//The Honourable Fernando Cheung, who usually stalks the halls of the legislative complex in his electric blue running shoes, occasionally yelling at the guards who turn away visitors lacking proper identification—This is the people’s house! This is a person! Let her in! Today, he is standing on a roadside a few blocks from Victoria Park beside a group of people in wheelchairs. They can’t march, exactly, and they can’t start with the others, but soon they will lead.
Fernando worries about what the police have done and might do still. After the government pretended it was giving itself permission to surrender Hong Kongers to the dictatorship in Beijing because of a mother’s grief, many people marched. After 72 of them were brutalized by police on Wednesday, and even after that other unspeakable horror last night, Hong Kong’s chief executive has stalled the bill but not withdrawn it. No one feels safer. The pro-Beijing establishment has looped a rope around the city’s neck, and will only promise not to pull the noose tight just yet.
Fernando was at Berkeley in 1989, a college student himself, when the regime murdered all those students. He and the other Hong Kong expats crowded around the television set of a friend’s dorm, watching kids their own age get shot in Tiananmen Square. They used every fax machine they could get their hands on to fire information out all over China: friends, family, journalists, random peoples’ numbers they found in desk drawers, it didn’t matter. They knew mainlanders weren’t getting news themselves. Along with the protesters died Fernando’s hope that Hong Kong would inspire China to democratize.
He stayed away from Hong Kong long enough to have three children. Only when one of his daughters, severely disabled, needed more care than Fernando and his wife could give her alone, did they all move back to Hong Kong, 15 years after Tiananmen. Things seemed all right. Hong Kong’s rule of law, its justice system, its civil liberties were intact. There were a couple of crises in the decade that followed, but their occurrence seemed nearly to confirm that the city wasn’t in mortal danger, for the city won: When the government tried to pass a national security bill in 2003 with an ominously broad definition of sedition, 500,000 people flooded Hong Kong and drowned the bill in the streets. Fernando saw the Hong Kong people as a tidal wave blocking the sun: In the roads, in the restaurants, on the buses, everyone dressed in black.
Today, too, all is black. It’s for different reasons. Last week when the police fired on its own people, it sent Hong Kong into mourning. Fernando wonders if police will do the same today, and whether the rubber bullets will always be rubber. People keep calling this bill an existential crisis, but that implies a future danger. People’s lives are at stake right now.//
desk the halls 在 Deck the Halls - Wikipedia 的相關結果
"Deck the Halls" (originally titled "Deck the Hall") is a traditional Christmas carol. The melody is Welsh, dating back to the sixteenth century, ... ... <看更多>