I never intended to write a Hong Kong protest novel. Here’s how it happened.
Hong Kong Holiday
In the school Easter holiday of 2019, we went as a family to Hong Kong. Jane, my wife had lived there in the Nineties and was keen to show us around. We visited all the usual suspects: the Big Buddah on Lantau Island, Mong Kok market, Admiralty.
And of course, we visited the Peak, including the T-shaped monstrosity of a tourist trap. While we walked down Lugard Road towards Mid-Levels, a young woman climbed up some rocks that towered above us. At the top, she sat, alone, on a rocky outcrop looking over the famous bay.
Who was she? Why was she doing that?
She was the initial spark for Do Not Keep Silent. Later on, as a family, we walked down Lugard Road. The lady was still up there, contemplating the view. A student in front of us turned around, taking a panoramic selfie. Later, I also used that image in the novel.
Home Again
Back home, the holiday burned brightly in my mind. I’d enjoyed it so much I wanted to extend it in the only way I could reasonably afford, by writing about it. I had the idea for a fairly light-hearted, romantic, finding yourself type novel about a British no-hoper who met someone up on the Peak, someone driven and intense while he was…not. I wanted that friction between the British (read colonialism) and Hong Kong characters.
THE PROTESTS
But then the protests against the 2019 Extradition Bill started. They quickly evolved into a much broader push back against the Chinese government’s infringements on Hong Kong’s civil liberties. The Umbrella Revolution, all over again. Tear gas, batons and non-lethal shotguns. Millions out on the streets. Graffitti art and hope.
THE PROTEST LEADER
The protests, and then what happened in the inevitable round ups, inspired me to write a very different novel. The lady on the Peak, who I’d seen rock climbing months earlier, took centre stage. Mae Yang was still driven and intense, but now for a purpose – because she was the leader of a new protest movement. In the wake of the government round-ups of the 2019, she was the person who’d stepped in to fill the void, to lead the new movement.
My British no-hoper became someone with a past connection to Hong Kong. He was also someone I’d first met almost twenty years earlier, a character I’d created in a short story called Sound. In that story, he realised he’d had enough of leading a wastrel, stoner sort of life. I always wondered how smoothly his integration into the world of work would go. Now I could find out.
More importantly, I could find out how well he and Mae would get along. Mae, it turned out, was about to meet the right man just as she was prepared to sacrifice everything for her cause. The problem was, he could very well be exactly the wrong man.
RESEARCH
Do Not Keep Silent took two years to research and write (well, twenty, if you think of the genesis as being the short story Sound). Here’s some of what and how I researched:
- The Umbrella Movement
- The Siege of PolyU
- Learning Go (because everyone in Mae’s family play it)
- Tear gas and non-lethal shotguns
- Countless YouTube videos about Hong Kong
- Gene Sharp’s 198 Methods of Non-Violent Action
- Reading twenty different books
- Pounding Google Earth’s Hong Kong streets for hours.
All that research was very much a labour of love, but also one of duty and respect, for all those millions of protesters in 2014 and 2019 whose dreams died.
The resulting book, Do Not Keep Silent, is my tribute to those who had the courage to stand up for their beliefs. They might have known they would lose, but they did not keep silent.
Links and Further Reading
Buy: Do Not Keep Silent on Amazon
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