. |
|
The months of demonstrations were ignited by the government’s proposed extradition bill, which would have allowed Hong Kongers convicted of crimes in the mainland to be tried in courts there. Many Hong Kongers feared that could lead to political punishment and repression. |
Ms. Wong does not trust the Chinese government and worries how it would crack down on dissent in Hong Kong. She worries that Hong Kong could suffer the fate of the Xinjiang region, where ethnic minorities were rounded up into concentration camps to quash dissent. |
And so she kept marching. |
Participation came at great personal risk. A rioting conviction in Hong Kong carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years, and the police made more than 7,000 arrests during the demonstrations, more than a third of them women, though many of those arrested were released on bail. |
To protect her from getting arrested, the boys on her team tried to pull her back, but she felt indignant and was determined to prove herself. |
“I have the courage to stand at the front and block rubber bullets and tear-gas grenades with my umbrella,” she said. “So I stepped into that role.” |
One time, Ms. Wong considered tossing a brick toward a police cordon. But fearful that she might hit her own teammates, she put it down. |
“Some question why we have to run toward conflict,” Ms. Wong said. “Others say that you can’t call yourself a ‘brave one’ unless you attack others.” |
Describing herself as “a timid girl often teased for clumsiness,” Ms. Wong said the months of protests made her agile and strong, and also more willing to step in, raise her voice and direct the demonstrations. |
Before, she was reluctant to touch rubbish bins; but during the protests, she found herself rolling them down streets. She fell asleep on concrete roads from exhaustion. When riot police officers fired tear gas into her campus’s sports fields in November, sending hundreds fleeing, she lifted a waterlogged gym mat along with five boys to deflect the tear-gas grenades. She saw urban warfare that she could not have imagined a year ago, much less found herself in the thick of. |
But the relentless, repeated battles took their toll. Rapid-fire tear-gas eruptions made Ms. Wong shudder, while others around her would vomit at the sound of the blasts. And several of her friends, including some in her core team, were arrested during protests, though they were later released on bail. |
For several weeks, she avoided visiting her family at home. And she would jump at the sound of knocks and footsteps, thinking that the police were coming to arrest her. |
|
As the pro-democracy protests have dwindled, and the coronavirus has spread, Ms. Wong has joined campus and community protests to express her discontent with the government’s response. |
But for Ms. Wong, the resistance is not over. |
“It may seem as though many people have grown disillusioned, but they are actually thinking of the movement constantly and just waiting for it to flare up again,” Ms. Wong said. “Hong Kongers will not give up on it.” |
“I can’t really see the future,” she said. “But you don’t resist because you have hope. It’s only when you resist that you can see hope.” |
Finding an outlet |
|
As a way to process the months of protests, Ms. Wong turned to painting and drawing. |
The scene above, by Ms. Wong, is based on photographs depicting fires set by protesters at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a stinging blue liquid sprayed by a water cannon. |
Today’s In Her Words is written by Tiffany May and edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Sandra Stevenson. |
Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here to get future installments. You can also follow us on Instagram at @nytgender or email us at inherwords@nytimes.com. |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment