Warning: I am writing this when I am now like pretty drunk so this is gonna be some bad writing but whatever.
As most Hong Kong millennials remember Xanga, I was one of the Xanga users. I remember yahooing (yeah Google wasn’t a thing by then) ways to change the font size, add some background music, or to set a cursor image, which I later on in life realised is something called HTML and CSS. Yes, that was my first touch of (something close to programming), while having multiple friends telling me how they were playing with turtle or pygame at age five when I tried to seek help from them for my Python learning, at age (almost) 30.
So, long story short, this is a blog/ journal of me doing different new things other than focusing on my career, after realising and accepting that being a journalist is somewhat impossible anymore here in Hong Kong.
Those things include, and list might keep being updated:
When I was in (a narrow-minded and conservative Christian) secondary school, I thought I could party all the time or do all sorts of crazy things once I got into university. Turns out, I spent my university life on taking part in social movements, kinda crazy too, I guess.
Being a millennial growing up in Hong Kong was never easy, if you weren’t born very privileged or are at least moderately empathetic. The summer before I kick start my university life, here came the Moral and national education (MNE).
Imagine an iron house without windows, absolutely indestructible, with many people fast asleep inside who will soon die of suffocation. But you know since they will die in their sleep, they will not feel the pain of death. Now if you cry aloud to wake a few of the lighter sleepers, making those unfortunate few suffer the agony of irrevocable death, do you think you are doing them a good turn?
Preface to “Call to Arms”, Lu Xun
In my teens, I didn’t have a lot of friends, I mean, I’d say I had none. Therefore, I spent my puberty in the library, given the poverty I was also born in. Coming across with Lu Xun changed my life, in a lot of ways, one of them is that it made me choose literature as my major.
As I said, I didn’t come from a privileged environment, but thanks to public education (and full government subsidy), I am now somewhat educated and not in poverty anymore. Yet, realising how the education for the next generation had failed, I thought, journalism is the way to go, and journalism is exactly the execution of Lu Xun’s ambition of ‘you may cure a hundred bodies being a doctor, but through literature, you can cure a whole nation’.
Circling back to my university life - I went to CUHK - the hotbed of Hong Kong student activism since the 70s. Spending your first year in activism is great but have you ever spent also your last year in university on a strike?
That was how I got into journalism.
I never knew how to have fun. I’ve always tried to ‘do something that makes the world a better one’, like what Lu Xun did (well China is still a hell but at least he changed me).
Fast-forwarding to November 2020, four months after Beijing enacted the draconian National Security Law in Hong Kong, a former colleague was arrested for the “crime” of producing a documentary about a mob attack which tied back to the police force. And fast-forwarding, again, to 2021, the closure of Apple Daily marks the closure of my journalism career.
So.. what am I gonna do with my life anymore?
One of the things I’ve learned from my mental illness is that, having people feeling sorry for you is not a good feeling. When your friends are in jail for justice, I’ve come to realising living a good life on their behalf is essential, as well as what they want us to be doing. Acknowledging the very fact that not everyone can be Kafka, we might as well just enjoy what we do while being a good person, other than always pursuing something big.
So yeah, I’m not a journalist anymore, in a way, but I can still try to be a better person everyday, which could mean, acquiring new skills no matter how old you are or becoming.
Here I am, and not limited to
After months, I’ve finally launched this de-press (not a press anymore do you get my joke) blog, just to force myself to at least write, even if my learning journey doesn’t go well, and because I know writing would make me happy.
TBC.