On a quiet night last week, I received a disconcerting message: my parents in Hong Kong had been the tasks of the National Security Police to interrogate.
Hours later, they were released, just to be with a multitude of journalists, summarized by the authorities to photograph and humiliate them.
I sat thousands of miles away, feeling every mile as a weight in my chest.
There was nothing I could do to protect them, not from the blow to the door, not from the cameras, not from the authorities that have destroyed my home and made me a fugitive wanted to defend the freedom we had once.
It was the second time that they would commission my mother to question him, since the Hong Kong government put me generosity for my defense abroad. Anyone who gives me the authorities there can win an “award” or one million dollars from Hong Kong.
My face, along with those of 18 Hong Kongers abroad, is stunned in the news bulletins around Hong Kong.
And now my family, whom I had to avoid since I left Hong Kong, was forced to pay the price because I refuse to be silenced.
I was born in 1999, two years after the United Kingdom gave Hong Kong to China under the promise of “a country, two systems.” I grew up with freedoms that were once guaranteed to my people.
When I was 7 years old, I joined my first public assembly to exercise these rights, and for 2012, as the erosion of our freedoms became more urgent, I began to actively participate in the social movement to defend the issue.
I did not know that one day would mean exile. I did not know that I would see my homeland disappear behind layers of silence, alone, since Beijing has erased prodemocratic voices in China since the massacre of the Tiananmen square of 1989.
In 2021, I became Hong Kong’s first activist to ensure political asylum in the United States, which has received me and my calls to freedom in my homeland.
I still remember the moment I returned to the news: a quiet relief washed around him, immediately followed by guilt and pain, knowing that he would never go home.
While many of my friends face imprisonment and surveillance at home, I found security, but not peace.
The repression of the Chinese government extends beyond the borders to each community and appearance of our lives.
Many defenders in exile have experienced threats and forms of harassment, including monitoring in the streets, as I have been, and learning to lets sent to their neighbors who encourage their kidnapping.
Now the Hong Kong authorities, under the control of the Chinese Communist Party, have attacked my family. Through transnational repression and a radical destruction of civil freedoms in the home, the Chinese government is determined to instill fear in our movement to silence and divide.
Seeing my family is trapped in the crossfire of my convictions is scary. The CCP uses them as a tool to press myself.
My heart hurts. I feel guilty. And although I am portrayed as “intrepid”, I feel fear in every action and word, because of the risk that I could represent for those around me.
Even now, while I write these words, I am worried that they can invite reprisals. But moments like this remind me that I am human, that I still have empathy. I can embrace these feelings, dominate them and transform them into force.
Faced with fear, I choose not to compromise.
I refuse to let authoritarians take off the power to honor my parents, share my history and claim the life pieces that I am.
I know I’m not alone. Many of us are displaced, exiled, afflicted and durable in silence.
Over the years, our struggle for democracy has become a struggle for each person in Hong Kong who has been silenced, each student who has lost his future and each family torn against authoritarianism.
When bringing their stories with me, I hope to encourage them to tell the truth to power and claim their own stories.
At times like this, each act of resistance, even a simple option to continue and cling when it would be easier to let it go, becomes a candle in the dark.
Our movement will continue to be driven by courage and determination that will become collective power and faith, only in the darkest moments, which we will raise again, with the love for the city to which we once belonged.
Frances Hui, based in Washington, DC, continues its defense with the Committee for Freedom at the Foundation of Hong Kong as the Policy and Defense Coordinator and, through its organization, we Hongkongers, about cultural strengthening and the construction of the community.
