【Tuen Mun–Yuen Long–Tin Shui Wai local convicted despite never going to the front line; collective punishment and forced head-shaving in prison, with cockroaches crawling over his bed】

The question of remembering and forgetting does not exist only in public discussion. After being unjustly imprisoned, or becoming caught up in conflicts both inside and outside prison, some fellow activists may want nothing more than to put everything behind them and forget — to stop being tormented by the experience of arrest and imprisonment. Others choose to confront what happened directly, searching for ways to express the delayed, suppressed emotions that accumulated behind bars.

Bonham Tree Aid spoke separately with two fellow activists, attempting through these conversations to reconstruct the faces once hidden behind masks on the streets, and to understand what their lives look like now that they have returned to something resembling normality. In this instalment, Ma Yat (孖一, pseudonym) looks back on his years behind bars.

> “That period of time is part of who I am.”

Asked to sum up his time in prison, Ma Yat was briefly lost for words before settling on one: “ambivalent”.

Trying to describe the experience, he compared it to “a very unusual drink, with every flavour in it — sweet, sour, bitter and spicy. Of course I would never want to try it a second time. But every now and then, I’ll bring back some of the good feelings from inside and savour them again.”

During the protest movement, stories of wrongful and indiscriminate arrests were common. With evidence often appearing weak, many assumed that most of those arrested would ultimately walk free. Ma Yat’s case shows how easily an entirely undeserved misfortune could instead become a prison sentence.

Ma Yat says that although he strongly supported the protest movement at the time, he was never one of those on the front line. Born in the 2000s, his first experience of street protest came on the night after the million-strong march on 9 June, when clashes broke out around the Legislative Council complex.

Despite turning up at protests large and small throughout the second half of 2019, with tear gas flying across the streets, he never once wore a “‘pig snout’ respirator”.

His eventual arrest had nothing to do with being caught in the act or making a careless mistake. One evening, after a protest had already ended, Ma Yat went over to have a look at the area. Riot police subdued and arrested him.

He was charged and ultimately convicted simply because he was dressed entirely in black.

He had not even laid eyes on the protest itself, yet ended up convicted of unlawful assembly. There was evidence showing that he had not been at the scene when the alleged offence took place, but a judge protesters regarded as particularly hard-line rejected it on the grounds that it was not credible.

He consequently lost several months of his freedom for something he maintains he did not do. It is little wonder that Ma Yat describes the case as a miscarriage of justice.

In the years since, he has occasionally passed the spot where he was arrested.

“At first, I had really mixed feelings. I’d feel angry — why did they arrest me in the first place, and how did they actually manage to convict me? And I’d feel upset too. I was just arrested like that and ended up going through prison.

“My heart would beat a bit faster. But that doesn’t happen any more. When I go there now, I’ll still instinctively look over and think, this is where I was arrested, this is where this and that happened back then. But emotionally, the reaction isn’t nearly as strong. I can look back at the place calmly now.”

But what was there about life inside that Ma Yat still finds himself revisiting?

During his first two weeks on remand, he would sometimes hum Shine’s Swallowtail Butterfly: “If there were paradise on Earth, would it look like this?”

At the time, prisoners held over protest-related cases made up a large share of the prison population. Cellmates and prison officers commonly referred to them as “yellow ribbons”. When some institutions became overcrowded, there were even designated “Yellow” cohorts.

Ma Yat still refers to himself and the cellmates from his cohort as “yellow ribbons” today.

Now, symbols associated with “Yellow” have all but disappeared from Hong Kong’s streets. Between the guilt some people carry over the protest movement having failed to achieve its aims, and the backlash that followed, openly identifying oneself as a “yellow ribbon” has become increasingly difficult.

For Ma Yat, however, continuing to use the term is not a problem.

“Playing football inside worked a bit like playing on a public pitch outside — there was a system for teams waiting their turn. Usually the people who played football were relatively alert and easy to communicate with, and different groups would form their own teams. During major festivals and holidays, there’d be different competitions.

“So we formed the Yellow Ribbon team. The gang-affiliated prisoners and the prison officers called us that too.”

Entertainment was scarce behind bars. Playing football during exercise periods was one of the few activities that still connected Ma Yat with his former life outside.

And his memories of football went beyond the games themselves. While talking to one of his football-playing cellmates, Ma Yat discovered that the two of them came from the same neighbourhood. They were around the same age and had regularly played on the same football pitch before prison. There was every chance they had already played against one another without knowing it.

Their friendship did not disappear when they returned to life outside. Ma Yat said that, on the night before this interview, the two of them had just been gaming together.

Being able to find brief moments of enjoyment amid the hardship is one reason Ma Yat can sometimes look back on his imprisonment. But the simple pain of losing his freedom is enough to make him certain that he never wants to experience it again.

He remembers arriving at the fingerprinting room for the first time, confused and helpless. The prison officers were aggressive towards him, and he was so frightened that his whole body shook.

Another fellow activist imprisoned over a protest-related case comforted him, easing his fear slightly. The man also advised him that, when registering, he should say that he smoked. That way, in the days ahead, he would have access to what functioned as a form of prison currency, giving him certain small conveniences.

Ma Yat remembers that after he was first released, he went for a meal with friends. They were concerned about him, and naturally curious about what life inside had been like.

His first response was simply:

> “It was really fucking grim.”

(*Ba*, the Cantonese prison slang he originally used, describes something grim, awful or extremely difficult to endure.)

The prison environment itself was one thing; the unpleasant habits of other prisoners were another. Nor was it any secret that prison officers used various petty forms of harassment against fellow activists.

By the time Ma Yat served his sentence, he was no longer classified as a young offender, so he did not have to endure the kind of physical punishment associated with Sha Tsui Detention Centre or rehabilitation centres, intended to wear down detainees’ will.

But adult prisons had plenty of other ways to make life difficult, and these had a serious effect on Ma Yat’s emotional state.

The most extreme case he encountered involved a prison officer whom he described as “a psychopath”. The officer ran the unit with an intensely high-pressure approach, placing coercion above education or ordinary prison management. When he was in a bad mood, he would sometimes vent his anger on prisoners in excessive ways.

Ma Yat himself had done nothing wrong on one occasion. But during an inspection, the officer took a dislike to one of his cellmates. Everyone in the cell was punished as a result.

It was collective punishment.

Living for long periods in such a hostile atmosphere kept Ma Yat constantly on edge, unable to relax even after the immediate incident had passed. The prison facilities were also rundown, while poor hygiene further intensified his emotional strain.

Ma Yat remembers that during his first month there, cockroaches roamed the ceiling and walls of the two-person cell. They would turn up everywhere — in drinking cups, by the head of the bed — often making it difficult to sleep. Over time, the conditions took an increasing toll on Ma Yat’s mental health. Things did not improve much after he was convicted and transferred to another cell. Some of his cellmates would spit openly in communal areas, hawking phlegm onto the floor — behaviour that left him genuinely taken aback.

On the board beneath his prison mattress, Ma Yat wrote a few lines adapted from Candy Lo’s *Love to Love*: “Perhaps I love you simply to numb myself / Even walking into prison, I need not be lonely until I die.” They recorded something of how he felt at the time.

Emotions accumulated over long periods behind bars, with nowhere for them to go. Friends and family had never been through the same experience and could not fully understand what it was like, making it difficult either to talk through what he was feeling or to find a way forward. Six months after his release, Ma Yat was still struggling. Poor health made it difficult for him to work full-time, hampering his return to employment, while ordinary events in everyday life would repeatedly trigger memories of prison and leave him struggling to readjust.

Some fellow activists, having begun their lives again, would rather not remember those painful days and choose not to speak about the past. Ma Yat says that, even today, he has yet to work out exactly how he feels about having been imprisoned. There was far more suffering than happiness, but he has never avoided talking about it. Even in ordinary conversation, traces of prison vocabulary remain in the way he speaks.

Ma Yat recalls that, when he celebrated his birthday inside, the cellmates at his table made him a kind of “prison banoffee-style pudding” from wafers, digestive biscuits, milk and whatever else they had available. After his release, he even recreated some of these “cell recipes” for friends outside, including makeshift cakes.

“I wanted them to try it. When you make it by hand like that, it actually doesn’t taste that bad. I wanted them to experience it. Everything in prison is colourless and tasteless, so you have to find ways to add your own colour and flavour.”

His friends thought the improvised cakes “looked like vomit”, but Ma Yat insists that they certainly did not taste like it.

Hovering somewhere between bitter and sweet, the experience may sound to an outsider like little more than a line from a song. Only the person living through it can truly know what those flavours mean.

Perhaps calling oneself a “yellow ribbon” today feels somewhat out of step with the times. But simply repudiating the past can just as easily lead to cynicism. When Ma Yat occasionally finds himself looking back, it is not simply because he wants to affirm the value of having taken to the streets back then. Nor is it because life behind bars left him so traumatised that he cannot escape it.

For Ma Yat, it is more a matter of acceptance.

“I accept that it is part of my life. Because if I constantly refuse to accept it — if I deny that all of this happened to me — that would be exhausting.”

Illustration: @sidelee.studio

Words: Vicent Vega

Editor: @mingyeung_

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