Hong Kong Protest Reads

Thousands gathered in Central for one of the early protest rallies

There are some books out already about the Hong Kong protests. First out of the gate was Jeff Wasserstrom's Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, where he weaves different themes and observations together historically between the former British colony and Shanghai, Tiananmen and 2019 in Hong Kong.

Wasserstrom's book takes a big picture approach

Next was lawyer and writer Antony Dapiran's City of Fire: the fight for Hong Kong, a lead up to his first book, City of Protest in 2017 about the Umbrella Movement. In his latest book, he details practically every single event that happened, a good first draft document of 2019 all the way to the district council elections in November, and some analysis in between.

There's also the South China Morning Post's Rebel City, a compilation of news articles that were published during the protests, some have since been updated to include the latest information. There are also colour photographs of the protests at the back of this large tome.

Dapiran documents practically every incident

And then there is Aftershock: Essays from Hong Kong compiled by journalist Holmes Chan. He was on the frontlines of the protest for Hong Kong Free Press and is now a freelance journalist.

He asked other reporters to submit essays about how they felt covering the protests, things they could not write in their reports. And what they wrote is so profound and thoughtful, emotions of anger, frustration, sadness. 

Aftershock gives them an opportunity to deal with their emotions in words on a page, to try to make sense of what has happened professionally and personally in the past year. It's a very slim volume and I only wished there were more essays to read.

A reflection of last year

It is also sold out in numerous bookstores, proving there is a big appetite for this behind-the-scenes book about what it's like to be a journalist covering the biggest story in Hong Kong that has impacted all of us politically, socially, economically and psychologically.

Chan's essay is about him questioning what he saw versus the police's version of events. He was the sole witness to the police roughly treating a protester whose teeth were knocked out, but when Chan asked the police about this brutality in the press conference, the spokesman dismissed it as violent.

So journalists are not only covering the events, but also having to battle the police in getting the "facts", that can mean different things to different people.

Rachel Cheung writes about a fight too, not with the police but with her editor about keeping her story "balanced". Her essay gives an insight into what some reporters go through daily at work to keep what they wrote in tact and not have it massaged to give a different connotation.

Meanwhile Sum Lok-kei talks about the siege at Chinese University of Hong Kong -- where he and his parents live, as they teach there. It was hard for him to fathom how his home had literally become a battleground with protesters trying to prevent the police from storming in, and the tactics used.

News articles about the protests from the SCMP

It has completely changed his perception of the campus, a place where he grew up and now scarred forever by what happened last November.

Hopefully we will see more books about the protests coming out, first hand accounts of what they saw or experienced. We need these so that the Chinese and Hong Kong governments as well as the police cannot whitewash what happened.

These are our collective history, our collective trauma.

We will not forget.