Apple Daily and me

I have a confession to make. (No, officers of the National Security Department, I’m sorry, but it’s not that confession that you have been awaiting).

It’s really a bit embarrassing, but in the spirit of being completely honest and open, I’ll just go ahead and say it.

When I was in college, first learning Chinese, I held extremely naïve views of this country, its politics, and culture. I tended to think that every country has its own distinct cultural background, and that its political system would naturally reflect that difference: hey, with five millennia of history, who was I to judge socialism with Chinese characteristics? The Chinese characteristics of the system were, after all, clearly on display right there in the name!

I also felt that we in the United States heard a lot about human rights abuses in China, when in fact there were many human rights abuses ongoing in the United States every day: who, then, were we to talk critically about human rights issues in China?

I suppose I can take a small amount of comfort in the fact that such empty platitudes are, for some people at least, the culmination of decades of thinking (or perhaps non-thinking), rather than simply the fleeting product of a recklessly idealistic, youthful mind. I am also greatly relieved that social media was simply not a thing at that time, allowing my naïve thoughts to remain safely quarantined in my own brain and a few very quickly skimmed college papers, thankfully preserved solely on a rapidly disintegrating floppy disk in some landfill in upstate New York.

It was only when I lived in China for a number of years after college that I learned what a steaming hot pile of nonsense this all was.

The monotone, seemingly endless nightly reports on who Hu Jintao met and what “important” speeches he made, all heralding “China’s rise;” the cadres giving the most useless advice ever during on-site inspections, visiting a region that was recently flooded and telling officials to work on flood prevention, as if that was some kind of insight; the newspapers bursting with blind rage at Japan, the United States, and Taiwan for whatever silly reason the propaganda departments cooked up that day; the censorship of the Internet, denying people basic information about the reality in which they lived (a matter of great importance, I learned, during SARS); and the experience of coming face-to-face with the sheer absurdity and cruelty of a system that one really could only ever romanticize from a distance (as many patriots, of course, do).

Yet as I grew increasingly weary and indeed repulsed by the political system that the Chinese Communist Party forces on its people, realizing how my seeming open-mindedness had served a closed system, I also began spending more time in Hong Kong.

I remember watching a television interview with Martin Lee in my Hong Kong hotel room in 2003 and thinking, wow, this guy makes so much sense. A few days later, eager to improve my reading of full-form characters and having heard of Apple Daily’s raucous reputation for pushing boundaries and engaging critically with the current reality of China, I picked up a copy.

In reading that first copy of Apple Daily, my mind was opened to the fact that Sinophone media did not have to be mind-numbingly boring: a truly joyous discovery for a young man who had just spent the past few years memorizing Chinese characters!

Yet there was a still deeper truth behind this truth. Apple Daily showed me that it was possible to both be Chinese and to think critically, unrelentingly critically, about the current situation in China today. People of Chinese descent in Hong Kong engaged in the same types of lively and heated debates that any society that seeks to improve itself needs and treasures.

From then on, whenever I was in Hong Kong, picking up a copy of Apple Daily was a necessary part of my day: over the past decades, I have to have picked up hundreds if not thousands. The reporting helped me keep track of everything that I wasn’t being told about up north. The opinion section revealed to me how diverse, lively, and even fun cultural criticism and political debates could be in the Sinophone world. The horse racing data always confused the hell out of me, but I honestly never stopped trying to read and make sense of it (in an alternate universe, I would have proceeded with my research project on horse racing and gambling in Hong Kong, and would be far less affected by the draconian changes of the past year in Hong Kong than I am today, but alas here we are).

Considering Apple Daily’s role in my own intellectual development, I was thrilled when Apple Daily journalists reached out to me for an interview during an academic visit to Chinese University in 2018: I roundly criticized Carrie Lam’s vacuous rhetoric on Hong Kong independence and “red lines,” seeing in her comments the specter of repression for which I had once found excuses, but which I now relished deconstructing unforgivingly.

I was even more thrilled when I was asked last year to write a column for the paper’s new English-language service. There have been all types of ups and downs in my life over the past year, along with many uncertainties. But I have reliably found certainty and anchoring one night a week when, after putting my son to sleep, I would compose my Apple Daily column.

Whether I was writing about my experiences with tear gas, the mind-numbing stupidity of the lawless National Security Law, the horror of the ongoing genocide in East Turkestan, the promise of the pan-democratic primaries, the urgent necessity of sanctions against all CCP officials, the anniversary of the Fishball Revolution, the foot fetish likings of certain Chinese diplomats, or the nauseating sycophancy of public discussions of Taiwan or Xinjiang in Australia, I knew week after week that I could write a column that people would enjoy. And for that reason, I enjoyed doing it, every single time. This Substack is an attempt to keep that spirit alive.

Yet as Apple Daily’s fate has been sealed this past week, my Apple Daily story has come to an all too abrupt end. I have struggled in recent days to find the words to live up to this moment, and still can’t help but feel that this piece fails in that regard. Yet I suppose I could say that there are two lessons that I could take away from all of this, in a last-ditch attempt to seek some type of order in this horrid mess of a situation.

First, the lesson that I learned from Apple Daily two decades ago about Chineseness and critical engagement was not wrong, but was certainly not complete: the Chinese Communist Party and its National Security Law clearly view being Chinese and being frank about the current political system to be mutually incompatible, and are currently aiming to force this foreign dishonesty and unfreedom on the city of Hong Kong in the name of “return.” The results are, not to mince words, tragic for many who persist in being honest, critical, and free.

Second, however, the deeper lesson that I learned from Apple Daily remains as true as ever: freedom is an irrepressible and universal desire, regardless of one’s cultural background. This desire for freedom, of which Hong Kong itself is a symbol, will live on in Hong Kong in everyone’s hearts, below the surface if it must, in prison if it must… until the day that the current fundamentally unnatural system, falsely naturalized as “Chinese,” gives way to a return to the glory that Hong Kong once was: of which Apple Daily was one irrepressible symbol, closed today but not forgotten.