Book Announcement: The Hong Kong Hermit Protest Trilogy
Three books detailing six years at the front lines of the Hong Kong protest movement, 2014 - 2020
*kicks door open*
WHO LIKES BOOKS?
“Have… have you been writing a book, Hermit?”
No. I’ve been writing three.
Songs in the Night, Whispers in the Morning - The Accidental Adventures of The Hong Kong Hermit is a three volume epic tale of how I stumbled into Hong Kong, and went on an unplanned 14 year journey from tourist to expat to immigrant to activist to exile. It will be released as a trilogy over the course of 2022. Book One is on course to be out next month.
Exile? Yeah, story time…
One year ago, at 5:41 p.m. on Christmas Eve 2020, the Hong Kong government officially declared that I, a random dude of no real significance, was a threat to Chinese national security. After four months of consideration and scrutiny, my routine work-visa renewal was turned down. No official reason was given, but we know what the reason was.
This was in spite of having successfully had 2 initial work visa applications, a visa transfer, and 6 visa renewals in the past decade. I had ongoing employment, paid my taxes, never once got arrested despite six years of being constantly present at an overwhelming majority of all the protests and being right up in things.
And believe me, cops wanted to arrest me. 6 years documenting the HK protest movement is something they wanted removed from the public record. Plus I annoyed them. I annoyed them a lot. But I was teflon, they only thing they could have gotten me for was that constant attendance, but it was the exhaustive public documentation of that attendance which was my defence.
That’s the thing, I always existed in this weird Lagrange point where I was so prominent I got a lot of attention, but also so prominent I was mostly kind of left to just do my thing as nobody knew what to do with me. Not even me. I did more accidental journalism than many actual journalists, and nobody (myself included) knows how I managed to slip between all the lines for so long.
Honestly though, I think they just never arrested me because none of them wanted to be stuck in an interview room with me for 48 hours. Because they were not ready for that. I, on the other hand, very much was. I mean, you may have seen me livestream 8 ID checks, I had way more fun than they did.
I didn’t announce my departure at the time for a bunch of reasons. First, nobody wants to hear “poor me, boo hoo”. So many Hongkongers are being punished in so many ways, and everyone (with one notable exception) is taking it bravely and without complaint. While I have it worse than some, I also have it far less bad than others, so didn’t want to make it all about me.
Nobody regrets doing the right thing, nobody was naive enough to assume no consequences. Once I started getting smeared by pro-China legislators and Chinese State media, merely for being white and scratching my tummy (no, really), it was already kind of inevitable.
Plus, you can get away with being happy on Twitter, or excited, or being angry. Sadly, people can even thrive by being hateful, bigoted, or stupid. But the one thing you can’t get away with is being sad, showing vulnerability. That’s when you have to keep it to yourself. It’s that kind of place now.
The second reason, is that after being repeatedly doxxed and harassed, locally by blue ribbons, online by (mostly) white (mostly) overseas (mostly) dudes from genocide enjoyer Twitter, I didn’t want to give them any encouragement to think that anything they were doing worked, because that would only make them do it more. As much as it may have been Good Content, it risked putting others at risk by encouraging more attacks of the kind I was getting.
Though I did have to chuckle at the earnestness with which these ethno-nationalists would keep trying to get the attention of the HK police, all “sir, sir, look at him” as if I haven’t had cops crawling up my ass since 2014. As if the cops didn’t know who I was years before the protests because background checks were a requirement of my field of work.
If anything, that constant reporting of me, who’m’s’t the police already knew very well, was just wasting police time and clogging up the system where people they didn’t know were being reported. The political decision to stealth deport me (and it was political) came from above, not from below.
I guess the third reason was becoming jobless, homeless, and forced into exile with only two weeks’ notice at the height of the 8th biggest pandemic the world has ever seen when most countries were in full lockdown. That’s some shit to deal with. How do you tie up 14 years of life in such a short time? Where do you go? What do you do?
I didn’t even have the option of putting all my things into storage, to be sent on later. Because store it for how long? To be sent where? My entire life, just about everyone I knew, was in Hong Kong. So I just gave it all away, and left with only what I could carry on my back and in my heart.
Oddly, other than the 20 people on Twitter that I chat to (my only real reason for having an account), only my enemies actually know what I did for a living. I spent 7 of my years in Hong Kong as a playgroup teacher. Anyone following me long enough knows I have no high opinion of myself, so when I tell you I was one of the best playgroup teachers in the city you can take that to the bank. You couldn’t do my job.
I took crying, screaming, terrified babies and transformed them into bright, confident, brave toddlers. Every single part of my routine, which I redesigned myself from the ground up, had purpose. I materially improved the lives of hundreds of babies by helping them overcome separation anxiety and be ready for kindergarten. I say again, you couldn’t do my job.
When it came time for the parent and baby classes to become baby only, and those bubs had to spend a whole hour away from mum and dad for the first time ever, and they’re howling and crying, snot everywhere, yet I was able to promise parents that none of my babies cried beyond the third class. And 99% of my babies helped me keep that promise.
Sometimes at the end of class I’d open the door a crack, tell all the parents to get their phones out to film, and then I’d open the door and have a whole classroom of babies dancing and jumping along with a song, putting on a performance for mum and dad. I could do this knowing they wouldn’t go running straight out to the waiting parents because they were already having more fun being part of a group of their peers. I could sometimes even do that on their first or second week, because I was just that good. Once more with feeling: you couldn’t do my job.
Honestly, I was a goddamn wizard at that. People would ask if I was teaching them English, and I’d point out you can’t teach babies. At that age it’s just learning how to learn. I wasn’t teaching language, I was teaching confidence, independence, self-discipline. Getting them to stop crying and open their eyes to the world so they could teach themselves.
All those times from 2014 - 2020, where you’d see videos of me surrounded by screaming, yelling, highly emotional riot cops or blue ribbons (occasionally both), and there was me, cool as a cucumber, just letting it wash over me… that was because I had learned to be an oasis of calm when screaming, yelling, highly emotional babies did the same. It was a transferrable skill.
Because I worked almost 7 years at one centre, I had many parents have their baby attend my playgroups, then leave after 2 years, and turn up a couple of years later going “Mr. Hermit, this is X’s new brother, we want you to teach him too” and every single time I would just be utterly floored at the compliment they paid me.
When I quit that centre in 2017, on my last day we had a leaving party. There was one boy there who I had been teaching every single Sunday for 5 and a half years. His mum and I walked together to the MTR station afterwards, and we had a little cry at the turnstiles. Because of lockdown measures, I didn’t get a chance to see my students for this final goodbye. That hurt.
I spent the last couple of years in HK teaching older kids. Just a standard ESL tutor. You could totally do that job, it was work I only took out of necessity after quitting a playgroup centre I’d just joined when they refused necessary safety equipment for classes with two-year olds, something I was not prepared to compromise on. I was “good enough” at that job though.
I’d mostly fallen out of touch with the many, many parents who had emailed and texted me asking where I would be working next, because imposter syndrome had me thinking they were surely just being polite. I never had the heart to delete even a single message though. Whole bunch of my older students followed me to the new centre anyway, which again was a humbling compliment.
I always kept my name off Twitter, for a bunch of reasons. Mostly to disassociate myself from my day job, because my employers were apolitical, and shouldn’t be dragged into the events that I went out and witnessed on my own personal time. I’m also not a grifter, self-promoter, or propagandist, I don’t have a brand to build. I never dropped links to a Patreon, never had a “hey guys, like and subscribe” attitude, never did anything other than try and tell the story of people far more interesting and important than me.
The entire reason I started going out to protests in the first place in 2014, was that my students were too young to go out and protest. And because as adults, we had a responsibility to try and fix the world so that they should never need to. I can only apologise that we repeatedly failed them.
Back at the end of Umbrella ’14, having spent 30 nights sleeping out, and most of the days in attendance, this account only had 1300 followers despite being the 4th most cited on the Reddit livefeed that aggregated all the people covering it as it happened.
Barely had 4k going into Umbrella ’19. There was no clout in documenting HK politics for those five years, but we did it all anyway because a record had to be kept and nobody else was keeping it. That and chatting with the 20 people I actually know on here was all this account was for.
Later, and this is fucked up, I had to try and stay more anonymous because I was worried for the safety of the children I taught. Despite the fact that I would do nothing more than turn up, and document events for everyone on every side to see for themselves, I got a whole bunch of crazies regularly talking about attacking me, or “doing something about me”. I collected death threats like Pokémon.
And if you think an attack was unlikely, I’ll remind you that there were multiple pre-meditated knife attacks against people at Lennon Walls and human chains, those most peaceful forms of protests. Including one Chinese nationalist, jailed recently for a mere 6 years for attempted murder, who literally disembowelled an 18 year old who was only handing out leaflets. (Don’t make me post the photos of the lad’s exposed intestines.)
So there I am, someone who has been smeared as a “commander” or “CIA agent” by Anne Chiang, Junius Ho, Global Times, Xinhua, and others, who spends 5 days a week at a specific known location, where people would take creepshots of me teaching and post them to blue ribbon groups (often without redacting the kids’ faces) where there were regular discussions about “doing me in”.
I didn’t post about it in 2019, but they also ran a massive harassment campaign against my boss, a sweet apolitical person (more blue than yellow if anything) just trying to run a business in peace. Phone calls, emails, one even turned up in person (they boast about doing so on Twitter, who refuse to sanction them). Mind you, they were too much of a coward to turn up on a day when I was actually working.
The day after the July 21st triad assault on Yuen Long MTR station, I went up to show them we weren’t scared of them (but I had to go alone because everyone I asked to roll with was actually scared of them). I also went to multiple pro-police, blue ribbon rallies. Certainly not scared of some keyboard warriors who talked a big game but then actively avoided me.
They got bored when it became obvious they couldn’t get me sacked, because any parents who knew what I was up to only cared about what I was doing inside of work, and I always kept work separate from outside interests because I’m a goddamn professional. I wouldn’t say I was “popular” at teaching older kids, not like when I was a playgroup teacher, but I was always “popular enough”.
Had they continued the harassment, I would have broken my silence and livetweeted the white terror, because I would have been the only one able to. But long months of having to watch my back on the street, walking to/or from work, and having to rearrange my classroom so I could keep one eye on the door in case some nutcase wanted a pop. All of which was just part and parcel of standing up to creeping authoritarianism.
Remember when CHRF leader Jimmy Sham was attacked the 2nd time, with hammers in the street? I lived 100 metres away from the scene, went home that night walking past his still wet blood stain on the road, the police tapes still up. Each night I’d have to do a full circuit of my block to see if I was being followed before going inside. Wearing headphones outside was no longer possible.
So that has been my life the last couple of years. Bouquets from parents of my students and people who actually knew me, brickbats from people who’ve never met me. The latter, amongst so many others, who ascribed some kind of importance to me that I’ve never given myself. But they couldn’t get me sacked, and couldn’t get me arrested, no matter how hard they tried.
And all this attention for me, a random playgroup teacher, just tweeting about stuff that happened outside my front door because ignoring it wasn’t an option. Not an exaggeration there. Check out this (incomplete) map. Black is where I was tear gassed, red where I was pepper sprayed, blue for where I was physically assaulted. The green pins are places I either lived or worked in HK over the years.
Being made jobless, homeless, and forced into exile from the only place I’ve ever belonged, at the highest peak of the 8th biggest pandemic the world has ever known, when almost the entire world was in full lockdown, is just one of those “well, that happened” things. The two weeks’ notice wasn’t even extended, despite there being almost no flights coming in from anywhere.
Visa extensions were being handed out like candy, the exceptions being for political cases. And my case was political. I’m not the only person this has happened to, but that’s for others to announce for themselves. It happened to people before me, and others after. You’ll hear more on that later. It used to be a joke that you weren’t a “true Hongkonger” until you’d smelt tear gas. Soon it’ll be that you aren’t one if you haven’t been subject to arrest, imprisonment, or exile.
If you feel you’ve had a bad year, Hongkongers will look at you and ask “really? Which year?”. Because we had the trauma of the protests, then the pandemic, then the imposition of the draconian insecurity law.
My personal additions were I got the heartbreak and impoverishment of exile, then a co-ordinated attack to try and shut down my Twitter for hosting one of the most comprehensive historical records of protests in Hong Kong from 2014 - 2020, then the PTSD of the protests catching up with me in a big way, plus the constant gnawing homesickness.
But, you know, shit happens. I only exist to spite my enemies, and I do have very good friends. I was looking to find the time, and the excuse, to write up my very unique story. The HK govt. was scared enough of this random dude telling the truth of the things I witnessed they needed me gone. So now I’m making sure it never gets forgotten.
My tweets, my emails, my photos, my videos, my livestreams, my message logs… I only regret not being more organised with it as I went, because it took me 5 solid months this year just to rebuild my photo collection from 2014 after Google Photos fucked it. That was another reason I went offline for a bit, I had to get my Twitter archive downloaded when it was coming under attack, plus all my livestreams. There’s an adage that if you have six hours to chop down a tree, you first spend four hours sharpening the axe. Well, I’ve spent this year reconstructing and preserving hundreds of videos and thousands of photos so it can never get lost to time again.
After seeing how aggressively they have silenced so many outlets, wiped clean so much of the history, I’m surprised they didn’t actually arrest me just so that they could remove my records of the last few years as well. Apple Daily closed down, all their archives wiped. Same with the HK Alliance. RTHK’s Twitter wiped clean and the journalists effectively muzzled. Just whole swathes of history being scrubbed out of existence. I was just finishing this post when in the space of a single day Stand News was also obliterated.
I guess in my case that they really would have needed to arrest me for the tweets, there being nothing else, and while the tweets were what put me at risk, the tweets were also my defence. I spent every day waiting for the dawn knock, and I was prepared for it, but they just weren’t ready for that can of worms. Cowards.
Btw, I’ve officially resigned from the self-assigned role of drawing all the online flak away from others. The bots and propagandists aren’t especially smart, and are easily provoked, but they were exhausting. If in 2019 you felt that you weren’t being shouted at much, then it’s because I went out of my way to get them yelling at me instead. You’re welcome. You’re also on your own now.
So, what have I been working on? I’ve still got a lot of work to do finishing things up, because there’s just so much story. It was supposed to be a single all-encompassing book, out in the summer, then the autumn, but the project just kept expanding and now it’s going to be a goddamn trilogy. The more the screws tightened on Hong Kong, the more I felt the need to record All The Things that happened, because soon not many people will be left able to.
I almost envy the grifters and propagandists, they only have to freestyle a hit piece to meet a pre-arranged word count and conclusion. I have to rewatch every video, reread every word, make sure that I remember all the things that were forgotten. And make sure I’m remembering all the things correctly. Memory alone cannot always be trusted. Same as with my tweets, I only ever say what I can verify, the books require even greater levels of confirmed veracity.
Additionally, with “time and waning interest” as one friend described a distracted world moving on, I’m moving more towards a broader story of my adventures. Because Hong Kong isn’t a city of activists, it’s a city of reluctant activists. Yes, the book has developed a bad case of project creep, but I do have such stories to tell.
Hong Kong is a place where people remember. More than anything else right now, the government is trying to erase and replace history, and silence anyone who might be able to recount the truth. But some of us can still say that we were there, that we saw what happened, and keep those moments alive in memory.
Aside from my own more personal stories, on the activism side of things, I can at least say that my attendance record was well above average. Well above. I went to protests you’ve already forgotten, but I have the records to remember it for you. I went to protests some of you never even knew existed. Hell, I went to some protests that weren’t even really protests until I turned up and accidentally (I swear) turned them into protests.
I wasn’t everywhere, I didn’t see everything. It was impossible for any one person to do all of that. But, and setting aside my own shyness for a moment, in 2014 - 2020 as a whole, I certainly saw far more of all the things than the vast majority of people did. I have so many stories that you need to hear.
Songs in the Night, Whispers in the Morning - The Accidental Adventures of the Hong Kong Hermit is a trilogy of books covering my first-hand eyewitness account of two revolutions and everything in between.
Book One - Songs of Hope should be out next month, provided I finish formatting the final draft in time. It covers the 2014 Umbrella Revolution as a protest memoir.
Book Two - Songs of Sorrow is a collection of essays and vignettes about the protests in 2015 to 2017, bookended with some personal tales of love, life, and loss in Hong Kong, and should be ready in the spring of 2022.
Book Three - Songs of Courage is when Poochie gets to the firework factory, and covers both the 2019 protests and the international propaganda war. This will be a mammoth volume and is expected for autumn 2022.
Each book will be available as a paperback, with black and white photographs throughout, and as an e-book with full colour pictures. 100,000 words, dozens of pictures, zero editors, thousands of typos, a non-zero amount of inappropriate dick jokes.
Once all three parts are out, I’ll then release a combined edition that packages everything together in a single definitive volume, because it really is all just one big story, and look into having it be full colour throughout on the print edition.
Plans beyond that may include making the film of the book of the tweets of the revolution, and I will one day be releasing the book in a “pay what you want (or nothing)” digital version but ask me more about all that a year from now.
I’m not attempting to write a comprehensive account of everything that happened, because it’s too big, too beyond my scope, and in many cases not my story to tell. So I’m just telling the only version of the story that I can: my own. I’m promising a dozen laughs and at least one little cry.
I want you to feel what it was like to be there. I want you to hear some of the stories of the people that I met. I want you to know what it took to stand up to the world’s oldest ethno-nationalist empire as it stamped a boot down on the faces of a free and gentle people. I also want you to know what it cost to do so.
It’s partly a history book. It’s partly a memoir. It’s a document of some of the most important events of the 21st Century, when a city full of heroes stood up and punched China in the dick.
But above all else, it’s a love story.
I’ll be back offline now for a few more weeks, when I’ll have Book One ready for you. You have questions I’m sure, but everything is in the book. Everything. I know it’ll only sell 6 copies, and only half of those will get read, but there are so many essential, unique, precious moments in time that needed to be recorded. More than anything else, I need people to know that we existed, and that we were beautiful.
- Hermit
P.S. Not that you have to feel obligated to support me in any way (that’s what trading you a book in return for money is for), but if you do want to say thanks for 6 years of frontline coverage then you can chuck me a a few bucks via Ko-Fi or PayPal using the buttons below.