Out Of Place

I awake to the launch of the civil disobedience in Hong Kong in the morning. 

This is almost my third week in Australia now. Similar to St Andrews, I am cushioned in a bubble. I relish a comfort of being financially secured, a relief from a necessity to internship or part time, and a liberty to travel around on shoestring budgets. However, what I enjoy most is an absence of internet that makes my life so reclusive. Australia, being one of the most developed countries on this planet, is appallingly undeveloped in internet. It takes me half-an hour by bus to a cafe in town to check email. Usually I cannot bother. Apart from skyping with my father, and maintaining necessary contact with a few friends, I fond of taking a refuge from the internet. 

An absence of internet gives me a blend of guilt and pleasure. I entered into a lethargy from tragedies, and self-deluded complacy of living in a small bubble. It pains me to see regular updates concerning how rampant lies and how impassive people act in Hong Kong, on facebook from a few of my socially active and politically conscious friends. I am also disgusted by the blatant audacity and lies pouring out of the mouth from many public figures and government officials whose salaries are paid by us. These people betray no shame when they bluster, as fig leaves are not even needed. Whilst they can take a deaf ear to voices of just and conscience, I feel there is very little I can do save switching off my laptop and TV since I realise I can hardly turn a blind eye to these repulsive acts without being helplessly furious. This, accounts for my cowardice and a corrupt pleasure of taking a haven from the troubled world, by sneaking from a world of lies, to a world of partial truth.  

Hong Kong, where the majority readily recognises the rule of lies, make me feel dishonest. Living abroad is not honest either, where comfort has an expiry date. I hate to turn my life, like many Chinese counterparts, into a set-out for obtaining a Western-country passport since I consider this unjust, nor do I want to live passively under lies, dishonesty, and corruption. The HKSAR passport carried in my pocket, it occurs to me, does not really represent me as I look at "PRC". I then question if that justifies me to secure a foreign citizenship, I have thus far failed to arrive a sufficiently staunch defence for such deed. The BNO, which I have not renewed since five years old, hardly has any national attachment to me either. Yet, to live and stay in a prison where I struggle to capture even a gleam of hope, and to endure the utmost indifference of the public toward injustice and lies, I feel tormented. To endure and embrace this truth is too painful, for it implies an self-imposed imprisonment of lies and dishonesty and inhumanity. To exile, it appears to me an equally painful option, for I resent being an outsider of witnessing a daily routines of tragedies of unjust. To make a difference, against the ever-rising authority and party machine of the CCP, that sounds worse than a slogon and soundbite from the Westminister elites. The authority is a collective, absorbing, and staunch power machine. To live with an harsh truth, one has to learn to dream, especially when nightmares take place under the broad daylight. I wish the civil disobedience participants, and Hong Kong well.