It’s a bitter harvest this year in Hong Kong after a long, hard summer of violence and unrest – the hardest, perhaps, in its history.
The Mid-Autumn Festival, traditionally one of the most peaceful in a city known for its noisy, colourful celebrations, is a good time for reflection. It takes place each year on the 15th day of the eighth month in the lunar calendar and honours Chang’e, the goddess of the moon.
She was the beloved wife of the mighty hero Hou Yi and, while details vary as to how she became imprisoned on the moon with her jade rabbit, the point is that it’s at Mid-Autumn – when the moon is at its fullest and brightest – that she can be seen.
That is when Hou Yi lays out Chang’e’s favourite foods and sits, yearning for her in the moonlight. And each year he is joined by Hongkongers who light paper lanterns, admire the beautiful moon and, of course, eat.
Which brings us to mooncakes. Like the seasonal treats of every other culture, they seem to turn up earlier each year. This time in Hong Kong, some of them have carried a political message.
It’s an old idea, originating in a legend that mooncakes were used to deliver secret messages coordinating an uprising against the rulers of the day.
There is some dispute around the historical accuracy of the tale but, for any student of Chinese culture, the layers of meaning attached to the poetry and stories of the past are always instructive.
One Hong Kong bakery caused a sensation in the early days of the disturbances with a range of mooncakes that carried political messages – not inside them, but instead stamped on the top.
Mooncake messaging: ‘No retreat, no surrender’ and ‘stand as one.’
They sold like … well, mooncakes … and one of the most popular carried a message which bears a little explaining. It derived from an early encounter between a reporter and a police officer which resulted in a very Hong Kong-style exchange.
“I’m a journalist,” the reporter said, to which the officer responded with a phrase which translates roughly as “Journalist your mum”. This derives from a typically direct and highly popular expression in Hong Kong which runs ‘diu lei lo mo’.
In the fluid and ever-inventive way of Hong Kong Cantonese, the phrase has been abbreviated in my absence so that the once-ubiquitous ‘diu’ – yes, it’s the ‘f’ word – is now rarely heard. ‘Your mother’ will do in getting your meaning across loud and clear.
“Gei lei lo mo” was instantly taken up by the protest movement, with a mock redesigned logo for the venerable Hong Kong Journalists Association, t-shirts (of course!) and, finally, mooncakes.
The redesigned HKJA logo. Not officially approved.
Your Girl Reporter is not a fan of the mooncake. They come in all shapes and flavours these days, but traditionally here in Hong Kong they contain an egg – and a salty duck egg at that.
It’s a known fact that I don’t ‘do’ eggs, salty or otherwise. And, since my mother played a key role in the formation of the HKJA, I can’t in conscience partake of a “journalist your mum” mooncake, no matter the filling.
But, as we munch on our Mid-Autumn Festival snacks this year, I’m sure we’re all wondering how we got here.
It started as discontent over a piece of legislation – the sort of thing that passes in most places without anyone really noticing. In my native Australia, for example, successive bills limiting civic freedoms and slamming the disadvantaged have passed largely unremarked.
People came out in remarkable numbers to make their displeasure known
But here in Hong Kong I was immediately struck by the level of engagement – from seemingly all sections of society – at every step of the extradition bill’s progress through the legislature.
It was apparent that the implications of the bill were clear to all when people came out in remarkable numbers, and from seemingly all walks of life, to make their displeasure known.
Hong Kong’s chief executive Carrie Lam announced back in June that the bill was ‘dead’ and – just a day later – two million people took to the streets to say, ‘not dead enough.’
Once again, the nuance was in the phrase Lam used in Cantonese. She may have said ‘dead’ in English, but in the local tongue she suggested it was sleeping naturally after a long life.
Lamma Island prepares for Mid-Autumn Festival. Hong Kong 2018
As protesters were quick to point out, something that is sleeping can, theoretically, be awakened in the future. In a Pythonesque moment, Hong Kong’s social media lit up with other phrases which alluded to the bill resting after a long squawk or joining the choir invisible.
My favourite, and most relevant in the context of mooncakes, was “gone to sell salty duck eggs”.
The mood has darkened considerably since those early days of summer, as the stakes have grown higher and each side has become more entrenched in its position.
There are enough pundits out there speculating on how this will all end but both sides are intensely aware of the need to win the public relations battle. Language, again, is a key weapon in Hong Kong.
A Mid-Autumn festival offering in Lamma Main Street. Hong Kong 2018
The news focus is naturally on the ever-increasing intensity of the physical encounters between the riot police and protesters, along with each side’s supporters in cities around the world.
But there’s also a battle playing out on social media, with a dizzying flood of memes and counter-memes, troll attacks and spin. Once again, the Hong Kong protesters showed their quick thinking and ingenuity.
They switched from posting in Chinese characters to using English renderings of Cantonese phrases, to avoid attracting the attention of China’s troll army.
It was a very Hong Kong approach, based on the realisation that mainlanders generally don’t speak Cantonese and would not recognise it when it’s spelled out phonetically in the Roman alphabet.
A Mid-Autumn festival display at Times Square. Hong Kong 2018
In the public relations arena, both on the internet and in the streets, the protesters are proving themselves to be the more flexible.
Week after week, in ever more imaginative ways, they demonstrate – in the only way they have – that they cannot be defined as a few violent radicals.
So diverse are the people taking to the streets in this movement that the police were forced to warn, on the last day of August, that shopping, marching for religious purposes and flower-viewing could all constitute unlawful assembly.
More threats and menaces, this time aimed explicitly at the accountants, lawyers, the ‘silver-haired’ elderly, the religious, the mothers. All these groups, and more, have held distinctive, peaceful rallies or marches over the summer.
‘Lennon Walls’ have been a feature of the Hong Kong protests, springing up everywhere – including on the water-filled barriers deployed by the police. Hong Kong 2019
It muddles the official narrative when little old ladies are bursting into shouts of “Heung Gong yan. Ga yau!” in glitzy Causeway Bay shopping centres, before politely handing out leaflets from the Silver-Hairs.
Away from the violence, it’s the most notable aspect of these protests and, once again, the messaging from the people of Hong Kong to their masters is clear: It could be summarised as ‘threaten away, we’re pretty universally angry right now and we’re not backing down.’
Meanwhile, the only strategy of the authorities appears to be an increasingly brutal effort to drive a wedge between the peaceful protesters and the radical wing of this movement.
So far, it isn’t working. One reason for that lies in a popular slogan doing the rounds which translates, roughly, as “everyone reaching the top by their own means”.
A message from the ‘silver-hairs’ to the shoppers of Causeway Bay.
As one Hong Kong Tweeter put it: “So while everyone won’t always agree with each other, we let the frontliners do their thing, the pro-US folks fly their flags, writers keep writing. No infighting.”
With no incentive for either side to change strategy, this downward spiral is not ending any time soon. We will be eating the bitter fruits of this summer’s harvest for a long time yet.
UPDATE: Carrie Lam has now formally withdrawn the extradition bill, a move which has been almost universally described as ‘too little, too late.’ As of this writing, protests look set to continue. There is no peace yet for Hong Kong.
© Maria Spackman 2021
Further reading:
Hong Kong bakery finds success with anti-extradition mooncakes and cookies – but police supporters bite back – by Zoe Low, South China Morning Post. July 11, 2019
An explanation of ‘journo your mum’ and other expressions which have been a feature of the Hong Kong protests – by Mary Hui, Quartz. June 20, 2019
Did Mooncakes Help the Chinese Overthrow the Mongols? – by Natasha Frost at Atlas Obscura
If, like Your Girl Reporter, you could use a little light relief, try this trip down Memory Lane to a simpler, more innocent time:
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