686: Umbrellas Up

Ira Glass

It's nearly 2:00 in the afternoon when we reach Jennifer's family's apartment, and she's just gotten up. She's still eating a very late breakfast.

Ira Glass

I'm with my co-worker, Emanuele Berry, and we're in a quiet working-class neighborhood in the part of Hong Kong that's called New Territories. It's a Sunday, so Jennifer is getting ready to do what she does every weekend-- what she did yesterday, in fact. That's why she slept late. She's going to a protest-- with a little backpack.

Ira Glass

So this is a maroon bag.

Ira Glass

The first aid kit is a little zip-up bag with roller bandages and gauze and gloves and stuff to sterilize a wound. Jennifer started at the volunteer ambulance corps in seventh grade and has used all this stuff at demonstrations. She packs her wallet and her AirPods.

Ira Glass

Two batteries for her phone because she's on it constantly during protests, checking the continuously updated online maps that show where the police are and show escape routes. She packs a black T-shirt. The uniform of the Hong Kong protesters is black shirt, black pants, surgical masks to disguise their identities.

Jennifer, by the way, is not her real name. But for the bus ride to the protest, she doesn't wear her uniform. She wears a striped maroon shirt.

Ira Glass

For a Hong Kong protester to live at home with her mom and dad, that is not unusual in any way. If you know anything about the demonstrations that have overtaken Hong Kong since June, you know it's mostly young people in the city where rents are high. Jennifer is 22 and just graduated college. She's working her first entry-level job at a public relations firm.

I came to Hong Kong because there were things about the protests that I really did not understand, and we'll get to that. But one of the things that fascinated me once I arrived was learning what a routine the protests have become and what that was like for the people in them. This was mid-September, the 13th week of protests for Jennifer.

Ira Glass

Speak of the devil, it's her friend, the one who kisses your boyfriend at demonstrations. And she's calling with bad news. She was going to bring gas masks to the rally today. They'd order them from Amazon, Jennifer thinks. But now she's learned that bringing gas masks would be a bad idea. Because at the subway station--

Ira Glass

Not ideal, but she's gone without gas masks before. Jennifer grabs her knapsack, says bye to her mom, who tells her to come home early, a request that will be totally ignored. And we head outside. But then she turns and runs back.

Ira Glass

Rubber bullets, that is.

Ira Glass

Also, protesters hide behind a wall of umbrellas when they're painting graffiti or dismantling a closed-circuit TV camera on the street, doing anything else they don't want the police to see.

As she and I and Emanuele head to the bus stop, we notice other young people carrying full-sized umbrellas on this totally sunny day.

Ira Glass

It's like, are you on my side? Are you one of us? Once you're at the protest, everybody's in a mass so you don't really know who's on your team. Here in the neighborhood, it's kind of exciting to wonder who your allies might be.

The protests in Hong Kong have been international news for months, kicked off by people's fears that mainland China is threatening some very basic things about their city and their lives. But for all the coverage, here at our show, we felt like we weren't seeing many stories where we got to know anybody very well-- who they were, what exactly they expected was going to come out of the protests, given China's intransigence.

Three of us arrived in Hong Kong in mid-September, me and Emanuele and a co-worker, Diane Wu. I have to say, one of the things that was fascinating, given the ugly state of democracy here in the United States lately, was to be among so many young people who believe so intensely in democratic ideals and yearn so deeply for the basics, like normal elections and free speech and free assembly.

Though, just in the last few weeks since we got to Hong Kong, we've watched the situation change dramatically. It's gotten much more violent, harsh new measures by the government.

This hour, we have the story of the change that we witnessed and what we think it might mean. If you haven't been following this story at all-- maybe you've been sitting this one out-- we're going to catch you up on what you need to know. We have all sorts of people from all sides of this that we want you to meet. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. This week, overseas with a lot of people who have some very American values. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, The Cursed Generation. OK, so what politicized thousands and thousands of people this much, that they've dropped their normal lives, and they're coming out every single weekend to protest? It's now been 18 straight weeks.

Take Jennifer, for instance. She's somebody who worked at Abercrombie and Fitch during college. She told me on the bus to protest that's why her English is so good. She's somebody who wanted to be a singer. Actually got a chance to go pro when she was 16, but her mom quashed that, saying it was too much of a long shot and she should get an education and get a normal job. Jennifer was actually very surprised when I informed her that an American parent might have said the same exact thing.

Ira Glass

So how did this Glee-watching, internet-savvy college grad in her first office job, how did she end up protesting in the street every weekend with tens or-- I don't know-- maybe it's hundreds of thousands of her peers? Well, for starters, Jennifer's 22, which means she's part of a special generation in Hong Kong.

Ira Glass

And here's a protester we're calling Alice.

Ira Glass

Here's her friend we're calling Tiffany.

Ira Glass

OK, let's just pause on these 22-year-olds for a minute for some quick history. As you may or may not know, Hong Kong sits on the edge of mainland China, right? It was a British colony for a really long time, starting in the 19th century. And then finally, in 1997, the British got out. They handed it over to China. And the idea was, there's going to be a 50-year transition period. After 50 years, China would fully be in charge. But during that 50 years, Hong Kong would be a democracy.

Ira Glass

That's the last British governor of Hong Kong during the handover ceremony in 1997.

Ira Glass

But to be clear, Hong Kong had not been a democracy under Britain. But they were going to transition towards it over a bunch of years. And the hope was, after 50 years, in 2047, the Chinese government would let them stay a democracy-- which, at the time, did not seem like a crazy idea.

China was opening up in all kinds of ways, though it wasn't clear how this was going to play out. And at the end of the day, after 50 years, in the year 2047, China was going to be able to do whatever it wanted in Hong Kong. These are the children born the year that clock started ticking.

Ira Glass

Originally, the joke had to do with a coincidence. They were cursed because of some weird, bad luck during some big childhood milestones they all went through together, like the year of their kindergarten graduation, the SARS virus hit Hong Kong. And the city shut down, graduations were canceled.

Six years later, when they should've had their elementary school graduation, same thing happened again, but with swine flu. And Jennifer remembers that her friends joked that when they graduated high school, it was going to be Ebola. And that's when they started using the word "cursed."

Ira Glass

Jennifer says the "chosen one" side of things didn't really kick in until their senior year of high school. It was 2014. They were 17, the 17th year since the handover. And that year, people in Hong Kong were still expecting that mainland China was going to let them start holding full-on elections, where they could choose their own leaders, as promised back in 1997. And that year, China announced it wasn't going to happen.

This led to a movement called the Umbrella Movement, headed by young people, teenagers, who'd learned their politics in these public school classes that all these 22-year-olds talk about as being instrumental in their thinking, classes that began as part of the handover called Liberal Studies classes that explained, among other things, the promises of 1997 and the rights of Hong Kong citizens.

They took to the streets, most of them for the first time, demanding to vote, carrying umbrellas, thousands of people in a vast procession down the streets in a protest movement that was almost entirely peaceful. And they lost. They didn't get the vote. After three months, the protests ended.

Alice works for a multinational company in an entry-level job out of college. She's a management trainee. She says she went to some protests back then out of solidarity with her peers.

Ira Glass

But she did really get all the politics. That changed this June, when Hong Kong introduced the bill that would allow mainland China to extradite people from Hong Kong to be tried and punished in China under Chinese law. This was seen as a new and very menacing encroachment on the rights of Hong Kong citizens.

Since 1997, they'd been ruled by Hong Kong laws and Hong Kong courts, where everybody is presumed innocent with the rights we know in most democratic countries. Now, anybody could get thrown into the prisons and courts of communist China.

Ira Glass

Wanting Hong Kong to stay like it is with its own laws, separate from China. A week later, 2 million people came out.

Ira Glass

Other 22-year-olds also told us how radicalizing it's been to see police teargassing and beating peaceful protesters. And at this point-- I didn't understand this before we got to Hong Kong-- a lot of the emotion driving the protests is just about the police.

Ira Glass

Of course, nobody knows where this is going to lead by 2047, when China fully takes over Hong Kong. But for Jennifer and lots of other people her age, things are starting to feel pretty ominous. Was Hong Kong going to become just like any other Chinese city run by the communists?

Ira Glass

She's talking about internment camps where the Chinese are holding perhaps a million Uighurs and others.

Ira Glass

Because she's politically active, this does not feel like an abstract threat. When these 22-year-olds picture who China's going to crack down on, it's them.

Tiffany's also in her first job out of college. She works at a bank. She asked us to replace her voice with an actress.

Ira Glass

Tiffany's heard of the social credit system that China has started to monitor and rate its citizens. She fears that if China decides that you're anti-government, it will make it impossible for you to get the job you want or rise in society. And the devices the China uses to monitor its population, an estimated 200 million surveillance cameras around the country with facial recognition software, they've been going up around Hong Kong, tens of thousands of them.

Ira Glass

This is something else I didn't understand before I came to Hong Kong. The protesters like Tiffany and Jennifer don't just fear what's going to happen to them in the future, with extradition laws or losing the internet or losing free speech. In their daily lives right now, they believe they're watching China already transforming Hong Kong, making it less like the Hong Kong they know and more like the mainland.

Jennifer points to changes in the public school curricula. Like, she says, her seven-year-old nephew is speaking Mandarin in school five days a week. That didn't happen when she was a kid. Mandarin's what they speak in mainland China. In Hong Kong, people mostly speak in Cantonese and in English.

Ira Glass

It's part of what makes Hong Kong Hong Kong. These days, when Jennifer pictures what her life is going to be like between now and 2047, she imagines her own kids going to public schools, not studying Cantonese, coming home and parroting the pro-government line that'll be the curriculum by then.

Ira Glass

Another change she says she's seeing right now in Hong Kong, she's upset at all the mainlanders moving there in her neighborhood, and university students that she and her friends encountered at college. So many mainlanders, she says.

Ira Glass

Oh, yeah, I'm just going to pause the tape there for a second. The total, by the way, is over a million mainlanders since 1997, roughly 45,000 a year. But I'm stopping the tape because I don't know how you're feeling about Jennifer, but this was a point we came to in a few interviews with these 22-year-olds. When you got them under the subject of mainlanders, get ready for a wave of totally bigoted opinions.

Ira Glass

So for all the alarm that Jennifer and the cursed generation feel about the future, the parents are often not as alarmed about China taking more control of Hong Kong and about what the island's going to be like in 2047. Like Tiffany's parents, they hate her going out to protest every weekend.

Ira Glass

What's galling about this for Tiffany is that she feels like she's being the responsible one, fighting for everybody's future. And they're telling her not to protest. She was like, maybe if your parents had done this themselves years ago, things wouldn't be so bad today.

Ira Glass

So Tiffany and Jennifer and so many others, they've kind of given over their lives to protesting. They work during the week, protest on the weekends. They say they don't have much time in their lives for much else. But what's interesting is, they don't think it's going to work. Most of our interviewees told us that. They don't think China is going to give in. Again, here's Jennifer.

Ira Glass

Again, here's Alice.

Ira Glass

2047 is coming, and this is a very grand thing to say, but so many of these curse generation kids feel like they have a special destiny. Alex preferred to speak to us through an interpreter. She's a frontline protester, builds barricades, has been arrested.

Ira Glass

Again, here's Jennifer.

Ira Glass

After an hour bus ride, we get to the protest. This is Act Two, The Fight. Once you're off of the bus, Jennifer ducks into a public restroom and comes out in black shirt, black pants, black mask over her face, hair pulled back in a ponytail. And we head on to a street where we're surrounded by hundreds of people dressed exactly like her.

A big shopping district, the stores closed, and no cars. All the side streets have been blocked off with barricades by the protesters-- scaffolding and fencing, trashcans, and orange construction cones piled in the street. They do an efficient job. We meet up with Jennifer's friends by a big Victoria's Secret store.

Ira Glass

For the record, I'm with them all afternoon-- no kissing at all. The city is giving permission for fewer protests these days, and this is an unsanctioned demonstration we're at, which means that everybody here is breaking the law. Anyone is subject to arrest, which affects crowd size. The maximum penalty is five years-- 10 years, if you're convicted of rioting-- which is why all the protesters are so scared of getting arrested all the time.

But despite that, the beginning of the protest has the feeling of a block party. People strolling, chatting-- you see a few parents and kids. Some non-protesters cut through the crowd, running errands. But an hour into all this, I look around and realize-- no families, no kids. It's not feeling like a block party at all. People are standing on top of fences, trying to see what's ahead of us. They're starting to put on gas masks.

Ira Glass

It's like two or three blocks away. We walk towards the police and the tear gas, past teams of protesters who are knocking bricks out of the sidewalk with long steel tools.

Ira Glass

Also, people throw bricks at the police. We march straight to the frontlines, where hundreds of protesters are massed on a side street. The police are just half a block away, but we can't really see them through the crowd. And then a whole wave of tear gas canisters arcs towards us, hits us.

And lots of people, us included, run back a ways, half a block away. Jennifer calmly administers saline solution into strangers' eyes. The controls on my recorder got knocked around running through the smoke, so I do not have a decent recording of that.

This is the role that she's assigned herself in the protest-- first aid, helping anybody who requires it. She even brought energy candy specifically to give out to people whose energy is flagging. After being driven back, Jennifer and her two friends and I wait for the smoke to clear.

Ira Glass

After a couple minutes, we head back toward the front line.

And then we wait around. A water cannon goes off, blasting water that is dyed blue, laced with stuff that stings your skin. More tear gas, and we pull back a little. Then we move forward, wait again.

Ira Glass

So many protesters are like Jennifer. They feel like it's their job to support the people at the front, who are the hardcore ones, who push back against police and throw Molotov cocktails, and chase police with sticks and metal rods, and tear stuff down to build barriers to slow the police, wearing full gear, helmets and goggles and gas masks and gloves.

Finally, the frontliners yell that they want room to retreat. And so we need to retreat. And so we fall way back, a couple blocks.

Ira Glass

And then we headed to a massive retreat, as the police advance towards us. And for the first time, there seems to be actual real fear. We're running down the streets and side roads. We get separated from Jennifer's friends and from Emanuele, dodging the police, and finally, taking refuge in a church. There are safe houses like this around Hong Kong that protesters duck into. It takes over an hour, and finally, the coast is clear.

And Jennifer calls her friend to pick her up. They're volunteer drivers for the protesters, part of the infrastructure they've created. Jennifer changes out of her black T-shirt into civilian clothes. No makeup-- she's too tired, she says, and no need, if she's getting picked up.

Ira Glass

And she heads home.

Ira Glass

As her car pulled away, across the street on Queens Road, there was an endless row of police vehicles headed in the other direction, just dozens of them, blue and red lights flashing. And as night went on, things became violent. A woman approached us on the sidewalk, upset about police beating somebody, and showed us video that she'd shot of it.

And the protesters were violent as well. The newspapers had accounts of six of them beating up a middle-aged man, kicking and shouting at him. They set fire to a subway station. They do that a lot because lots of protesters think Hong Kong subway-- the MTR-- colludes with the police. That's why Jennifer prefers the bus, even though it's less convenient.

Every protester we interviewed supports the violence. They support it because they feel like they have no other options, that it's the only way they can get the government to respond to them. A few told us, back in June, they marched peacefully against the extradition bill and got nothing. Then they got violent, and the bill was withdrawn. It worked.

And violence has become a way to defend themselves. Setting fires and building barricades slows police, who were coming after them. So they support the violence, or they at least understand it. Emanuele talked to them about that. We're at Act Three of our show, On Civil Disobedience. Here's Emanuele.

Emanuele Berry

When I started asking protesters about violence, a couple of them said, we're not violent like Americans. Our tolerance for it is much lower. So getting to this point to being OK with violence isn't something we did lightly. And a lot of them explained to me that they didn't always think radical tactics were OK.

What changed their opinion was the way police responded to peaceful protest. That being shot at with water cannons, tear gassed, seeing someone knocked unconscious, beaten with batons, handcuffed and kicked, groups of thugs beating and attacking people with hammers, clubs, and knives, watching all this and being subjected to it-- that's what got a lot of people on board with violence. Now some protesters throw Molotov cocktails, vandalize buildings, and chase police with sticks and rods. Ira and I talked with one protester, Yuen.

Emanuele Berry

So many people we talked with expected someone to die-- a protester or a police officer. Most thought it would help the movement put pressure on the government. This hasn't happened yet, but destruction and violence are giving way to bizarre scenes throughout the city. My co-worker Diane and I went to this protest at a mall, one of many in Hong Kong.

Sometimes the entire city can feel like one giant Chinese shopping mall connected by subway. The stores are all open. The mall is full of people. But not many people are shopping. The entire premise of this protest is to go to the mall and not shop.

The mall is five stories. Each tier has railings that look out over a central atrium. There are families, kids, older folks. Some people are in black. Others are just in their regular day clothes. They chant. They sing the protester anthem, "Glory to Hong Kong," over and over.

[PROTESTERS SINGING]

At one point, someone starts handing out paper, and suddenly hundreds of people are folding paper cranes. Then, an act of gentle vandalism. There's this machine that prints out reservation receipts for the restaurant called Jade Garden. The protesters hijack it, forcing it to spit out hundreds of receipts. They tape the receipts together and string them from one end of the atrium to the other and back again a few times.

They target Jade Garden because one of the company's founders has a daughter who supports Beijing. That's how far things have gone in Hong Kong. Businesses are labeled either yellow or blue-- yellow for the ones that support the protesters, blue for the police and government. There's even a Google Map that tells you if a business is one or the other.

Soon, things in the mall start to shift. Diane and I watch a group of about a dozen protesters enter a pro-China bakery, owned by the same company that owns Jade Garden. They start taunting the staff.

Before things can escalate any further, the workers force the protesters out, close the store gates, and barricade themselves in. A restless energy takes over. It's like the protesters are looking for something to confront, something to disturb. But the thing they're fighting against is the existential threat of China. And that's not really in the mall.

They march to more pro-China businesses in the mall. The alarm starts going off, and a PA announcement says, "The mall is very crowded. Please be careful." Then word comes police are on their way, and some mood that feels like a mix of fear and adrenaline fills the space.

Protesters begin to build barriers out of whatever is not nailed to the ground, blocking doorways, creating obstacles. They want to stop the police from entering from the subway entrance of the mall. They start throwing trash cans down the escalators. A group rips a six-foot TV screen out of a wall to use as part of a blockade.

The PA announcement remains the same. "Please be careful. The mall is very crowded." They open an emergency firehose. Someone brings giant jugs of oil, which they add to the water. The tile floor of the mall lobby is now a little lake that police will have to cross. A woman slips and falls.

And while all this destruction is happening, the shoppers, the older folks, even a few families, they don't leave. They're on the upper levels of the mall, looking over the railing, like they're watching a sporting event or something. I'm super uncomfortable. The protester next to us, Chan, is so chill.

Emanuele Berry

The police eventually come, but they meet the protesters outside the mall. They throw tear gas. Protesters threw a Molotov cocktail. Smoke and gas waft through Snoopy World, a mini theme park on one of the mall's upper levels. Giant statues of Linus and Peppermint Patty, along with dozens of shoppers and protesters, who lined the outdoor balconies, all watch the confrontation between police and protesters unfold below.

There's this thing that protesters say to each other-- never sever ties. Sometimes they even say, never sever ties even if there's a nuclear explosion. Basically, if another protester does something you disagree with-- say, set something on fire, beat someone up-- you don't criticize them or cut them off.

My co-worker Diane saw an extreme example of this at a protest about a week later. It was a very peaceful protest in a park at night. So serene, Diane said she felt she could only whisper. Then a guy starts waving a big Chinese flag around. Protesters start shouting at him. He rips a poster out of one girl's hands. That's when the mob rushes in.

Emanuele Berry

Dozens of people walk by. And if anyone has a problem with this, they don't show it. He's left face down on the ground, bleeding from his head. Eventually, someone gets a first aid person to help.

Ira Glass

Emanuele Berry is one of the producers of our show. She used to live next door to Hong Kong in Macau for about a year. Coming up, you're a protester. You think the police are utterly immoral and indefensible. So, what do you do about the cop who happens to be your dad? That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, Umbrellas Up, stories from Hong Kong and what it's like for people to live through over 100 days of protests there. I traveled to Hong Kong with my co-workers, Diane Wu and Emanuele Berry. We have arrived at Act Four of our show. Act Four, Good Cop, Bad Cop.

So as an American visiting Hong Kong for the first time, one of the things that kind of killed me was hearing that before the last few years of protests, people were really into the police. They were trusted. They were respected. And it was only the last few years, especially the last few months of protests, that changed all that. At a rally, I actually saw people chanting at a row of cops that they hoped that they and their families would die.

And feelings about who to side with, the police or the protesters, they've gotten so intense, it's tearing families apart. On the Telegram app, there's a whole channel for protesters who get kicked out by their parents and need a place to live.

Alan Yu grew up in Hong Kong. He knows a family that is very far apart on this. The son is a protester. The dad is a retired police officer. And Alan had them sit down and do what nobody in Hong Kong is doing-- talk to each other. There is really no dialogue between police and protesters anywhere in Hong Kong as far as we could tell. Here's Alan.

Alan Yu

I've known this family since I was six. I knew them because of my friend, Jonathan. I rode the school bus with him every day. His father, Peter, was the first policeman I knew in real life. I was excited to talk to him because you never hear what the police think about the protests. Police here are not really allowed to talk to the press.

Peter's retired, but still very connected to the force. So before the family all sat down together, I asked Peter to get together with me and my producer, Emanuele. I hadn't seen him since I was 12. Back then, people called me "Yu-don," which means fish ball, because the Cantonese for fish sounds like my surname, Yu, and because I was fat.

Alan Yu

As a kid, I liked Peter. He'd take time off work to stop by during recess and buy us chips and other snacks. My friend Jonathan would have his birthday parties at the police station, which we loved-- big barbecues, other policemen around. Peter was the cool dad.

People in Hong Kong trusted, even revered, the police back then. One of the most popular TV shows was a cop show, [CHINESE], where the police were heroes. Peter's hair is gray now. He's tall, athletic. He plays tennis.

Alan Yu

He still likes his dad jokes. I cannot imagine Peter ever doing what I've been seeing in these videos-- beating up unarmed protesters, kicking people on the ground. I thought surely he would object to some of those things and that his views would be complicated.

Alan Yu

I ask him about different situations the police have been criticized for. I even show him videos of police brutally arresting people, things I think are clearly wrong. But he always seems to have a justification for the way police behave. He says you are judging the police based on what you see in these clips. That's not fair. You don't know what the officer was facing.

Alan Yu

He's not conflicted about police, and he isn't very sympathetic to protesters. He thinks the protests are destroying Hong Kong. The extradition bill is OK. He doesn't think China will end free speech in Hong Kong, and protesters' fear of China is way overblown and naive.

Alan Yu

I'd already been worried how this family conversation was going to go. Hearing what Peter believed did not help. Peter told me he understands that Jonathan goes to protests, but doesn't ask him about it because he doesn't want any details. Jonathan said he does not ask his dad what he thinks of the way police beat and tear gas protesters for the same reason.

So this family does not talk about the protests at all. Tennis, yes. Soccer, yes. Pets, great. But no politics-- till tonight. They've agreed to have the conversation they've been avoiding after dinner. Jonathan's mom, Alva, washes the dishes.

[ALVA HUMMING]

I recognize the song right away. I'm surprised she's humming it in front of Peter. It's the protesters' new anthem, "Glory to Hong Kong." Alva is on Jonathan's side. She works with lawyers, including some in the pro-democracy camp.

I ask if Peter knows what that song is. She says, maybe. That's kind of how it's been going between her and her husband. No real discussion, but the occasional passive aggressive comment while they're watching the news, or some passive aggressive humming during dishes. This is another reason Jonathan avoids bringing up the protests. He doesn't want to start a fight between his parents.

Alan Yu

That could be his mom, or his dad, or him.

We all sit at the dinner table. I don't know why they agreed to talk about this. Maybe just because I've known them for so long, and I asked. Or I hope maybe part of them wanted to talk, and I was just a good excuse. Peter's facing me, and Jonathan and Alva are next to me. Jonathan has their dog, Loki, named after the Marvel character, on his lap.

The conversation starts with all of them saying, in different ways, it's fine that we don't talk about this. We all have mutual respect. Instead of talking to each other or looking at each other, they're talking to me or looking at the dog. It feels all very careful, proper, and calm. This continues for half an hour. Then, everything changes when Peter uses the word "compromise."

Alan Yu

Compromise-- it's basically the government line. That's what Hong Kong's chief executive Carrie Lam says, that the protesters should stop protesting. And after that, the two sides can talk. Alva and Jonathan hear that as meaning the protesters should back down. They both lay into Peter.

Alan Yu

Alva says the police are the ones who need to change. They have to calm the situation. Peter says the police are doing their job. I don't know why, when the police arrest people for fighting or breaking stuff, it's treated as weird. It's illegal, so arrest them. No problem.

Alan Yu

Jonathan says, OK, yes, arrest them. But how much force does the police need to use? Sometimes a person just asks the police a question, and they still get arrested or beaten. Or people who are already on the ground, kneeling, subdued, they still get beaten. Peter doesn't respond. Then they argue, openly argue for the first time, about one of the protesters' main demands, something the government refused to budge on-- to start an independent investigation into police behavior.

Alan Yu

Peter keeps repeating the same thing over and over, like he's been backed into a corner, that there's no need for an independent investigation. Now is not the right time.

Alan Yu

The city already has a system in place to investigate complaints about the police.

Alan Yu

They talk a little longer, but it doesn't go anywhere. Alva tells me later she had other things she could have brought up, but decided against it. She didn't want her husband to feel trapped. The word she used was [CHINESE], which translates as, dead corner. No place to go.

Preserving the family was more important to her than trying to win an argument. Later, Jonathan told me he still loves his dad, but he's given up hope that his father could be a reasonable human being, at least when it comes to the police.

When I started this, I was kind of naive. I thought maybe Jonathan and his mother and father, people who actually want to understand each other, could talk about this in a productive manner. And that if they could, maybe there was hope that the rest of us could. But now, I don't have a lot of hope.

Ira Glass

Alan Yu. He's normally a reporter for WHYY's show The Pulse.

Ira Glass

Act Five, A Slow Boat to China. So what about all the people living in Hong Kong who have no problem with China, who like China? There's a lot of them, and they hold their own demonstrations, which are pretty small-- flag parties where flash mobs show up at malls and wave Chinese flags and sing the Chinese national anthem.

And the big day to celebrate China normally would be October 1, National Day, the anniversary of the Communist Party founding the modern Chinese state. And this year was going to be a big one. It was the 70th anniversary.

And the people who support mainland China were kind of resentful, because this day was supposed to be this huge holiday for them, but anticipating massive protests, the city shut down. Fireworks were canceled. Trains weren't running. Almost all the malls were going to be closed. The protesters had ruined the day again.

So in defiance, the pro-China people organized an anthem singing party for the morning of the first. Our co-worker, Diane Wu, went.

Diane Wu

The party took place at 8:30 in the morning on a boat. Not just any boat-- on the Star Ferry, this iconic Hong Kong commuter sightseeing boat on the harbor. The ferries are these beautiful old boats from colonial times with names like Silver Star, Northern Star, Twinkling Star. And today, one of them is going to get completely covered with bright red Chinese flags.

A couple dozen people are gathering at the ferry terminal. They're mostly strangers, know each other loosely from previous flash mobs and get-togethers.

[SHOUTING IN CHINESE]

"I love China," they shout.

[SHOUTING IN CHINESE]

"Support the police."

[SHOUTING IN CHINESE]

[CHEERING]

It's kind of funny when you think about it, all these people up so early on their day off, getting on a boat to sing the national anthem together. It's also a little dark, because there's a real threat of violence against people who don't support the protest.

One of these flag parties two weeks ago at a mall devolved into a brawl when protesters showed up. People on both sides got beat up. And so going out on a ferry to shout pro-China slogans is strategic. Once you're on the boat out at sea, you ought to be safe from a counter-protest. As one guy put it--

Diane Wu

In the terminal, everyone gathers in a semicircle, holding special holiday issues of the China Daily and singing the Chinese national anthem together.

[SINGING IN CHINESE]

It's a little shaky. The guy leading it told me he just learned the words a couple of weeks ago. Most of the people here, best as I can tell, are not mainlanders who grew up with the anthem. The ones I talked to were all from Hong Kong. Being this into China is new for them, something that only happened when the protests got bad enough that they found themselves rallying around this new flag.

And it's not always comfortable. I'm getting on the boat with Daniel, the guy who was griping about being terrorized, when someone puts a heart-shaped sticker on him.

Diane Wu

Red, in the crayon box of the Hong Kong protests, refers to being pro-China, versus blue for the government and yellow for the protesters. Daniel almost didn't come this morning, actually. It's not really his scene. He sees being this patriotic about China as kind of dorky. Moreover--

Diane Wu

The two things he can't accept that we end up talking about are the lack of free speech and censored access to the internet.

Diane Wu

I pointed out to him that after 28 years, it's very possible those freedoms would disappear. And he had the same response that I heard from other people who don't like the protests. He was like, well, sure, maybe.

Diane Wu

It's a big jump from I could never live in China to I would sacrifice my freedom just to get this to stop. But the intensity of the protests and his frustration with what he is experiencing in the city have driven him to at least try on this extreme idea.

Daniel's 40, works in finance. He lived in the US for 12 years. He's a football fan. Roots for the Chicago Bears because he likes the tenacious defense. He says he wasn't politically involved before all this. Went to one of the big peaceful protests last spring, more to watch than to participate.

But that changed one day when he was watching a livestream of the young protesters storming the legislative council. He was surprised how ferocious they seemed, how even the police officers looked a little scared.

Diane Wu

He woke up the next morning to see that the coverage was wall-to-wall about police brutality. To Daniel, it seemed like everyone was leaving out the fact that the protesters had started it, which seemed deeply unjust to the police.

Diane Wu

Other people sided against the protest for different reasons. A big one I heard was the disruption they caused. The security guard told me he had to transfer four times to get home by night because of subway shutdowns.

A woman trying to get cash out of an ATM that had been destroyed by protesters said, if you're mad at the government, take it out on the government. You're only hurting people like me. A man said to me, sadly, Hong Kong is our home. Why are they destroying it?

[SINGING IN CHINESE]

[CHEERING]

The crowd on the boat finishes belting out the national anthem a second time, when, suddenly, everyone rushes to the railing.

Everyone crammed together on one side in a position that's a little precarious. That's kind of like Daniel's world right now. He felt pushed to choose a team. Like it or not, these are his new people. He doesn't think like them, exactly. But he feels more aligned with these Chinese nationalists on this boat waving at the police than with the angry protesters ganging up on them, even if those protesters ultimately want the same thing he does-- to preserve their freedoms in Hong Kong.

[SINGING IN CHINESE]

Sitting on the upper deck of the Star Ferry, this was actually the first time Daniel had ever sung the national anthem in public. He told me later, as he sang, he was surprised to find that he felt something.

Ira Glass

Diane Wu is the managing editor of our show, and she also has one more story for us. I'm going to set this up. It is Act Six of our show. Act Six, Two Weeks Later.

So October 1 wasn't just a big day for supporters of mainland China. If anything, I think it was even more anticipated by pro-democracy protesters. They knew China did not want to be embarrassed by demonstrations in Hong Kong on that day, such a big anniversary. And in the weeks leading up to it, several of them told us that they were worried. What kind of crackdown was going to come on October 1, or maybe in the days before it? Would the government try to shut them down?

And sure enough, the weekend before October 1, there were tons of police, undercover cops posing as protesters, surge in arrests. And on October 1, something happened that several of our interviewees predicted. For the first time, a protester was shot with a real bullet-- a teenager.

In the days after that, things descended. The government banned wearing face masks in public, which caused a huge backlash in the streets. Another teenager, a 14-year-old, was shot by police. Both teenagers survived, by the way. A protester slashed an officer's neck with a box cutter. A bomb went off next to a police car.

Jennifer, the protester that I went to the demonstration with in mid-September, she went to all those protests in the days before October 1, and then she was out on October 1, that big violent day. And Diane caught up with her the day after that, October 2, to see how she was doing, and to see what she made of it all.

Diane Wu

I met up with Jennifer at the MTR station in Tsuen Wan on a Wednesday. She'd taken the MTR only because she was in a big rush to meet me after work.

Diane Wu

She's talking about the protester who was shot. It actually happened just a short walk from where we're standing. The last few days of protests had been especially bad. Jennifer was in the middle of the crowd when dozens of special tactics police officers exploded out of a hidden door, sprinting after protesters and tackling them to the ground. People hadn't seen this before. It caused a wave of panic. Everyone fled in terror, including Jennifer.

Her phone was flooded with images of arrested protesters, pinned on the ground by riot police, face down with their wrists tied behind them. Later, she met her friend, the one who went to the protest with Ira and her, and found out that in the rush, she had gotten trapped. She came really close to getting arrested.

Diane Wu

Jennifer's deeply fearful of getting arrested. Remember, it could mean years in prison. After all of that, on October 1, she was almost too scared to go protest, but braved it anyways. Then, police started to fire tear gas at people up ahead of them.

Diane Wu

She panicked, started crying. Her boyfriend helped her get home.

Diane Wu

The police strategy of clamping down on the protests by outlawing almost all of them, then flooding the streets with riot police and arresting tons of people, this is the toll it's taking. And of course, this is one way the whole thing could end. Maybe it'll scare people off.

Diane Wu

Jennifer's boyfriend, Joe, shows up. He's got his shirt tucked in, a new protest tactic from this weekend. The idea is to try and expose undercover police who wouldn't be able to tuck their shirts in over their guns and batons. Joe's here for moral support because, incredibly, Jennifer is now on her way to another protest. We're headed to a soccer stadium across the street from where the protester was shot. Jennifer figures she'll stay as long as she can tolerate.

We walk onto the field. It's a big solemn group of people in their work and school clothes, all facing the bleachers.

Diane Wu

It's a kind of vigil for the protester in the hospital. Jennifer and Joe put on black surgical masks.

We go into the streets, Jennifer's on edge. Every time she hears a loud noise, she squeezes Joe's hand. She'll stay out until 10:30. Then she'll get dinner, go home, go to bed. In the morning, Jennifer will be at work again, at her job where she can't let her bosses know where she was the night before.

Overnight, the road cleaners will come out with backhoes to clear the barricades. They'll paint over the graffiti, fix the smashed street lights, tidy up the piles of bricks in the gutters, erasing their protests as they have so many days before, turning the city back to normal, except, of course, it can't be normal again.

Ira Glass

Diane Wu.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Emanuele Berry and Diane Wu. Our brilliant field producer in Hong Kong was Yannie Chan. Thanks to our interpreters, Flora Chung, Diana Chan, and Dominic Yang.

The people who put together our show today includes Elna Baker, Susan Burton, Zoe Chace, Dana Chivvis, Sean Cole, Damien Grave, Michelle Harris, Jessica Lussenhop, Miki Meek, Lina Misitzis, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Ben Phelan, Nadia Reiman, Robyn Semien, Lilly Sullivan, Christopher Swetala.

Our executive producer is David Kestenbaum. Special thanks today to Dave Hill for the cover of the theme of the cops show, Armed Reaction. And special thanks to Laurel Chor, Karen Cheung, Noble Wong, Yu, Tse Sai Pei, Alanna Thiede, Jiayang Fan, and Martin Lee.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he'll never forget his first time on a carousel. The way he tells the story, he gets on a horse and starts to go around--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.