June 4th is Now a Ghost Festival
Since 2019, so many places in Hong Kong have become haunted that we are all used to ghosts. They bleed into the fabric of everyday life, and it’s hard to say whether the sickening feeling you get when you walk past a drove of blue is a past horror or a present one. Of course it’s both, except you are meant to believe that it’s neither. The best you can do to deal with it is to become a ghost yourself when you pass the ones in blue, and hope that they’ve got enough nothing to do that you go unnoticed.
As anyone who has been haunted will know, there are days where you forget about it entirely. There are periods where the ghosts are barely there, drowned out by the rest of your life. You can be haunted and not be so bothered by it, because your only other option is insanity.
Today is not one of those days. It has been a present haunting: you wake up in the morning and know that things are wrong. But unlike the rest of the year, this wrongness is not ambiguous, because when you open up Instagram all you see is photo after photo of people in black being pulled into police cars. And that brings you back to 2019, back to 2014, back to 1989, back to the first time you witnessed an arrest, scared and helpless and numb.
Except this is not true at all. It is 2023, you are at home, and everything will be fine as long as you remember to forget the vigil that was supposed to happen today. Everything will be fine as long as you do what you always do on a weekend: eat, shop, talk shit, have fun. All will be well as long as you move without intention, as long as you walk within the designated lines, as long as you don’t stop to wonder what is haunting you and why.
The ones in blue seem to be doing all the remembering for you anyways, clustered together in the very spots you would have stood four years ago. You drift past them, a ghost, and, like a ghost, your only option these days is to linger, then disappear.
How to cite: HW. “Just Another Day: HW.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 4 Jun. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/06/04/hw.
HW is a Hongkonger. They write about Hong Kong, unexpected everyday happenings, and are interested in land rights and building solidarity within and across communities.
Cha 