Falun Dafa Protest And Southern Kowloon Rain

2017 July 23

This morning I got breakfast with Nicolas - an American visiting Hong Kong short-term - and Martin - a German teaching English in Hong Kong. Then I took a series of naps until waking up to the sound of brass instruments and drumming moving through the street below. From the bedroom window, it looked like a parade, so Lise and I were curious and checked it out. It was more apparent on the ground that this was actually a particularly well-organized peaceful protest. Hong Kong locals were marching through the streets in support of Falun Dafa, a Chinese spiritual practice centered around the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance and which encourages meditation and qigong exercises to improve health and reach spiritual enlightenment.

Falun Dafa began to be publicly taught in Northeast China in 1992, and it quickly gained popularity throughout China, seeing the number of practitioners rise to 70 or so million by 1999. Around this time, the Communist Party of China began to view Falun Dafa as a threat to their control. In the following years, China launched a campaign to eradicate the spiritual practice by censoring content pertaining to Falun Dafa on the internet, extrajudicially imprisoning and torturing hundreds of thousands of followers, and creating a market for organs for transplantation that are harvested from those imprisoned. I am certain that this kind of protest, despite being nonviolent and nonconfrontational, would not be tolerated in mainland China outside of Hong Kong.

We stuck around to see the last protestors pass our street, then went back inside to relax.

At around 7:30pm I retraced my route to southern Kowloon to explore more of the district with Winter. We grabbed bubble tea and talked, then explored a side-street market until a small typhoon hit. The umbrella wasn’t really helpful, so we just embraced the rain, soaked ourselves to our bones, and played anyway. We tried to see how many building security guards we could walk past to explore some of the upper floors of the high-rises in that district, and we found some hidden and interesting gems. Then we took one elevator to the 20th floor of a building, and the door opened to a completely dark hallway blocked off by a metal rolling grille directly in front of the elevator door. Since we were going back down anyway, I decided to press all the buttons for the floors below us to see if any of them were unblocked. We descended to the 19th floor and were met with another dark floor and metal grille. I joked about how creepy it would be if the elevator broke down and we were stuck with other people on one of these upper floors. Then the door closed and instead of going down, the elevator went back up to the 20th floor, the door opened, the lights in the elevator shut off, and the power cut out. For about thirty seconds a lot of thoughts went through our heads about how this was going to end, but then the power surged back on and we hit the button for the lobby and got the hell out of there. Some of the sloped streets were now flooding enough to ride with a boogie board, and most of the locals were crowded at shop and restaurant awnings to wait out the storm. The storm did eventually settle down, and I left big puddles on the metro rides back to Wan Chai (sorry).