The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Isabella Kwai, a reporter with the Australia bureau.
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I was lying down at my parents’ house in Sydney last week in a room with the shades drawn, recovering from eye surgery, when my father walked in.
“Have you seen what’s happening in Hong Kong?” he said, waving his phone. “The people in the streets protesting?”
“Dad, I’m blind,” I said. “What protests?”
“I’m disappointed in you,” he said. “Aren’t you a journalist?”
He was talking, of course, about the mass demonstrations that have galvanized the world over the last two weeks: Millions of protesters have spilled into the streets of Hong Kong to oppose an extradition bill that would allow those suspected of crimes to be sent to mainland China.
Here in Australia, the protests have received widespread coverage and are being closely watched by many — but especially by people like my father.
For him, Hong Kong was a safe haven. Now 70, he was brought there from mainland China as a five-year-old in the 1950s during a period of political upheaval. His family were landowners that had ties to the Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, which was the Communist Party’s rival. It was in Hong Kong that he built a life, until he immigrated to Australia in 1986.
Since then, he has rarely returned to Hong Kong. Now, watching the resistance unfold in the place he once called home, he is brimming with something that he doesn’t always explicitly show: pride.
“People just want their own well-being to be protected,” he said. While the city has a history of demonstrations, my dad was stunned by the scale of the protests. “That will be the biggest parade ever seen in human history,” he told me, admiring the photos of marches. “Tell me, where will you find this?”
For others in the diaspora, the protests have also challenged one-dimensional Western ideas of Asian culture as passive and deferential.
“I think this has reminded me that Australians are perhaps more complacent than we’d like to believe, and Hong Kongers have more fight in them than people remember,” said Benjamin Law, an Australian writer and author, whose relatives in Hong Kong joined the protests. “It makes me more proud of my heritage.”
“It’s them against the behemoth that is mainland China,” he added. “All the odds are stacked against them, and they choose to stand up and show up. You can’t help but be moved and humbled.”
Apart from symbolism, the extradition bill, if it were to pass, could have tangible, concerning implications for residents here. Because it applies to foreign citizens, those who have openly criticized the Communist Party here say they now worry about visiting relatives in Hong Kong.
The city’s chief executive, Carrie Lam has delayed the bill and made a rare apology. But demonstrators, fearing the loss of more freedoms that people of Hong Kong enjoy under the “one country, two systems” policy, want the bill to be entirely withdrawn among other demands.
[Read more about how Hong Kong has long been a refuge for mainland Chinese people and how the Chinese government has responded to the protest.]
Of course, in the broader Chinese community there are differing opinions. According to the 2016 census, only about 6 percent of the 1.2 million people of Chinese ancestry in Australia were born in Hong Kong, making people like my father a small piece of a larger, more complicated puzzle.
One recent winter afternoon in a Sydney hangout popular with young Chinese students, several seemed reluctant to comment on the protests.
“It doesn’t change anything,” said Rizhen Fenn, 26, a law student from southern mainland China. “The government is too powerful over people.” Another young man called the demonstrators “terrorists,” but did not elaborate.
In China, for many, the protests might as well have never happened. When my mother called a relative in Shanghai, asking if the family had heard about the protests, she was told they knew nothing about it. “I don’t want to influence them,” my mother told me, and left the conversation at that.
Maybe that silence is what led my father to be so excited — the people of Hong Kong had resisted and demanded to be heard. Even from here, he’s doing what he can to participate. He’s been glued to the news, reconnected with old friends from Hong Kong on WhatsApp, and theorized about where things might lead.
“I just worry about another Tiananmen Square. This group, it’s all young people. They are very impulsive,” he said. “Really, they are very brave.”
Up until the protests, I knew him mostly as the tall, wiry entrepreneur and amateur gardener who could grow melons the size of heads. But over the last week, just as he learned about a younger generation, I learned about his. I saw a glimpse of something children don’t often see in their fathers — the young man he might have been; angry, energetic, hopeful.
What did you think of the protests? Have they affected you emotionally? I’d love to hear from you at nytaustralia@nytimes.com or in our NYT Australia Facebook discussion group.
Now, onto some other stories from the week.
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Australia and New Zealand
• New Zealand Man Gets 21 Months for Sharing Video of Christchurch Attacks: Philip Arps, who owns an insulation company that uses white supremacist symbols, also sent a copy of the video to be doctored to look like a first-person-shooter video game.
• Sam Kerr Can’t Stop Scoring: The 25-year-old Australian striker and Matildas captain scored all four goals in a victory against Jamaica this week. Revisit this super fun interactive feature, where you can watch that magic right foot at work over and over again.
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Around the Times
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And Over To You
Last week, we wrote about the Christchurch attacks and asked how much you think social media and internet radicalization is to blame for white supremacy.
“Apropos your piece on the Christchurch shooting: the world and Australia have a long history of racism. As such, I think it would be a bit misleading to say that only community breakdown, and the internet are the causes. They may be contributing to anger against the ‘other’ or even catalyzing terrorism but we need to look deeper than that at the history of violence and perhaps terror in Australia (including the treatment of Aboriginals, refugees, and demonizing Muslims and Africans who are increasingly alienated from the mainstream).
The Australian parliament and major media outlets are not an adequate reflection of a diverse and growing Australia.
Not much has been written about the Christchurch shooter. And I wonder if it’s because of his race or background. A question to ponder.”
— Manju Mathew
Source : Nytimes
