Three cigarettes and a long wait at Hong Kong train station pushed bookseller into turning away from border
Lam Wing-kee was heading to Shenzhen with a list of mainland people who had bought critical books
From an ordinary Hong Kong bookseller to a symbol of resistance to communist persecution, Lam Wing-kee admitted it was a “very difficult decision” for him to make to expose what the Chinese state apparatus had done to him – and to defy what it had instructed him to do.
Just half an hour before he was due to reach the Chinese border last week carrying a list of mainland people who had bought his “banned books”, he smoked three cigarettes – two more than he had expected – outside Kowloon Tong railway station – the interchange for East Rail and the border.
He was pondering: “Will it be good or bad? Will it be right or wrong?”
In his mind, he was struggling between two possibilities: to return to the mainland and comply with the orders of high-handed and secretive investigation officers who had deprived him of his liberty without cause, or speak out and warn Hongkongers about the diminishing freedoms and rights to which they should be entitled.
“I have no choice but to speak out,” the 61-year-old Lam said. “It’s not a matter of a bookstore or some individuals. It’s about the whole of Hong Kong.”
That decision earned him a mix of responses. His mainland girlfriend called him a liar, as did some of his former business partners. But thousands of Hongkongers took to the streets to show solidarity with him.
His long-term friends regarded him as a book-lover who stocked thousands of publications in the bookstore he founded in 1994 and sold to Mighty Current in 2014 amid rising rents.
It was perhaps those three cigarettes and the afterthoughts that made him pursue freedom at all costs despite the ubiquitous supervision that took the form of a mobile phone given to him by the authorities and plainclothes officers tailing him.
“Later on, I had had enough,” he said. “I turned off the phone. Being in Hong Kong, why should I be subject to supervision of this kind?”
Recalling those 48 hours he spent in Hong Kong – a city he was barred from returning to over the previous eight months – he became fully aware how much love he had for the place he felt safe in.
“The people in the mainland know no boundaries,” Lam said. “They are abnormal.”
“I couldn’t sleep when I spent my first two nights in Hong Kong. I wandered around Temple Street and looked for food.
“Although the MTR was so crowded, I still found it so comfortable,” he said. “The people were all so nice.”
Lam said he had told his two sons never to visit the mainland again. He added that he had separated from his wife, with whom he could “hardly” reunite.
He remained loyal, however, to his books.
“I went to Causeway Bay Books again on Saturday. The lock was changed so all I could do was take a picture outside.”
But for all the problems books had brought him, “reading is still what I enjoy doing most”, he maintained.
