EPILOGUE

MAP OF TEARS

We all build our own mental maps of the cities we live in: maps of the playgrounds we played in as children; maps of all the streets on which we have lived; maps of the places where we have been kissed. Over time, these maps build up in layers to form our personal topography of the city.

Many Hong Kongers now have a new layer on their maps: the map of places where they have been tear-gassed.

I have been tear-gassed in Admiralty, Wanchai, Causeway Bay, and North Point; in Sai Ying Pun and Sheung Wan and Central. I have been tear-gassed in Mong Kok, Yau Ma Tei, Jordan, Tsim Sha Tsui, and Hung Hom. In Tuen Mun, Tsuen Wan, Kwun Tung, and Yuen Long.

In 2019, tear gas maps of Hong Kong circulated online, showing all of the locations and districts in which tear gas had been fired. All eighteen districts, other than the outlying islands, were accounted for, from Sheung Shui in the north by the Shenzhen border to Aberdeen on the south side of Hong Kong Island.

Memories are fixed to points in space. We understand memory as being attached to specific spaces of significance. Upon these spaces the texts of the past are written as a palimpsest.

The 2019 protest movement wrote layer after layer of new meaning onto the palimpsest of Hong Kong.

Long after the graffitied slogans have faded from the streets, long after the Lennon Walls have resumed their roles as anonymous pedestrian tunnels, the spaces of this protest movement — as with past protest movements — will continue to live in the collective memory of the city as memory spaces.

The spaces in which the protests occurred — the sites of the Lennon Walls, the campus of PolyU, the roads surrounding the government headquarters, the forecourt of the LegCo building — are loaded with images, meaning, and memories. Memories of what has taken place there before, memories of imagined possible futures. Protesters talk of a shared dream: the dream of the day when they are victorious, and can embrace each other under the LegCo building, remove their masks, and see each other as if for the first time.

These spaces are in the real world, and also in the virtual world, embracing the cultural icons, the satirical humour, and the artwork of the movement.

These memories take their place as additional inhabitants, phantoms haunting the urban space. They live side by side with us, walk with us on the streets, whisper in our ears.

If you stand in the cement canyons under the freeway overpasses, between the buildings, you can hear the echoes of their voices.

‘Reclaim Hong Kong! Revolution of our times!’