Thread by @WilliamYang120

"#HongKong isn’t what it was. The exuberantly free and pluralist society that I knew for 28 years has largely vanished. Activists for a kaleidoscope of political and social causes no longer line the road outside Causeway Bay station." bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

"Hong Kong officials say the national security law that China imposed on the city in 2020 ended the chaos and violence of the 2019 pro-democracy protests and restored order. It did a lot more than that."

“It was as if, in order to fix a leaky pipe, the builders had pulled down the entire house and plowed up the land under its foundations,” @limlouisa wrote in Indelible City.

"After three years marked by the worst unrest since the return to Chinese rule, an unprecedented security crackdown and political purge... Hong Kong is a city with PTSD. To that, add the mental pressure of feeling gaslighted almost constantly."

"In April, I marked the 30th anniversary of my arrival in Hong Kong. The decision to leave is nerve-wracking, and not without pain and doubt. British bureaucracy and London property prices are providing a fair share of each."

"There’s a sense of being suspended between two netherworlds: the Hong Kong that has disappeared; and the land of my birth, a country that I no longer know in any meaningful way after so long away."

"To contemplate remaining would be a bittersweet prospect, knowing what Hong Kong was and what it has become. It would be so easy to stay. The guilty secret is that this city is kind to foreigners like me, ...

... and probably will continue to be — as long as they serve its functions of being an international financial and business center."

"These comforts have started to weigh more heavily. It was one thing to accept all that Hong Kong had to offer when the city was, in effect, a benign autocracy — one that didn’t offer meaningful democracy,...

... but where individuals were subject to minimal interference by the state, and where a vigorous civil society flourished. Now the benign part has gone."

"Some might argue that the braver course would be to stay in Hong Kong and keep bearing witness. But I ask myself: Is this the society that I wish my three-year-old half-Chinese boy to grow up in? And the answer has to be no."

"I’ve been in Hong Kong for so long. Will I be struck by pangs of anxiety one day on my suburban street, wondering where all the crowds, all that familiar “frenzied energy” and “language of alienation and impatience” have gone?"

"So many Hong Kong people have left for the UK with far less, seeking a better life in a country they don’t know at all. Their intrepidity should put me to shame."

"A March documentary by Singapore’s Channel News Asia focused on a Hong Kong family with two young children who emigrate. They land at Heathrow and drive to an Airbnb house in Crewe in the northwest."

"An immigration consultant tells the camera that he gives them only a 50-50 chance of being able to adjust to life in the UK. Several months later they have spent half their HK$1 million ($127,000) savings ...

... and no longer meet the financial requirements for the British National (Overseas) visa, which they hadn’t obtained before leaving. I stopped watching, my heart sinking and fearing the worst."

"They call it the Lion Rock spirit, after a TV show about the lives of everyday Hong Kong citizens that started in the 1970s.

The series, named after an iconic Kowloon mountain, embodied the Hong Kong values of perseverance and solidarity that underpinned the city’s rise to prosperity.

I’ve always, from the depth of my soul, admired that spirit: the humor, the irreverence, the will to live and endure of Hong Kong people. If I take one thing with me when I leave, let it be that."