How face masks have become part of the Hong Kong identity

Six weeks after the planes flew into the World Trade Centre, in September 2001, Central’s Pottinger Street was selling rubber masks of Osama bin Laden in time for Halloween. Eighteen months later, as the war in Iraq was about to begin, Raymond Wong – TVB’s man in Kuwait – donned a gas mask for a muffled on-camera report about chemical weapons. Oh, how we smirked.

That was the second week of March 2003. Already medical workers at the Prince of Wales Hospital, in Sha Tin, were falling mysteriously ill. Soon, the joke was on us: severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) revealed itself as the real biological weapon and in the following three months it would kill 299 people here (and 475 in the rest of the world). Although Covid-19 seems to be doing a better job of global domination this time round, for Hong Kong Sars was the more deadly experience.

In its desperation for armour, the city turned to masks. Then, as now, they were in short supply. Then, as now, there wasn’t strong evidence they gave full-on protection. Even if you wore them continuously in the outside world, the virus could still scythe you down at home: the single worst cluster, in Amoy Gardens, in Ngau Tau Kok, killed 42 residents via their bathrooms. But a belief took hold that masks would protect you, even if you wore them dangling from your ear or clasped under your chin or damp with the germ-laden moisture of your own breath; and that psycho­logy has never left.

After Sars, the government had to persuade people to take off their masks: they may have been a community crutch but they weren’t a good look for tourism. By then, however, trust in Tung Chee-hwa’s administration was evaporating.