‘Against my fear, I see that you hope’

A week ago today I sat together with you outside the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s library, a teacher among other teachers, a university member beside students, 13,000 strong. The weeks before had felt quiet: at the three previous all-student meetings around the Goddess of Democracy statue, you listened respectfully to guest speakers—past student union presidents, a student who had been arrested on July 1, Leung “Longhair” Kwok-hung from the League of Social Democrats. There were not many of you, but you raised your hands and made gentle suggestions about what time last Monday’s rally should start, about how you could be photographed studying outside of class, about making public art by folding paper stars.

So I was surprised when I arrived at the campus plaza on Monday. Under a relentless late summer sun, you filled the entire campus mall. On the impromptu stage, white banners read, “Student Boycott, Take a Stand!” and “Be the master of Hong Kong’s future!” Throughout the afternoon a “Democracy Wall” rose at the far end of the crowd; some of the messages you attached to it simply gave support for the strike and Hong Kong’s democracy, some of you filled poster-boards to the brim with righteous indignation: “The National People’s Congress has seized our right to universal suffrage…you are not the emperor!” You bore brightly-colored flags that bobbed in the sunlight, representing your universities, your departments. The atmosphere was ebullient. You cheered and waved when a photography drone passed overhead. You chanted slogans with yellow ribbons tied around your wrists. You sang songs with your arms in the air.

I was and am inspired, most of all by your words. To begin the student rally, Alex Chow and Lester Shum declared that you were all there as Hong Kongers, as the future of Hong Kong society. They affirmed that Hong Kong society had to be awakened, that Hong Kong must be the master of its own future. Shum explicitly described Hong Kong’s present as colonialism, ruled from the ground by its tycoons and from afar by the Communist Party. Today, he argued, you take back Hong Kong’s future. Chow’s answer to the idea that the student protest has no hope: “It is not because we hope that we strive, it is only through striving do we glimpse hope.”

I am inspired by the way you understand your role in society. After Chow and Shum’s speeches, a group of you stepped forward to explain why you have joined the movement. You told us that you study social work, you described extreme inequality in Hong Kong and people living in human cages, and you said that you defend social justice. You explained that you were studying to be a lawyer, and you outlined the idea of the rule of law. You said that you were going to be a doctor, and you asked what diseases plague Hong Kong. Your job is to come to the rescue, you said, and your job is to cure. Your words echoed down the length of the plaza and reflected the writing on the “Democracy Wall” of the medical sciences building, “Medicine is fundamentally a revolution: above, it heals the nation, among us it heals people, below, it heals the illness.”

I am inspired by your ability to teach yourself, as you organized activities following the rally and moved to a week-long boycott in Tamar Park. I went to the teach-in and saw your mini-university and watched you streaming between the simultaneous lectures. You had come of your own accord. You were taking assiduous notes. You broke into groups and talked about the meaning of direct action, of civil disobedience, of protest. You wrote to tell me how the boycott made you understand society more deeply, and I smiled when you confessed that it was so far a superficial understanding, that you would have to read more books to combine theory with practice. What teacher would not be filled with joy to watch his students seize learning so independently, so concretely, and with such passion? If we shed tears at this moment it was because we saw how you did not need us anymore, you could learn and act on your own.

But as I listened to you, I was and am fearful. During the rally on Monday my eyes followed one of you, my own student, as he spoke on the stage. Was it less than two years ago that he was one of the silent ones in class? When had he grown so tall, so articulate? And where had that beard come from? As I watched you tremble with the rightness of your words, with the fury of the wronged—when you shouted that you would make the Chinese state come to its knees—something clutched my heart with fear. At that moment I suddenly felt old, in a way that wrinkles and grey hair have not chilled me. When I was young, I too had many dreams.