When I woke up, I picked up my phone straight away. The very first thing I saw was Instagram footage of the artist Sanmu Chen being detained in Causeway Bay. One police officer was holding each of his arms as they frogmarched him to a police van. The whole way, Sanmu was calm, but he kept shouting, “Hong Kongers, do not be afraid! Do not forget June Fourth!” The police were holding an orange plastic cordon around him, as if that could contain his words. As I watched, I felt a lump in my throat constricting my breathing. It stayed there all day.
After breakfast, I began looking for a June Fourth memento that the artist Kacey Wong had given me in 2019. It was a white wax feather. He’d made it from the melted-down stubs of candles he’d collected from the Victoria Park vigil the year before. He’d given it to me in a small black box and I’d carefully carried it back to Melbourne in my hand luggage. But it had snapped in half en route. Even so, I took it out every year on June Fourth. The smell of it instantly took me back to all those vigils, the way the hot wax dripped on your fingers, and you were slick with sweat, and the singing was always too loud and off-key. And yet, those tiny points of light in the dark conjured an emotional intensity that cancelled out everything else.
This year, however, I couldn’t find the wax feather. It seemed to have got lost in the detritus of my life. In the afternoon, I went through my cupboards again, taking everything out, one stupid item at a time. It wasn’t there. I became more and more agitated, then I felt tearful. I knew it was nothing: one tiny, personal, meaningless loss so small it was not worth mentioning. A drop of water in the ocean of loss. But it was the last tangible object I had that transported me back to Victoria Park.
In the evening, I went to the June Fourth vigil with one of my children. We were several dozen people, hatted and face-masked outside the Chinese consulate. The two of us were holding candles, but everyone else had small electronic smoke-free candles. Someone produced a large banner of the Pillar of Shame. It was a flat, shiny, plastic sheet that bore little resemblance to the grotesque, agonised pile of torsos rearing from the ugly tangerine pillar. One of the protestors was holding up a mobile phone bearing an image of Alliance organiser Chow Hang-tung with a candle. It was as if, far from Hong Kong, our vigil had been flattened and mediated through screens, our emotions held at a remove. When I got home, I tried one last time to find the broken wax feather. It was gone, but the lump in my throat remained.
How to cite: Lim, Louisa. “Just Another Day: Louisa Lim.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 4 Jun. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/06/04/louisa-another-day.
Louisa Lim is the author of Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong. Her first book was The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. She is now a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne. Visit her website for more information. [Louisa Lim and chajournal.blog.]
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