I once thought I would never say goodbye to Hong Kong. Or, that if I ever did, it would be by my own choice. I should have known better. In this city, the choice has never been ours. We are used to this. Coteries of old men - and three extraordinary women - in faraway places have been signing away our rights for 172 years. No one on that ship in Nanjing ever thought to ask how the people on this barren rock felt about being ransomed for opium. No one in Beijing negotiating the terms of the lease on the New Territories considered bringing its occupants to the table. No one at the table in suite 336 of The Peninsula on Christmas Day, 1941, was even Chinese. And nowhere in the declaration Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher toasted 30 years ago is there any reference to the people of Hong Kong. We are used to this, and maybe like we have before, we will soldier on, even on a battlefield where it sometimes feels like no one is fighting for us. Maybe we will yet squeeze a few drops of democracy from this lemon, even if its sour taste lingers. Maybe we will reinvent ourselves one more time, and make our administrative region special one more way. But maybe not. Maybe this time is different from all the previous times we've been played. Maybe this broken promise was the very thing that gave us the best chance of reinvention. Not only the aim of universal suffrage in article 45 of the Basic Law, but also that other covenant made to us on July 1, 1997: the Constitution of the People's Republic of China. In its preamble, in article 2, and in article 34, the constitution makes us, the people, the masters of the country; cedes to us, the people, all power; and bestows upon all citizens the right to vote and stand for election. No law, article 5 assures us, shall contravene the constitution. If it seems this betrayal runs deepest among the young people of Hong Kong, and that we are prone to making the stakes excessively high, perhaps it is because we, too - like the city we love - find ourselves at an inflection point, when the decisions we make and ideals we choose to pursue, or not, set us on increasingly fixed trajectories. We are the ones who still have whole lives to live between now and 2047; ours is the generation that may be the first to live through to one country, one system. This didn't have to be an inevitably negative fate. With little memory of colonialism, many of us grew up assuming we could heed the call of the group Beyond, to "indulge our freedom" and chase the wide seas and open skies. We might even inspire the nation to do the same. We might matter to the world. Now we have been told that the seas are not quite so wide, the skies not quite so open. There is a ceiling to our potential, the nation says, and we are, at all costs, to avoid being an example to others. However loudly we protest, the world will not care about our troubles, so for the good of the nation we might as well keep quiet. For the good of the nation, we were relegated to colonial subjects. For the good of the nation, we gave refuge to the hundreds of thousands it pushed away. For the good of the nation, we weathered the storm of uncertainty unleashed by its tanks rolling into a square. For the good of the nation, we lost 300 of our own exposing a disease it tried to cover up. I am beginning to wonder if the problem is not that we have failed to fully embrace the nation; I wonder if it is that the nation has failed to fully embrace us. If push came to shove, would it give us away again? I once thought I would never say goodbye to Hong Kong. For 90 years now, since my great-grandfather absconded from his warlord fiefdom in Guangxi and built a small family village in Kam Tin, the city has kept luring me back. My father, born during the Japanese occupation, departed from Kai Tak half a century ago with a one-way ticket to study overseas, then returned the moment opportunity beckoned. I did the same from Chek Lap Kok, and four years later, I was back. Then I went away again, and then I came back again, and again. But as I contemplate leaving once more, I can no longer be sure what home I will have to come back to, and for how long. Last month, the land that surrounds my great-grandfather's grave in Kam Tin was slated for development. Whether the grave is preserved is out of my hands, the fate of my family's heritage to be decided by some higher authority. And so I worry that the farewell I have never been prepared for is being thrust upon me, and that the incredible story of this city, like my family's, will have been simply a sojourn, passing through, a mere accident of history. Keane Shum is a lawyer in Hong Kong