“After leaving Hong Kong, my whole identity disappeared.”

“After leaving Hong Kong, my whole identity disappeared. The experience and networks I built over the years became useless. I can barely even remember the ideals I once had about civil society and social work.”

I first met Y at an open mic night in a Hong Kong–run bar in Taiwan. That evening he was sitting in the middle of a group of friends who were egging him on to go up and sing. I can’t remember what he sang — perhaps something by Leslie Cheung or Beyond. In any case it was the kind of weathered, deeply emotional old-style Cantonese song, each line carried by a heavy vibrato that now feels strangely out of its time.

After finishing, he picked up his drink and wandered from table to table, chatting and clinking glasses.

Most of the times I ran into Y were also in this same Hong Kong bar. He would arrive wearing a sleeveless shirt, carrying two bottles of soy milk and a “healthy meal box” from the convenience store. Then he would order a beer. Then another. And then many more.

Y used to be a registered social worker in Hong Kong. After graduating from university, he worked at several community and labour-related organisations, mainly helping unemployed people return to the workforce.

At the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU), he revised CVs for job seekers, conducted mock interviews, explained labour laws, and accompanied people who had been unemployed for long periods to meet potential employers.

The people he served came from many backgrounds: middle-aged workers pushed out by industrial restructuring; elderly people with limited physical ability or education; newly arrived immigrants unfamiliar with their surroundings; and all kinds of “out-of-place” workers on the margins of the labour market.

Within the system, Y was still an employee who had to chase progress targets, submit reports, and complete performance indicators. The sector had long suffered from staff shortages and limited resources, and organisations had to reapply for funding every year. Work meant to help people was constantly broken down into quantifiable “outcomes”.

Y says he never wanted to become a manager, because that would mean more administration, more meetings, more numbers — and therefore less time with actual people.

“I’d rather stay on the frontline,” he said. “So whenever it got to the point where I might be promoted into management, I would leave. Up to now I’ve never stayed in a job longer than two years.”

Outside the system, however, Y was effectively a full-time participant in Hong Kong’s civil society.

Going back to his university years, he gradually became concerned with public issues under the influence of teachers and Christian communities on campus. During the Anti–Hong Kong Express Rail Link movement, he first stepped onto the streets, joining rallies, street booths, and publicity work. That was when he entered the networks of civic activism.

Over the following years he continued appearing at different social movement sites, including the 2013 Hong Kong dock strike, the Five Constituencies Referendum, and the Anti-National Education Movement.

Compared with student union politics or internal organisational debates, he more often stayed at the frontline or community level, supporting mobilisation and logistics. During the Umbrella Movement, he spent long periods moving around Admiralty, helping care for elderly participants and students.

When the movement ended, he did not withdraw. Instead, he continued moving between various grassroots organisations and community groups.

“I never thought I needed a fixed organisational identity,” he said. “Usually I just went wherever people were needed. I was rarely famous, but people in the circle would know who I was.”

This kind of participation — without formal titles but constantly present — became mainstream in 2019.

In the early stages of the protests, Y still moved between different locations in a relatively fluid way: street booths, rallies, and streets after police dispersal operations. Wherever support was needed, he went.

By mid-July, however, he began joining the Protect the Children volunteers, and his role gradually became clearer. Most of the time he stayed at the edges of clashes, accompanying minors seeking medical attention, helping parents locate missing children, comforting frightened citizens, and sometimes acting as a buffer when police advanced.

These tasks belonged to no official structure and had no clear division of labour, yet they required quick judgement and involved the risk of arrest.

That risk surfaced during the Hong Kong Polytechnic University campus siege.

At the time, Y and several other frontline supporters were accompanying an injured minor who had taken temporary refuge in the campus medical facilities. Under the police cordon, the situation became chaotic. People were forced to scatter, and the young person eventually lost contact with them.

Originally, Y and his teammates had found a way out — a chance to leave on their own.

But one teammate turned back and asked a single question:

“So what about everyone else?”

The two of them went back.

Soon after, police arrived. Those still present were accused of rioting and taken away together.

Y clearly remembers every moment of being escorted to the police station on a tour bus.

They were told to change clothes, replacing them with white shirts printed with the words “I Love HK.”

Officers recorded their personal details one by one. They asked what education he had received, but mistakenly wrote “stone item” instead of “master’s degree” in the record. They repeatedly questioned why someone his age would be there.

“Their questions weren’t really about understanding me,” Y recalled. “They already had a preset idea — that so-called rioters must be young troublemakers who were easily manipulated and poorly educated. So when they saw that I actually had some education and wasn’t that young, they kept asking why I was there.”

In early 2021, police began arresting people connected to the Polytechnic University incident. Y knew clearly that it would be impossible for him to stay out of it.

So he came to Taiwan seeking asylum.

After leaving Hong Kong, he felt an abrupt emptiness. At the same time, Hong Kong’s civil society was rapidly dismantling under mounting pressure. With his identity, location, and political environment all changing at once, the professional experience and personal networks he had accumulated in Hong Kong suddenly had almost no place to be used.

“After leaving Hong Kong, my whole identity disappeared. The experience and networks I built over the years became useless. I can barely even remember the ideals I once had about civil society and social work.”

Through introductions from senior Taiwanese activists, Y began working with projects related to victims of the White Terror period, supporting both survivors and their families.

For him the work felt both unfamiliar and strangely familiar. What was unfamiliar was the historical and institutional background. What was familiar was the social worker’s role of accompaniment — how to receive such heavy emotions and experiences without speaking on behalf of the person: fear, silence, and the sense of rupture created by long periods of repression.

Yet this familiarity gradually became another burden.

When the people he worked with spoke about being arrested, monitored, or forced into silence, he often heard echoes of what had happened in Hong Kong in recent years. But he also knew clearly that he should not bring those feelings into his work.

“For me it was secondary trauma,” Y said.

He described it as a double silence: he would not take the initiative to speak about his own experiences, and the other person might not yet be ready to tell their story either.

In that silence, one question kept returning in his mind — a question he could not voice aloud:

“What about me?”

As someone who was also a victim of political persecution, he could not find a place to hold his own experiences.

Eventually he resigned.

He gradually realised that Taiwan’s institutional understanding of social work differed greatly from what he had known.

“Taiwan doesn’t really respect the social work profession,” he said.

Large amounts of administrative work and KPIs reduced judgement and companionship to procedural tasks. Even after more than ten years of social work experience, the salary he could earn here amounted to only around HK$10,000 per month.

For the next year, Y was almost entirely unemployed.

That was when I met him in the bar.

The bar was a space where no explanation of identity was required. No one needed to answer what they were doing, explain why their life had stalled, or justify where they were heading.

Among the community of Hong Kong people in Taiwan gathered there, between music and alcohol, he could briefly return to a familiar language and role.

Outside the bar, however, the position that once belonged to him still had not reappeared.

“But I know I can’t keep going like this,” he said. “In the end you still have to earn a living. A person needs something to do.”

Becoming a fitness coach was not the result of long-standing interest in the fitness industry, nor because he possessed particularly outstanding physique or athletic ability.

Rather, it was the path that remained after other options gradually disappeared.

The profession required less reliance on language or local networks. It had clear certifications and entry procedures. At least in theory, the system could still accommodate an outsider.

At first he believed that as long as he worked hard, the income would not fall below ordinary working-class jobs, and might allow him to meet the minimum salary threshold required for residency or naturalisation in Taiwan.

After starting work, he realised his expectations had been far too optimistic.

Most chain gyms in Taiwan provide coaches with a base income equivalent to the minimum wage — NT$29,500 (about HK$7,200) — while the rest depends on sales and class renewals.

Every day involved endless phone calls, persuading people to try trial sessions and pushing sales forward. The effort rarely matched the rewards.

For new coaches, income is highly unstable. Those who eventually earn higher salaries usually have accumulated stable clients or can withstand the intense pressure of constant sales.

For someone lacking local social networks and facing both identity and time pressures, the starting point is even harder.

After six months of work, even in his best months, his income only reached a little over NT$30,000, not even HK$10,000. In Taipei, this was barely enough to live on, let alone reach the salary threshold required for naturalisation.

What he found hardest to endure was not only the unstable income but the complete shift in the logic of work.

Y had grown up within the context of Hong Kong’s civil society. After years in community and protest settings, he was used to building relationships through trust and time.

“I’ve never called people ‘cases’,” he said, “because that word itself comes from the logic of the business world.”

But in the gym everything had to be quickly converted into performance indicators and sales.

The professional skills he once used as a social worker — listening to people, understanding them, accompanying them — had to be transformed into sales techniques.

Y told me he wanted to change careers.

“All my life I’ve never worked just for money,” he said.

For him, work should at least respond to some form of value, not simply complete targets in exchange for income.

When daily labour becomes nothing but sales and transactions, it becomes harder and harder to recognise his own value within it.

Sometimes when he looks up into the mirror, he sees the exhaustion and emptiness in his own eyes — someone very far from the person he remembers himself to be.

He knows clearly that he no longer has much room to make mistakes.

“I’m almost forty. My margin for error is actually very small.”

Age, identity, and time are closing in like a slowly tightening net. Questions of income stability and legal status seep into every detail of daily life, becoming background noise that can never be switched off.

The anxiety about whether he will obtain long-term status has begun to show in his routines. His sleep has become short and fragmented, waking frequently in the night and unable to fall back asleep. Insomnia has become normal, and the long-term exhaustion has begun to erode his everyday life.

On days when reality’s pressures cannot be shaken off, the bar becomes one of the few places where he does not have to explain where he is going or what the future holds.

Y’s favourite film is A Better Tomorrow III: Love and Death in Saigon (《英雄本色III：夕陽之歌》).

Sometimes at the bar’s open mic nights he sings the song of the same name.

The lights are dim. The microphone occasionally distorts. He finishes the song, steps off the stage, and returns to his seat.

“奔波中心灰意淡／路上紛擾波折再一彎／一天想／想到歸去但已晚。”

“Amid the rush of life the heart grows weary and pale,

the road twists again through turmoil and hardship.

One day you think of returning home —

only to realise it is already too late.”

People occasionally look up and applaud him.

Then the next person goes on stage.

And the cycle repeats.

Postscript

People like Y are not rare.

They are not unwilling to work, nor do they lack ability. They are caught in the gap where identity transition, institutional differences, and the realities of survival intersect.

Humanitarian fundraising aims to provide the most basic and necessary support during this transitional period, allowing those who continue to persevere to withstand the pressures of making a living.

The Bonham Tree Aid Foundation continues to provide livelihood support to fellow activists in need. If you would like to support this work, please visit the link in our profile to learn more about the fundraising campaign.

Illustration: @sidelee.studio

Written by: G

Edited by: @mingyeung_