 Okay, we're back. We're live on global connections for the love of Hong Kong. It's a book by Hannah Mayhan Davis, who joins us from New York right now. Hi, Hannah, how are you? Hi, I'm good. How are you? Good. I mean, although I'm reading your book, I get sad about Hong Kong, you know, both your father and mother have been on our show. Here's a picture of the book. And now you, you know, you go to another generation and you look at it from another point of view, perhaps not quite as academic as they because they're both academicians, global academicians, if you will, so familiar with the critical times, the critical decades in Hong Kong. And you saw that as a babe. And you saw that as you grew up, you saw it deteriorate is what you did. So you just graduated from Yale, and you're studying or you did study architecture and journalism, which is the strangest combination I can tell. Can you tell us how those two intersect and why those two and what those two have to do for the love of Hong Kong. I actually contrary maybe to what most people might think I do think they intersect a lot I think there's kind of just an attention to detail that both fields require, and in architecture maybe you're thinking of it more visually and conceptually but in journalism you're doing things just writing about it and so I think they do intersect. But yeah, no, it's relevant to Hong Kong, I guess for that reason that they both kind of push you to look at the nuances of what's going on and not just you know one aspect of it but consider the visuals the culture of politics with history all of that. So, architecture, I have found through your friend Michael Kimmelman the New York Times architecture critic, who also has time at Yale and Harvard who is really one of my favorite speakers. Found that you know architecture is about people, you know, everything's got people really. But when you listen to him you realize that it's all it's designing a world for people or not. I have to be mindful of that. And at the same time journalism especially these days journalism is about people it's finding truth and truth is evasive these days. So I can tell you that at UH, there's a new flurry of activity at the communications. The communications journalism center. The program there and I've heard that there was an article in where was it oh NPR recently about how people were flocking to journalism because they wanted to get involved they wanted to do something want to write it up. And I expect that's part of your motivation is it. No, absolutely you, I guess hit the nail on the head I think it's both an effort to kind of commit it to memory or commit what you're experiencing and seeing and all of that to not even just memory but to paper so that it's there forever. And the other thing is to just understand it's a way of processing. I think what's going on in the world when it's so almost unprocessable this kind of stage that we're in. And just to touch on that a bit you know I was saying before the show that, you know you you grew up you cut your teeth so to speak, growing up in a deteriorating Hong Kong. This really sort of sad story because you know we all lose our childhood somehow, and you lost it in, you have lost it in in ways that are so so hard. And so here you are, you're in the United States you, you carry a lot of memories around which we'll talk about in the book. And you find that the same sort of same sort of process or at least a parallel correlated processes is happening here that way the government was, you know, deteriorating or being forced to deteriorate in Hong Kong we have a kind of deterioration here in the United States and so you, you go from the, the frying pan to the fire so to speak or maybe the other way around how do you feel about that. I mean, not to be annoying but I think that there's a lot of freedom such as to vote in the press and you know to think and act freely in the US that can be taken for granted at times and I think we saw that in 2016 when people weren't voting as much as they should have been when you know in Hong Kong two years prior there had been thousands of people hundreds of thousands of people sitting in the streets for 79 days to fight for that exact same right for one man one vote. And so I think that's something that has resonated with me a lot the past couple of years having moved here properly in 2016 but just, you know, making sure to not take things as seemingly basic as the right to vote for granted. Now PS on all of that just a footnote is that the news on cable today is that Ron DeSantis the governor of Florida who they say may run against Trump for the nomination. Next time around has said that he is going to withhold funding from universities in Florida state funding I suppose, but who knows where that goes with who. So universities who are too liberal, however you define that. So we have the thought police, the thought police are marching. And here's a guy who could be running for governor, president, who is saying that he's going to try to affect freedom of speech on campus in the state of Florida. It's very troubling to me, very troubling. Let's, let's talk about your book we need to talk about your book. Why did you write such a book and certainly you wanted to memorialize your childhood. It's a lot of that isn't it. What made you do it though you could have waited. And as a much smaller kind of senior thesis senior essay type project when I was chronicling the fall of my senior year, the 2019 anti extradition protests as they were unfolding as a capstone for my for the human rights program which I was a part of. And it grew into this I guess much larger book, as a way as you say to kind of say farewell to Hong Kong as a way to really just memorialize this day and all these memories that I had. And so, I think, I think they were it was happening as really each raw emotion was happening to me as well I would go kind of weeks without writing anything because I just put in bear to and then there'd be one night where you could just just keep writing non stop because it was all there suddenly and so it was very just like a visceral processing of what was going on, as it was going on. So you, you've had you've grown up there and you've had a lot of friends there. You know some of whom, as you mentioned the book are in the United States now and query is anybody else written a book like this or are you unique kind of. I think there's a lot of creativity coming out of Hong Kong right now, and especially in the past two years or so. And even more so I'd say these days as maybe the avenues in which you can express yourself or becoming more and more narrow. And so we saw in the height of the 2019 protest and in 2020 just lots of art visual kind of film writing poetry coming out of the city and there's been quite a few more kind of anthology type collections of essays of protesters I can imagine a lot of the leading figures in the movement are working on projects themselves. A similar line and lots of kind of you know academic books for scholars local scholars. But I mean, hopefully what I did is unique. Can you go back. I probably not. My parents definitely can't out of extreme caution. We're probably not any of us going back anytime soon, unless something drastically changes. With this book and kind of you know the ensuing offense and other pieces that I've released as part of marketing and all of that. The odds I guess are slimmer and slimmer. So when your, your dad and I we started to do these discussions about Hong Kong was a time of the umbrella movement seems like a long time ago. Those, those are the housey and days gone by, where you could get out in the street and you know, have an effect somehow and be recognized that now you get out the street and you're good for retraining somewhere in Western China, you know, not a good thing. But anyway, you know one of the big questions that came up and I want to pose it to you is what, what did you think would happen. Do you think that Xi Jinping was going to let this happen that, you know, let it slip out of his hands. It was clear that he wanted to accelerate the 2047 date. He wasn't about to lose ground, he wanted to gain ground. So what do you think would happen with all this protest. I mean, wasn't it clear what the future would be. I think there was a time in 2019 when the protests really started picking up where there was great hope that this was actually going to impact some sort of change when you saw one 2 million people coming on the streets, hundreds of thousands every weekend and strikes kind of across the city across different fields and professions, you know, schools of education. I think there's always kind of been an ebb and flow of optimism among Hong Kongers. I think when you see big turnout when you, which usually kind of is in almost direct response to the government's breaking of promises in terms of democracy and human rights and the rule of law. And there is this kind of moment of optimism, but when that fails or if that fails, then a kind of, I think, dread and sadness settles in. And so Hong Kongers have dealt with that cycle for, you know, two decades now. And I think at the start of 2019, which really is what kind of kicked things off to be what's going on today. There was a sense of optimism, which kind of quickly fell into a sense of well, even if things don't go badly, this is our, you know, live or die moment, we have to give everything our all right now. And I think that was especially person among people who are my age or, you know, approximately born in the years around the 1997 handover because the future that would be impacted if China continued to encroach was so immediate to us. And it would impact, you know, our careers our education choices where we had kids got married all of that and so I think there was an element of optimism but be hard to be optimistic. Well, it might have been you know I catch that from your book you, you, you describe that in great detail and, you know, very well so that the reader understands just what that optimism was but just wondering what, what would you be optimistic about at that time in other words, you know all these students are out there and faculty, millions of people from, you know, the ordinary walk of life and optimistic about what what in an optimistic sense what did they hope to achieve at the time, you know, of the umbrella movement and forward it was one in 2012 also these various protested, but what did they hope to achieve what do they think the, you know the, you know, Hong Kong would look like in their minds I think there was a big sense among people which is really what's always driven people to the streets in Hong Kong that when the direct kind of promises that we were given by UK by Britain and China during the 1997 handover were under threat that we had to be there and protect our, you know, autonomy or freedom or human rights, when the kind of government was failing to do so. And so I think the biggest, maybe most direct form of optimism being a hope that, you know, in big numbers in 2015 600,000 1 million even thinking at 2 million people that something might actually come of that that there were enough voices in a city of you know just over 7 million people that, you know, someone had to listen at some point and there was a lot of international attention on Hong Kong to and I actually wasn't there in 2019 but I was interning at the Washington Post in the first day of my internship 1 million people had marched across. The fact is something that that really woke me up in your book and that is this, you know, people don't remember that in 1997, coming off from, you know, the previous 100 and some odd years that that Hong Kong was a British colony. They did not have its own sovereignty. It was run by the Brits and, and, you know, I mean okay the Brits they're not, they're not so bad but that there was no Hong Kong sovereignty although a lot of people in Hong Kong wanted to have sovereignty felt that they could benefit by it. You know, this was their destiny of sorts. And, and you talked about the five seconds. Remember that can you can you talk about that the five seconds between the flags. There's, there was a passage I had read once in you know kind of scouring the internet and books on everything where a writer had written, who was writing about the 1997 handover ceremony which was a very grand affair between these two great world powers. They wrote about the kind of five second, you know time lag between the British colonial flag, lowering, and the Chinese flag raising and in this span where only the Hong Kong flag was hanging. That was the only autonomy that and kind of. That was the most Hong Kong that Hong Kong has ever been because there wasn't this you know, holler flag hanging slightly you know a couple feet away. And I just thought was so, I don't know, poetic and it's such a visceral image that you can see. I could feel it, I could feel it in your book and you know, and then I and then I later on I realized that from that point forward or at least soon thereafter forward. The Hong Kong flag hangs higher in Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong flag which had it sovereignty for five seconds hangs lower and that's the way it is. That's the way it's been. And that gives you a sort of a peek into the future. Yeah, no, absolutely. You're right so eloquently about, you know, life as a kid. It's, it's good literature really is and you describe, you know, the streets, your sense of safety and call it your affinity with even even alleys and dark places that were safe in Hong Kong. And the food and the people and the and the clamor and commotion all around you. This was the Hong Kong that you grew up in this is the Hong Kong you grew a lot so it was different than the academic side of your life can you talk about what Hong Kong was when you were a kid growing up and and why you didn't have any concern about living among all this noise and commotion. And I think, I think safety was definitely huge element of it that, you know, with the kind of rise in power and authority of the police force there is and you know just fear of what the new law might mean. There's a lack of that safety now that's very deep. But something I always think about is you'll see when I was a kid you'd see five or six year olds like kindergarten school students going to and from school alone taking subways mass transit railways buses, because people trusted the city the crime rate was shockingly low. It was just, there's this at one point. I remember this super random news story that the prisoner kind of level in Hong Kong was at such a low because there just wasn't that much going on that the local cat rescue shelter had let all the cats go into the prison to just, you know, be watched and loved by the prisoners and I just thought that was so kind of symbolic of how just safe the city was for so many years. And it was a place where really you could go anywhere the transit systems great you could go anywhere and kind of find a sense of belonging because each neighborhood, you know, to a certain extent reflected the next and it really always felt like there was a pocket around just, you know, knowing and understanding and you couldn't be if you know spoke the language knew the place you couldn't really be lost because everyone was just kind of there and you mean not the friendliest but like would stop and help if you needed help and that was always something that struck me and I thought was super special just the trust people had. Yeah, great, great geo wishing too bad it's gone. But you had an advantage. You spoke, what can Cantonese to speak Mandarin to just Cantonese. Oh, good. I was going to ask you to do the show either in Cantonese or the other. Anyway, so, so there came a time when you realize that Hong Kong went even as a child, or at least teenager when you realize that a lot of Hong Kong. A lot of the energy of Hong Kong was being focused into the freedom movement. You know the human rights movement, the academic expression of that but then expression by everyone on the streets. I mean a million people that's way, way more than the academic community and there's something, but you got drawn into that What about how and why and what it was like as a kid as a teenager to be drawn into this enormous force of protest. Yeah, I think, I mean as a kid, growing up with parents and kind of family adjacent people that were very active in the pro democracy movement. What happened to me as a kid was just very kind of inertial like you did where your parents took you to and it made sense that I would appear at these annual movements and say hi to people that were basically aunties and uncles to me the same way they are in Hawaii. And that just was all kind of a given and I think the moment for me that it became kind of glaringly apparent that that wasn't a given for everybody and that there were, you know, a large number of people who might disagree with my kind of families position on politics and was actually during the 2014 umbrella movement. When my school was actually very engaged in having kind of conversations about what was going on in the city making sure you know speakers came to explain things talk about things share their views from both sides really. We'd have in class debates and discussions people would write you know their final essays on them for whatever history class or something like we were in high school. But there was a lot of conversation about it and our schools human rights group which I was part of actually had kind of teacher chaperone visits to the protest site. And there was a moment where I'd be talking, I was talking with one of my friends and she was complaining about how, you know, because the traffic had slowed down due to the protesters the sit in in front of the government complexes. It took her two extra hours to get to her tutor, some sort of extracurricular class and that that was the most annoying thing in the world and how terrible these people out on the streets disrupting everything blah blah blah. And I mean in hindsight she's probably reflecting the views of her parents at the time as I was also, but it just it really struck me that it wasn't obvious in her mind as it was in mind that those people had to be on the streets, you know where at school we're doing our little kid thing but people are age are on the streets and that's noble of them really admirable. I think that was a moment for me where I was, oh wait, there is. It's not a generational thing it's not some political thing that you know I don't know who sit in fancy offices think about and I don't have to it kind of all around you. Well that raises an interesting question I mean you, you clearly attended tended to the freedom movement or democracy movement that was a natural. It was a natural because of you know your parents but it was also a natural because I think I'm suggesting this, just looking at your book is a natural because of yours, you know you're thinking at the time and the school you were attending and so far. But, but it was not universal in Hong Kong. There were people in Hong Kong and Hong Kong who were rooting for Beijing. They were rooting for more control by Beijing they were not going to stand in Beijing's way and they were going to oppose and actually discourage the protesters. Did you know any of them was was there an active conversation going on. Was it a divisive experience to know that there were two sides to that question. I think as someone who kind of went to, you know, fairly privileged elite private international school. A lot of my classmates I think understood the privilege and took it to mean that this maybe wasn't something that you would discuss so openly, especially you know as 2019 2020 war on. It was for the sake of maintaining a piece among kind of friends. I think there was definitely a lot less division in 2014 when we were still in school together as classmates. I think in recent years I've aired almost kind of out of self preservation or just, you know, not needing to get into a huge argument for better or worse to the kind of side of just you know keeping my mouth shut. I think we all know what each other thinks and the conversation will come up when and if it does but I honestly have a lot more conversations about Hong Kong political situation with friends from university than I do with high school class. Unless I'm kind of certain that they agree with me almost. Why does this remind me of what's happening in the United States. Thinking that. What's about you. My thoughts are you can correct me, you're entitled. Number one, number one is, you know, you carry within you. Hong Kong, the true Hong Kong, Hong Kong you grew up in the noble democratic freedom loving Hong Kong the the synthesis of east and west and maybe the best elements. You carry that within you and you took the time to write this book about it. And my guess is that that's not going to change in your lifetime you're always going to be defined by, you know, your life in Hong Kong and how you feel about Hong Kong. As you, as you have left it, and this book. Am I right. Or are you moving on. You're definitely right. I think, especially having been away from home for two years now and, you know, many more years to come probably that the, I think the way home wherever it is for people all across the world in similar situations kind of comes to mean to you I think really changes. It becomes something that I think is very very central to your identity and to my identity that maybe wasn't so overtly, you know, one of the pillars I could have kind of stood on until the reality of what was going on kind of became clear and clear. And I think another thing, I guess, that I kind of carry with me that was actually something someone said to me one of the journalists I interviewed for the book said that you love Hong Kong but maybe now you find that Hong Kong isn't a place that's worth your love anymore. And that's really stuck with me. He's saying this is someone who plans to stay, but is kind of very on the fence about this. And I'm kind of receiving this quote as someone who, you know, really didn't have a saying the matter of whether I'm staying or going. And I'm now on this other side of the fence. And I think for everyone who's away, it definitely is a place that is worth your love. And I think that's really this kind of like question of whether or not Hong Kong needs to be fought for anymore is something that's really going to carry people forward for years to come. Well, you know, I think Beijing has done a good job in squashing Hong Kong. I mean, you knew they were going to take for Connie and steps and, and they certainly have and it struck me that I won't mention his name but the somebody you mentioned in the book that you really could not discuss the book with. You know, mention him as a source or reviewer of your of your book, because that would get him in trouble. And what that suggests to me is that is what has happened in Hong Kong is that kind of cut you off from an open discussion with the people that you would like to talk to who live in Hong Kong because they will be at risk. And indeed under the security law they would be at risk. And so if you published a book of, you know conversations with your old friends in Hong Kong who are still there, express their views about the government my goodness they would be at risk. Am I right about that isn't that kind of cutting you off from your own connections. I think that's one way of thinking about it. I think the kind of vagueness of the terms of this law that's been imposed on to Hong Kong, add to this feeling of uncertainty, there's no, you know, clear cut, this is what you can do and this is what you can't do and if you do what you can you'll get in trouble. The kind of ambiguity of the language means that, you know, they might not get in trouble if I published a book of conversations I had before 2020, but they also might, or maybe they'd be, you know, fine and I would get in trouble or someone's, you know, kid or parent who's, you know, they've immigrated but their family is still home they could get in trouble for something someone else does abroad and so there's I think just the lack of connection I think is very fair and I think it's a lot of people you know struggling to find new ways of kind of maintaining that connection to home and maintaining, you know, connection to people who still symbolize home whether they're living back home or living abroad. Well as I went through your book I became more nostalgic for the good old days. I became sadder I'm sure that you know I was tracking on your state of mind as you wrote it. And that leads me to one question I want to ask you was how do you feel about the future really of Hong Kong. It's not going to be the way it was. It's never coming back. Maybe you could say that about the US to it's never, you know, there is no old normal becoming normal again. And the reality is that when Beijing has it completely under under control, life will be different in Hong Kong not only for the generation that Beijing is concerned about now but for the children of the children of the generation. It won't be something you can easily reckon. How do you feel about that. How do you feel about what do you think is going to happen. I think my most maybe hopeful thought on what is happening is something one of my professors said to me at Yale, which was Hong Kong is a happening it's a phenomenon that doesn't need to be bound by this kind of space time that it's in. What they're referencing was this kind of almost forced mass exodus of people this kind of forced creativity into you know rethinking and reimagining what a Hong Kong or is and who that might be. I think that's, you know, maybe the most hopeful it gets is thinking about what Hong Kongers can do abroad, which you know both my parents contribute to which is why you've interviewed them and there's just you know countless of people doing really important work. And I think for a lot of Hong Kongers whether or not they can go home. I, you know, would imagine that a sense of almost responsibility in a sense of trying to bring Hong Kong story into whatever work they're doing will be, you know, present for a lot of people. The situation on the ground is a lot more bleak you point I think correctly to this, you know, generational rift that is probably going to happen where there's kids my age slightly younger, and of course older people who lived through what we all just live through and you know have memories and you know concretely say through personal experience what happened what they think, then there will be, you know, likely a whole act of kind of brainwashing and forgetting which is what we've seen in mainland China for younger generations, especially, you know with electoral reforms and national education curriculum and things like that and I think that's a pretty scary thought as someone my age that I could be talking to someone who's 10 years younger than me, you know, a couple years down the line and we would have totally different stories regardless of what their parents think and my parents think and I might think that we just have totally different understandings of what Hong Kong's history has been and so I think that's a pretty hard to digest reality. But let me offer you this just a reaction I have on. And that is, you know, many ways that doors closed, it's closed for you and many others it's closed for other countries in the world, you know, who have treated Hong Kong as a kind of the jewel of the Orient in many ways, both, you know, socially and culturally and just generally energetic across roads of the world, which isn't it's not going to be the case going forward, but you were there, you grew up there. You smell the smells and saw the sights and, you know, you felt it you felt it pulsing within you for really most of most of your young life you've had that experience. And in a funny way, you were part of the history of this extraordinary phenomenon from 1997 till, you know, recently, you carry within you the history of it you're you're an historical icon. You were there, there aren't that many of you like that. I see you as a lucky person, and I'm lucky to get to meet you actually. But let me ask you, you know, what would you like people to carry away from your book, which is very well written I must say, you know, Yale is a pretty good school. It really is. It's loaded with metaphors and references it's loaded with personal, you know, personal experiences that you, you know, have the power to articulate so well. But what do you want people to carry away what state of mind would you like to have as they close the cover of your book and maybe look forward to the next one. I think something that the past four years being in the US, you know, aligning five years I guess aligning with kind of Trump's election and all of that, and the aftermath of everything that has gone on. Something that really strikes me is that, you know, all of these social movements all of these protests all of these, any fight for kind of you know people say it all the time like any fight for I think Martin Luther King, maybe fight for justice, anywhere is, I don't say the quote terribly, but these movements are all linked together. And I think that's something to keep in mind that you can't, you know, push for democracy somewhere and human rights somewhere without pushing for it uniformly. And that's actually a weird shocking juxtaposition you see sometimes. And I think that, you know, to think of Hong Kong if you're protesting somewhere for something that stands for human rights and justice, and you know rule of law. This city really just kind of so benefited and so supported the world for so many decades and became a place where so many people have traveled to and moved to and loved and, you know, dim some from everything to food to cinema culture to just you know politics and all of that Hong Kong has made an impact on the world and I think, you know, at risk now of being subsumed into mainland China a lot of that might be lost and so I think just, you know, remembering Hong Kong when you think of things that are, you know little tidbits that are relevant and remembering that it's a city and it's of the people on, you know, in Hawaii, especially there's tons of, you know, Hong Kong immigrants in Hawaii. And I think just not forgetting as long as we can back with the bookings to do to that. And to remember, unless we forget their, their courage is what was going on on the streets until fairly recently was a statement of extraordinary courage in the face of great risk threat. Okay, we're at the point where I want to ask you to read a piece so we can wrap ourselves in your prose. Can you give us a paragraph that expresses your prose. I can. And I did prepare it. So, it's on page 29, if you have your book today. It starts, I was born seven months after the handover in Mon Sean's Prince of Wales hospital on a rainy winter day in February 1998. My parents named me may hon in honor of Martin's late mother, watching over me as a sleeping infant my godfather pointed to my throat fist raised high above my head as if I were punching the air and indignation. He joked, saying it was a sign that I'd follow in his steps one day. My childhood was defined by the rhythm of Hong Kong's pro democracy movement and the cascading greenery of the Chinese University campus where we lived in airy wood panel faculty housing. The campus was my playground, an oasis of safety that gave a child the freedom to explore alone, but the streets of protest or my classroom, where I'd wave signs and chant slogans that I could not yet read, eating steaming plates of peanuts and fun after swimming lessons, watching Sesame Street at four in the afternoon, and going to the annual Tiananmen candlelight vigil were all unsuaiable routines in my young mind. Thank you so much. It's wonderful to meet you and get to know you. I see you as a child of Hong Kong. Maybe the perfect expression of the best times in Hong Kong. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.