The Umbrella Movement: Ethnographic explorations of communal re-spatialization

Beginnings

The defining scene that opened the curtains on the Umbrella Movement was undoubtedly the release of 87 tear gas grenades by police on Sunday, 28 September 2014. The eyes of Hong Kong people were glued to the TV as they witnessed police using pepper spray on demonstrators and shooting tear gas grenades into the crowd. While not everyone may identify with the political objectives of the demonstrators, such action from the police, perceived broadly as police violence, drew moral outrage from a broad cross-section of Hong Kong society. The measures used by the police to disperse the demonstrators, which were arguably legitimate according to the law, seemed to have touched a raw nerve in the moral sensibilities of Hong Kong people. The iconic image of a lone demonstrator holding up his umbrella amid swirling mists of tear gas went viral, and the umbrella as a form of defense against the violence of the state came to characterize what became known as the Umbrella Movement. ‘Hong Kong people should not exert violence on Hong Kong people,’ later slogans remonstrated.

The moral dimension invoked is notable, for it couched the movement within a moral discourse that transcended the legal discourse of the police and the state. While the police might have the law on their side in the maintenance of social order, or Se Wui Dit Zeoi (社會秩序), as was oft repeated in the carrying out of police action, the moral discourse not only legitimized the transgression of the law that was embedded in the act of occupying roads and other public spaces, it threw Hong Kong into a state of protest that the state and its force of law had to retreat from, at least for a while. That the law, which implies force and violence (Benjamin, 1978; Derrida, 2002), was not enforced at that point, suggests that authority was held in limbo in the postcolonial city-state. This impasse between moral sensibilities and the law, between protesters and the state, thrust Hong Kong into a state of political liminality, where political authority was temporarily undetermined.

The same night of 28 September and the early morning of 29 September, protesters began to occupy not only the Admiralty district in the northern part of Hong Kong Island, blocking access to government and law-makers’ offices, but also Causeway Bay toward the east of the island and Mongkok on the Kowloon Peninsula, both key shopping belts of cosmopolitan Hong Kong serving tourists and locals. In contrast with the hardline stance taken just hours earlier that led to clashes with demonstrators, police kept their distance and retreated from their role as enforcers. They allowed protesters to sit in the middle of traffic junctions, immobilizing traffic, and to set up barricades blocking roads, tramlines and entrances to subway stations.

As I ventured out on 29 September, the atmosphere in the streets was not one of tension, as one might expect in the aftermath of political violence. Instead, there was somberness in the air, and a sense of reproach against what was seen as unwarranted violence the night before. Students came to the university in black, the color of mourning, expressing their disapproval of excessive police violence against ‘peaceful demonstrators’. At Causeway Bay, students and other Hong Kong residents joined a sit-in and blockaded large tracts of Hennessey Road as well as entrances to the Causeway Bay MTR (subway) Station. The police left them alone and showed no signs of wanting to clear the roads and restore ‘order’. The protesters were seated in rows facing Wanchai. Some parents even brought their young children to join the sit-in. Amid occasional shouting of slogans, protesters chatted among themselves. It was a warm day and some volunteers took it upon themselves to walk around and spray the protesters with water and distribute cooling strips. Others went round to distribute fruits, snacks and water. In this transgression of law and space, there was tacit order. The protesters did not evoke a sense of danger, as a mob would, but behaved like a community caring for itself, a community that one could easily join and be a part of. It did not feel like something was out of place, and so one could almost feel that it was normal to sit out in the streets and occupy them. It is not clear where this new form of normality came from, and how people could so quickly adopt it, but the streets were becoming a liminoid space where the unthinkable was becoming possible.

In this new normal state of affairs, I could walk along the main thoroughfares of Hong Kong Island from Causeway Bay westwards toward Wanchai, then Admiralty, with no sign of the vehicles that used to ply these highways. At Admiralty, buses trapped and abandoned from the night before were not vandalized. Crowds were gathered along Harcourt Road and someone helped me onto a road divider so I could get a better view. The crowd here was also not a mob. Some were protesters and activists, giving speeches and shouting slogans, while many others were merely curious onlookers who had brought along their cameras to capture shots of this extraordinary phenomenon. This is another notable aspect of the movement from the start – Hong Kong people, armed with cameras or smartphones, came out to ‘see’ themselves and be ‘seen’. Through recognizing and being recognized, this imagined community was beginning to come face to face with itself. Concurrently, the posting of pictures from the occupied areas onto social media facilitated the imagination of the community anew.

In the center of the Admiralty occupied area, makeshift supply stations were already being set up. A lady in her sixties had seated herself at one such station, deftly handing out food, water and protective gear (goggles, plastic wrap) without stopping. At another supply station, the volunteer-in-charge shared how donors just kept depositing supplies such that it grew quickly into a very well-stocked station. Passersby freely took what they needed (or wanted), without having to account for their role in the movement that was taking shape. Moving past Admiralty Centre, small pockets of people occupied parts of the highway stretching all the way to Central to the west. Along the way, three volunteers trudged on with supplies, calling out to ask if anyone needed food and water as they distributed these to the scattered occupiers.

Thus, at the beginning of the Umbrella Movement, a re-spatialization process was under way, where roads and public spaces were occupied under a new normality. A sense of communitas was emerging in these spaces, as Hong Kong people related to each other as political subjects of an imagined community sharing a ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’ (Anderson, 1991: 7), rather than as mere digits within Hong Kong’s socioeconomic order. Eventually, these spaces would be imbued with new meanings as occupiers renamed the streets, set up ‘villages’ and other functional amenities like the ‘Big Stage’ and self-study area, expressed themselves through creative forms and put into place strategic defense lines. In these new spaces, Hong Kong people formed face-to-face communities that not only maintained order but also reinforced a sense of community through the moral idiom of care.

Re-spatializing the landscape

From undifferentiated spaces that, in general, served only to convey vehicles, people and commodities, the roads and public spaces that were occupied began to take on meaning and character as each day passed. In the Admiralty Occupy area, or what some have come to call ‘Harcourt Village’ (with reference to Harcourt Road in Admiralty district that was occupied), there were shared functional spaces, such as the Daai Toi (大台) or ‘Big Stage’, the Chater Self-study Area, the ‘Occupy Workshop’, the supply stations and the first aid stations. There were also expressive areas, such as the Lennon Wall ⁶ and its environs, where installation art and posters had been set up. But what gave the movement its critical mass were the ‘villages’ that had emerged throughout the occupation period, represented by clusters of tents. These formed face-to-face communities, sometimes of people who knew each other before the movement, but often of like-minded strangers who came to be associated through the Umbrella Movement. This re-spatialization was represented through maps, such as the illustration in Figure 1 drawn by Connie Maoshan, which challenged the pre-existing conceived space represented by the state. ⁷ In this section, I provide a sketch of the social topography, which in turn will reflect the texture of social life in ‘Harcourt Village’.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Illustration of ‘Harcourt Village’ by Connie Maoshan.

The ‘Big Stage’ served as the congregation point for the occupiers gathered at Admiralty. Every night, the stage would be used for the dissemination of news, the delivery of speeches by key activists in the movement or politicians, and the sharing of thoughts and opinions by participants. Sometimes, the stage was used to host concerts, where songs and music became an avenue through which participants could express their grievances as well as their aspirations. The ‘Big Stage’ thus provided a focal point through which political discourse was formulated, and through which participants could be mobilized for action, such as the storming of police lines at Lung Wo Road on 30 November 2014 (The Guardian, 2014b). It has to be noted that the multi-vocality of the movement did not allow the ‘Big Stage’ to be the sole platform for the formulation of political discourse or the work of representation; in fact, at one point, there was debate on whether the ‘Big Stage’ should be dismantled, so that it did not impose a master-narrative on the participants. There were many other ‘stages’ throughout the occupied area where participants could air their thoughts, such as those organized by the HKFS and activists from the Mongkok occupied area, or solo acts by individuals who wished to share their opinions, with nothing more than a personal loudspeaker. Even concerts were multi-vocal, ranging from the popular ‘Bananaooyoo’, a Hong Kong University law graduate who gave concerts at the entrance of the Admiralty MTR Station equipped with microphone and speakers (Wall Street Journal, 2014), to simple solo gigs accompanied by a guitar. These different congregation points became platforms where participants could speak, sing, be seen and be heard.

Another part of the ‘Harcourt Village’ that contributed to its uniqueness was the Chater Self-study Area (named after Chater Road in the adjacent Central district), set up by students so they could revise their schoolwork as they participated in the movement. ⁸ Professional teachers would volunteer their services, walking about the area and advertising their subjects of expertise, helping students where needed. Other volunteers would come by with snacks or hot drinks to keep the students well-nourished and warm. Opposite the self-study area was the ‘Occupy Workshop’, which, among other things, provided the self-study area with tables and benches made on-site. Embedded in such acts was a moral discourse that sought recognition. Although the students, in joining the Umbrella Movement, were challenging the political establishment and its vision of how political reforms should be advanced, they did not detract from but rather affirmed their prescribed social role as students by demonstrating that they had not forsaken their studies. Their ‘innocence’, coupled with the display of their socially responsible behavior, added to the moral force of the movement. At the same time, other participants, who volunteered their time, talents and resources to support the students by taking care of their various needs, were valorizing the moral force of the movement through the idiom of care. This moral idiom of care, articulated through the reproduction of everyday life in the protest site, was captured in one of the slogans and common refrains of the movement – ‘To Watch Out and Care for Each Other’ (互相守護).

The projection of exemplary neighborliness presents the occupied area as a microcosm of a utopian Hong Kong where each person is valued as an organic part of the community and for what he or she can contribute. Those with medical skills volunteered to work at the first aid stations distributed throughout the occupied area. Others had set up makeshift washing areas enclosed with canvas so that occupiers could take a simple bath or wash their hair. The area also had a recycling station and volunteers would regularly go round to collect rubbish and sort it out for recycling. A small patch of grassland, trampled by police during the face-off with protesters, was transformed into an organic garden. The practice of care in the reproduction of community life – care for each other, care for the environment and care for Hong Kong’s political future – also served as a critique of the uncaringness of a government that sanctioned excessive police violence, a state that neglected the political interests of Hong Kong residents, and the general aloofness of capitalist society. At the same time, the spatial make-over of the occupied area, imbued with the occupiers’ concern with hygiene, sustainability and general well-being, reflects a community capable of order and ‘governing’ itself and therefore not in need of ‘micro-governance’ from the Chinese central government.

Part of the reason why I describe the occupied areas as a liminoid space of new possibilities is the hyper-signification that creatively marked these spaces. It was difficult to traverse the landscape without some form of slogan, installation art or image engaging one visually. The Lennon Wall was set up to allow visitors to write down their words of encouragement or hopes for Hong Kong onto multi-colored post-its that were then stuck onto the wall. Facing it was the ‘Umbrella Man’, a wooden statue holding up a yellow umbrella, which was emblematic of the kind of defenseless yet tenacious resistance against state power that marked the start of the movement on 28 September (SBS, 2014). Round the corner was a replica of the Lion Rock Hill with a yellow vertical banner declaring ‘I want genuine universal suffrage’ (我要真普選), made because the original banner hung on Lion Rock Hill by rock climbers had been taken down by the authorities. Hung along the street railings were more banners with slogans, as well as paintings of Occupy scenes. Along Tim Mei Avenue was a tank constructed out of recycled plastic bottles, no doubt recalling the tanks that rolled into Beijing in 1989 to crush the Tiananmen democracy movement. It is also difficult to walk around the area without (avoiding) stepping on chalk drawings or slogans on the tarmac. Essentially, every available surface is potentially a space for signification.

I call this hyper-signification, not just because of the visual deluge, but also because of the multiple layers of meanings and associations, sometimes tinged with irony and humor, that are compressed into images or slogans. Consider, for example, the block slogan Gwong Ming Leoi Lok (光明磊落), meaning ‘above board’ or ‘honorable’, that was cast onto one of the blockades of the Eastern Defense Line. ⁹ Gwong Ming Leoi Lok was a reference to a police spokesperson’s declaration on 14 October that the Hong Kong police had been totally above board and honorable in the way they handled the protests associated with the Umbrella Movement, in a bid to dispel doubts that the police had been unfair or used underhand means in dealing with protesters. Ironically, right after this declaration, on 15 October, seven plainclothes policemen were caught on TV beating up a defenseless and restrained protester in a ‘dark corner’ (secluded spot) of Tamar Garden (The Guardian, 2014a). This ‘dark corner’ was subsequently dubbed Gwong Ming Leoi Lok dik Am Gok (光明磊落的暗角) or the ‘Honorable Dark Corner’, to play on the irony of the police’s declaration and at the same time serve as a critique of police violence. This ‘Honorable Dark Corner’ then became part of the topography of the occupied area, and in fact, could be found on google map. Thus, the placement of these block characters, just a stone’s throw away from the Hong Kong Island Regional Police Headquarters, was to exclaim the opposite to the enforcers of the law.

As the movement wore on, clusters of tents were set up throughout the Admiralty area. Weekly counts found that there were more than 2000 tents in the area between 25 October and 22 November, peaking at 2348 tents on 1 November (Harcourt Village Voice, 2014: 24–5). Most of these tents had been named in some way, and some had clustered together to form ‘villages’. These ‘villages’ acted as loosely organized communities, sometimes consisting of people who knew each other, such as students from the same university, but often also of strangers who got to know each other through the movement. But whether ‘residents’ of these ‘villages’ had known each other before or not, they would forge new relations as fellow political subjects in the course of their involvement with the movement. As political subjects, they recognized each other as part of a larger imagined community of Hong Kong people that had come face to face to encounter others who shared similar political aspirations, to act on their political interests and to share a sense of community with fellow occupiers. This sense of community was emphasized and represented in the nuance of the Chinese character used for ‘village’. Most times, the character Cyun (村) was used rather than Cyun (邨). The latter referred to the urban public housing estates set up by the government to house Hong Kong’s burgeoning population since the 1950s, while the former conveyed the image of rural villages where people knew each other and everyone was steeped in bonds of reciprocity. This neighborliness and its recovery were valorized through face-to-face interactions, and participants often shared how they cared for each other in the course of the movement. This idiom of care and how it added to the moral force of the movement will be revisited when we consider the social life of the communities.

The ability to form spontaneous communities is a mark of the liminoid space and its potentialities. Part of the manifestation of this liminoid conceptual space can be seen in the naming practices of the ‘villages’ and tents. Some, like the ‘village’ that called itself Haa Kok Hou Ting (Royal Harcourt), mimicked the names of high-class multi-million dollar condominiums in Hong Kong. Other fictitious addresses, such as ‘1B Connaught Road’ written on one of the tents, alluded to the supposed astronomical value of the property, since Connaught Road runs through the financial district of Central. For such temporary shelters to assume these names and addresses is, of course, ironic, but it reflects the bourgeois aspirations of the occupying tenants and points to what has been denied them, namely, attainable middle-class housing. That they were sitting and camping on prime land was not lost on the occupiers. One night, as I was roaming among the tents browsing the fictitious addresses and photographing them, an occupier sauntered over and in a jocose manner started acting the part of a real estate agent, asking if I was interested in any of those ‘properties’, assuring me that they were most affordable. In that brief exchange, we shared an intimacy, mediated by humor, as powerless subjects of a neoliberal regime, knowing full well that no property on such prime land could be affordable for either of us. But with play at work in the liminoid space through such fictitious naming, occupiers question the order imposed by the neoliberal housing regime and at the same time share in the intimacy of being similarly dispossessed. ¹⁰ Furthermore, by setting up camp in the occupied areas, occupiers are suspending, at least temporarily, the market value of prime space, and reconfiguring the space according to new values accrued based on functions and meanings that have come to be associated with different parts of the occupied areas.

Naming also reflects the political aspirations of the occupiers or their critique of the establishment. One road sign for Harcourt Road had its Chinese name changed to Kong Zang Lou (抗爭路), meaning the ‘Road of Struggle’, and Connaught Road Central was renamed Gung Man Daai Dou (公民大道) or ‘Civic Way’. Another road sign read ‘True Democracy’ in English, and in Cantonese asked, ‘Where is genuine universal suffrage?’ ¹¹ Still others have taken on phantasmal names, such as Wut Mai Cyun (活米村) or Hogsmeade Village drawn from the Harry Potter series, or Faa Gwo Saan (花果山) and Seoi Lim Dung (水簾洞) from the Chinese mythical classic Journey to the West. Such names translate abstract idealizations onto a makeshift landscape, and through this discursive act of place-making opened up new possibilities with respect to social and political relationships in the communities (Berg and Vuolteenaho, 2009).

In contrast with the Admiralty occupied area, the Mongkok occupied area carried more of a working class character. Commentators usually described the area as being Lung Se Wan Zaap (龍蛇混雜) or full of unruly elements, no doubt alluding to the triads that operated in the vicinity. Indeed, in Mongkok, the occupied spaces were not spaces set apart to project a utopian order, but rather spaces that were a part of the neighborhood that reflected society in its unsanitized form. Part of this could be seen in the institution of religious altars and icons, which included a Gwaan Dai (關帝) ¹² altar and a Catholic altar. Here also, the signification was multiple. Through infusing the landscape with the folk religious practices of Hong Kong people, the space was appropriated for the common man and his plebeian concerns. At the same time, installing Gwaan Dai, a martial god who is also the guardian deity of the police, was a particular challenge to the police as it would be taboo for them to dismantle the altar. On a more existential level, inasmuch as these transcendental ‘authorities’ were appropriated to legitimize the movement, they also served as a critique of the ‘earthly’ authorities and their impotence in securing the interests of the Hong Kong people. In other words, disillusionment with the Hong Kong government, whether due to its inability to procure genuine universal suffrage for the Hong Kong people, or the lack of affordable housing and rising costs of living, had led occupiers to appeal to ‘higher’ authorities. Thus, the re-spatialization of Mongkok’s streets was structured by the habitus or cultural dispositions (Bourdieu 1990) of the common Hong Kong people, reflecting their everyday concerns and the practices they employed to address those concerns. Nevertheless, that their angst had spilled onto the streets was something new, and suggests that these streets were transformed into liminoid spaces where new possibilities were being sought.

Communities

The beginning of the Umbrella Movement was marked by an atmosphere of triumphalism. Many Hong Kong people from all walks of life congregated at the various occupied areas, contributing their support and resources. Organic communities evolved, based largely on lateral fraternal relationships. Although many who joined the movement were acquaintances or even family members that knew each other, they came to recognize each other not so much in terms of their pre-existing relationships but as members of an imagined community mobilizing for a set of common interests. It was this transcendence of established relationships, social status and background that allowed strangers to associate with each other through this movement. Thus, more often than not, participants narrate the story of joining the movement spontaneously and becoming fellow occupiers with people they had never known before. For people without pre-existing relationships to come together without formal coordination suggests a mobilizing force outside of established social relationships and personal interests. This gave the movement a moral force that legitimized it outside of the law, which also fueled its sense of triumphalism. Social relationships at this point were marked by open-endedness, where strangers freely associated with each other.

As I roamed the grounds of the Admiralty occupied area, one ‘village’ that caught my eye was the Eastern Dragon Mansion, near the Eastern Defense Line. It had a main tentage with a few tents flanking both sides. I was curious about the name, and after taking pictures of the area, approached one of the tenants of the ‘village’ to make inquiries. Ah Tat (a pseudonym), who was in his late 20s, told me that originally they had called themselves the Eastern Dragon Island, as they were perched on a raised triangular road divider just behind. However, since they were no longer on the ‘island’, they had decided to call themselves the East Dragon Mansion instead. In the course of our short conversation, Ah Tat offered me and my companion chairs and invited us to sit and chat. With him was a female tenant in her early 20s, Ah Mei (another pseudonym), who without prompting began to tell us how she got involved in the movement.

Ah Mei stayed in Tung Chung (Lantau Island) but worked in the Admiralty area. When she saw on the news the release of the tear gas grenades on 28 September, she decided to join the protesters after work to support the movement. Since that night, she had been staying at the Admiralty occupied area almost every night. At the beginning, she did not have a fixed area to sleep, but eventually got along quite well with tenants of the East Dragon Mansion and ‘settled’ there. When we met her, Ah Mei had just returned from a holiday to Taiwan and had come directly to the occupied area after landing, instead of going home first, although where she stayed was actually very close to the airport. She had wanted to share (famous) sandwiches that she had bought from Taiwan with her friends at the East Dragon Mansion while they were still fresh. In the middle of our conversation, she spied a friend at the next ‘village’ that she referred to as ‘Teacher’, asked her over and gave her a sandwich. After leaving behind two dozen of the Taiwan sandwiches, Ah Mei finally went home.

After Ah Mei left, Ah Tat confided that he did not really care about the objectives of the movement, whether it was democracy or genuine universal suffrage. He joined because he wanted to protect the students, and give the students a chance to fight for their future. That was why he took up the position near the Eastern Defense Line, which played the role of delaying attacks and alerting the main Occupy area of offending forces.

In the course of my visit with the East Dragon Mansion, people from other ‘villages’ and defense lines came and went, sometimes to exchange information, and often just to chat. Ah Tat said that he often visited other ‘villages’ and defense lines as well to Ceoi Seoi (吹水, literally ‘blowing water’). Ceoi Seoi means to shoot the breeze, that is, casual chatting without topical limits or boundaries. It can take on the negative connotation of exaggerating or blowing something out of proportion. On the other hand, the ability to Ceoi Seoi can also be considered a positive trait, when used to describe someone as being articulate and convincing. In the political discursive landscape of Hong Kong, Ceoi Seoi has come to represent the opening up of spaces for different political voices to be aired. In the Admiralty occupied area, on a more formal level, Ceoi Seoi could be done at the Daai Toi (Big Stage) or the HKFS’s own Ceoi Seoi Keoi (吹水區) or Ceoi Seoi area. In these (semi-)formal contexts, anyone who wanted to share his or her political opinion, voice his or her frustrations, or criticize the political establishment through humor and satire, could have a turn at the microphone. It was democracy in practice, where everyone had a chance to let his or her voice be heard.

In the more intimate space of the ‘villages’, Ceoi Seoi allows different opinions and concerns, political or otherwise, to be shared, articulated and formulated. It takes on the tone of being only half-serious, could be ludic and amount to no consolidated position whatsoever. Yet, out of these often aimless multi-logues could also emerge informed and cogent political analyses and positions. The potential of Coei Soei is embedded in social relationships that are at once intimate and open. My invitation to engage in Coei Soei at the East Dragon Mansion was not premised on who I was. My interlocutors also did not offer to tell me who they were, but they freely told me their stories – how and why they joined the movement – without me having to prompt them. Social identities were suspended in this manifestation of communitas. What was important was that we were sharing our thoughts as part of an imagined community that had come face to face; it was the words that carried the intimacy, not the relative proximity of our statuses or positions in life.

I argue that this discursive art called Coei Soei, couched in the cultural intimacy (Herzfeld, 2005) of Hong Kong people, opens up a space where new ways of talking about the political are made possible. In a sense, this is akin to the discursive arenas of the coffee houses, salons and societies described by Habermas (1989), but without pre-determining that communication has to be rational. It is also similar to the Singapore practice of ‘talking cock’ (see Velayutham, 2009), except that ‘talking cock’, where complaint tinged with local humor is usually enshrouded in cynicism and fatalism, is often indulged in as a form of social catharsis in lieu of formal political engagement. On the other hand, Coei Soei, as practiced in the liminoid space of the occupied areas, carries anti-structural potentialities that could open up new possibilities in terms of political thinking and discourse.

Parallel to the practice of Coei Soei is the Man Zyu Gaau Sat (民主教室) or Democracy Classroom, which can be considered a structured form of Coei Soei, if that can be said. The Democracy Classroom is a field classroom that follows a schedule featuring speakers from academics to activists. ‘Students’ usually sit in a scattered fashion on the ground while a ‘teacher’ lectures based on his or her area of expertise. ¹³ Topics range from political philosophy to social activism in Hong Kong. In contrast to the common Coei Soei platforms, whether formal or informal, the Democracy Classroom is hierarchical and the ‘teacher’ is one who speaks with authority. Although there is usually room for questions and discussion, the Democracy Classroom remains an avenue for political education. Against the structure of the Democracy Classroom, the practice of Coei Soei, where anyone is entitled to speak and opine, presents an anti-structural impetus that subjects the participant to a dialogic process. It is this dialectical experience between structure and anti-structure that shapes participants as political subjects within the evolving movement. ¹⁴

As a lateral fraternity, people found their own niche in the movement, contributing their skills, talents and resources to enrich the movement in different ways, producing a form of organic solidarity in the process. Some played humble roles, like collecting and differentiating rubbish for recycling. Others started a little farm to grow vegetables and shared the fruits of their labor in the form of organic produce. A group of technologically savvy students came up with a system for helping ‘villagers’ charge their batteries, a service that had become essential since mobile and electronic devices were a regular part of Hong Kong people’s lives. Here, new possibilities and everyday life were entwined, reproducing community life in the Occupy sites that was not imaginable before.

While people in the ‘village’ communities took up roles that would contribute to the sustainability of the communities, there were other transient participants that sought to make the lives of the occupiers more comfortable. The toilets were well-equipped with all sorts of branded amenities like facial masks, moisturizers and hand-cream donated by supporters. Other supporters brought breakfasts and left them with the supply stations for the occupiers. Still others banded together to prepare tonic drinks, sweet soups and night-snacks for the occupiers, initially to relieve them of the heat and later to fortify them against the cold.

I met one such drinks band on a chilly night. They were offering hot drinks such as hot cocoa and honey apple tea. I struck up a conversation with Peter, who shared that since he could not be an occupier, he joined like-minded people in preparing the drinks – it was the least he could do to support the occupiers. In the midst of our conversation, members of the band kept coming back to the drinks trolley to refill their tumblers and deliver the drinks to the different ‘villages’. ‘Remember the orphans,’ Peter reminded one of his band members. I learned, later, that the ‘orphans’ were referred to as such because they were camping on one of the furthest reaches of the occupied area, and therefore often forgotten when food or drinks were distributed. Operating here was an idiom of care that constituted the community, which, although it was occupying a defined space, was not confined to the limits of that space.

The neighborliness and public spiritedness seen through such support allowed participants not only to imagine the community, but also to experience the community. Those who came to experience the community were of varying class, gender, age, educational and ethnic backgrounds. Some were drawn in by the moral idiom of care to protect or support the occupiers. Others were attracted by the creative energy flourishing in the liminoid space and finding expression through music and art. Not everyone shared the same political convictions, and occupiers often differed on how the movement should proceed. But there is always an open invitation to Coei Soei, and contribute to the multi-vocality of the space.

Coda

At the onset of the movement, demonstrators were dissatisfied with the procedures outlined by the NPC for the election of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive in 2017. The stringent criteria introduced were seen as obstacles to genuine universal suffrage. At the same time, Hong Kong people were becoming disillusioned with the Hong Kong government for its inefficacy in handling the Man Sang (民生) or livelihood issues that concerned both the middle and working classes. The social angst that resulted boiled over and spilled onto the streets, leading to the occupation of Hong Kong’s main thoroughfares and their transformation into a spatial petition that hyper-signified. This new form of political expression propelled the territory into a liminal state, and the occupied areas became liminoid spaces that facilitated political soul-searching and creative discursive practices, and attracted the moral support of a broad spectrum of Hong Kong people. However, as with any state of liminality, the social effervescence is temporary and difficult to sustain.

As the movement wore on and it did not look like the authorities would give in to its demands, the triumphalism and openness that marked the onset of the movement started to taper off. People became more suspicious of strangers and restless as the movement’s direction and prospects became uncertain. This was especially the case when news that bailiffs and the police would be clearing various occupied areas became known. Visitors were advised against taking pictures of supply and first aid stations, out of fear that the authorities would prosecute these supporters later. The occupied area became less populated and many tents were left empty.

However, when it became clear that the authorities would be clearing the Admiralty area imminently in December, there was almost a sense of relief in the air. A few nights before the authorities moved in, people came back in droves to reunite with friends that they had made through the movement and bid farewell. Selfies were taken to archive memories of a place, time and community that would soon undergo erasure by the state. In the midst of all these, a group of vintage camera enthusiasts trooped through the length of the occupied area, offering to take vintage photographs of fellow ‘villagers’, companions and friends, so that their place in the movement could be captured in black and white. In offering this service for free, the enthusiasts wanted to leave participants with a memento. Unlike cameras in the age of digital reproduction, the vintage camera produces only one instant and authentic photograph. This left every group with a piece of indivisible communal property, evidence that they had been part of a face-to-face community that took part in the irreplicable experience of the Umbrella Movement. That experience was one of communitas in a liminoid space, where anything had seemed possible.