Over the past year, China's suffocation of Hong Kong's independence, including the recent charges against 47 activists and the rewriting of election rules, has stabbed at my heart, because for me and thousands of other Chinese, Hong Kong is more than a city. It's a beacon.
When I was a young man in the 1970s — during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and China's darkest years under Mao — I joined hundreds of thousands of desperate Chinese willing to risk our lives to get to freedom. Between late spring and early fall and during the night, we crossed the mountains to reach the sea, and from there we would swim across the water — as far as 6 miles depending on the route — to reach Hong Kong.
On my first attempt in 1972, I was caught on the coast by People's Liberation Army soldiers. A year later, I was caught by Chinese fishermen near Hong Kong after I had struggled for eight hours in the rough sea. Choking on seawater, I thought of death, but I kept reminding myself, "I must reach Hong Kong, for my mother, father and myself!"
Thousands of freedom swimmers died in the water; three of them were my friends. When I finally stepped on the soil of Hong Kong on my third attempt, I believed I had reached paradise.
At that time, Hong Kong was everything that China was not: dazzling neon lights, morning crowds of neatly dressed businesspeople threading through jampacked skyscrapers, and bustling cinemas that played discounted Hollywood movies at midnight. Hong Kongers proudly proclaimed: "Hong Kong never sleeps!" My heart cheered: "Hong Kong is the pearl of the Orient!"
My father was working in Taiwan's customs office in Hong Kong when Mao took over China in 1949. In 1950, he joined a patriotic insurrection in his office and took our family to China to help the newly formed People's Republic.
Later he was denounced and punished as a "capitalist rightist" during Mao's "Great Leap Forward" campaign. Because of him, I was called a "little bastard" during the Cultural Revolution and sent to a primitive village to be reeducated by peasants. After three years of harsh labor and witnessing the public executions of a group of "counterrevolutionaries," I decided to escape to Hong Kong — the promised land for me and thousands like me.
Though I have traveled to many places around the world in the decades since, only Hong Kong evokes an indescribable longing to return whenever I leave. But now, even as an American citizen, I dare not visit Hong Kong again.