
They are strangers in a crowd. They do not know each other’s real names and have little clue how the other looks under the gas masks they call snouts, the 3M goggles and hard hats. But they regard each other as sau zuk, which means “hands and feet”, a Cantonese idiom to refer to how close they are that losing the other is like having a limb amputated.
For the past 14 weeks, 24-year-old designer Kelvin has been with his sau zuk on the frontline taking on the riot police. “There are three segments in the frontline – the forefront, middle and the back,” he says. “Those on the forefront would have to hold the so-called shields while people in the back would have to source for projectiles which could be thrown beforehand to back up the forefront.”