William Gibson’s notorious 1993 essay for WIRED, in which he calls Singapore “Disneyland with the death penalty,” ends with him eagerly escaping to Hong Kong. Ironically, the soothingly authentic image that prompts Gibson to loosen his tie, the ungoverned shantytown Kowloon Walled City, was dismantled later that year. What stands in its place today is a level park, built in the style of Qing dynasty gardens, replete with antique-looking concrete pavilions—a site that would incite an even stronger allergic reaction in simulacra-averse Gibson than surveilled, sterile Singapore.

Since the UK returned Hong Kong to China 25 years ago this summer, Beijing’s ever-tightening grip has made the city resemble Singapore all the more. In the 1960s, a severe crackdown on political dissidents in Singapore led to an enduring icing of political commentary. Many were detained without trial in the name of national security—most notably Chia Thye Poh, who was imprisoned for 23 years. Today in Hong Kong, the prosecution of the 2019 pro-democracy protests and the sweeping National Security Law of 2020 has cast a pall on the city’s once vibrant atmosphere of free expression. The Hong Kong police have arrested more than 10,000 people in connection with the 2019 protests. Several of the city’s independent newspapers have been shuttered. Under the broad umbrella of the National Security Law, acts big and small, such as managing bail funds for arrested protesters, or even sporting certain imagery or slogans on bubble tea shops, have been deemed threats to national security. In July 2021, speech therapists were arrested and charged with sedition over children’s books inspired by the protests that depict Hong Kongers as sheep.

While Hong Kong and its gleaming cyberpunk skyline used to be an aspirational vision for Singapore’s economic future, Singapore’s past and present may now serve as the harbinger of Hong Kong’s socio-political future.

Singapore and Hong Kong’s surveillance states are also becoming mirror images. In Singapore, there are plans to increase the number of CCTV cameras used for police surveillance from 90,000 to over 200,000 by 2030. In Hong Kong, a national security hotline launched in 2020 encourages citizens to report on possible violations of the National Security Law, effectively transforming every person on the street into an internet surveillance tool. In the last two years of the pandemic, both Hong Kong and Singapore launched apps meant for contact-tracing, which raised concerns among many regarding privacy and data.

When total surveillance in a disciplinary society suffocates free expression, how does that expression escape the state's watchful eyes?

When I arrived in Hong Kong at the end of last summer to begin a job as an assistant professor, I was eager to find out. The city seemed to have become an ideological battleground between China and the West, and Western media coverage often reproduced this reductive binary. Naively, I would probe people I had just met with a typhoon of questions about the 2019 protests. Most, however, gave me lackadaisical answers about how the protests had been inconvenient, though a flicker behind their eyes made me wonder if there was more to what they thought. How jejune of me.

I began to recognize the hushed tones of many of today’s Hong Kongers. Growing up in punitive Singapore, I’ve long observed a weird conversational antic that occurs when people discuss a topic deemed taboo—things as quotidian as politics, local politicians, even sex. (Sex between two consenting men is still criminalized in Singapore.) They perform a two-step contortion of rhetoric where they begin by saying what they truly think—an opinion that might be considered against the grain—then laugh too loudly while exaggeratedly overcorrecting themselves, miming to an invisible observer (the ever-present CCTV in the corner). Less important than whether there is cause for such suspicions is how it reveals the atmosphere of paranoia that undergirds and governs people’s actions and thoughts.

In such a fearful atmosphere, one has to grow vigilantly observant to see the free expression of what cannot be freely expressed. It was hard to know where to begin to look. From the point of view of a newcomer in 2021, 2019 felt like buried history. The people were mum, but the city itself was making contact—in the shadows and in plain sight. It was speaking to me in a language I did not yet understand.

The first whispers of enduring protest came to me on one of the many nature trails that weave through Hong Kong island. My partner and I began noticing the same odd Chinese characters scrawled on park signs—a baffling phrase like “share dog.” A Google search provided some illumination: It was a slur used to describe supporters of the Chinese Communist Party. The phrase is completely verboten today, as I learned from a comical instance in which a man’s WeChat posts about giving dogs up for adoption were repeatedly censored. Over weeks and months, I became obsessed with observing the back of a single park sign that seemed alive with chameleonic scribbling, where the unheard and unspoken sociopolitical battle of the city seemed daily to be battled out. One day I’d see the slur freshly scrawled; the next day it’d be painted over with white. One day I’d see a red and yellow sticker stuck over the patch; the next it’d have been vigorously scratched out.

The city’s architecture bespeaks the literal whitewashing of its psyche, a kind of metaphor for the lobotomy that is being performed on collective memory. As I walk around my pristine and immaculate campus, there is nary a mark that betrays the intense standoffs between protesters and police from just three years ago. But when the light hits just right, one notes where the white paint is glommed on too thick. Patches of newer, shinier white paint catch a glint of light and take the shape of protest graffiti, like invisible ink materializing. Post-its with pro-democracy messages were used abundantly during the protests and saw the city blossom into a bouquet of colorful “Lennon walls.” The slogans on these Post-its have now been outlawed, so businesses display walls of colorful blank post-its. To the uninformed and uninitiated, this appears as a curious kind of kitschy decor—but far from being unmarked, it tellingly marks a wry challenge to power. Cleverly staging appearance as disappearance, connotation serves as denotation. At every moment, at every turn, something is peeking out, waiting to be noticed by the attentive flaneur, nostalgic city-dweller, the amnesic citizen—often barely there yet significant precisely because it shouldn’t be, but is.

On a particularly clear day, I ascended Lion’s Rock, an iconic peak in Kowloon which offers stunning vistas of Hong Kong to the intrepid hiker. In 2019, the grandiose cliff face was regularly draped in protest signs. Steadying myself against a tree trunk, I feel my thumb slip into a groove. I look up, and, squinting, see etched into the trunk, “八三一,” the Chinese characters for 831. Like Neo learning to read code, the same numbers began to float before my vision as I ambled down the trail, uncanny and insistent, carved into tree after tree: 831, 831, 831. I whipped out my phone: 8/31, the date of the “Prince Edward Incident,” when police brutally bludgeoned protesters at the Prince Edward subway station, then sealed it off to first responders.

Googling 831 led me quickly to 721, the Yuen Long incident on July 21, which also involved violent clashes between police, protesters, and counterprotesters. Democratic Party chair Wu Chi-wai condemned the arrest of Lam Cheuk-ting, a Democratic Party politician at the time, pointing out that “the prosecution is ‘calling a deer a horse’ and twisting right and wrong.”

My mind whirred, clicked back. Months before, listening to an indie band beloved for their politically subversive lyrics led me to a coffee shop in Kowloon they sing about. A few doors down, I’d seen a curious T-shirt in a shop window: It had a picture of a deer captioned “this is a horse.”

I was beginning to piece things together, to understand how the businesses and people around me were marking themselves—how they stuck their tongues out at leaders by sticking their tongues in their cheek; how coded interactions allowed them to seek each other out and build community.

Some weeks later, I am nodding distractedly along during a conversation when my acquaintance sighs, “You simply cannot point at a deer and call it a horse.” My eyes dart up. They catch my look. “You understand what I am saying?” they ask meaningfully. “I understand,” I replied. We exchange silent, knowing nods, both comprehending that something important has passed between us. Surveillance promotes mistrust, and conversation therefore often occurs only between the lines. Far from an act of cowardice for not “speaking one’s mind,” these coded gestures are a profound measure of trust, a commitment to remembering together.

As Milan Kundera once wrote, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” In the face of Beijing's will, this may be all that is left to those in this city who took to the streets with a passion just three years ago. But it is not nothing. Far from it. Learning to see something where nothing is there sounds paranoid, but indeed it is the only bulwark against revisionism in a city where one has to contend with doublespeak from the highest offices. Last year, two independent newspapers were shuttered within a week, and their employees were arrested. But Carrie Lam, then the chief executive of Hong Kong, claimed that while the newspapers compromised national security, their shuttering had nothing to do with the National Security Law or censorship. Addressing questions about the recent elections being a “one-man race,” where only one candidate stood for elections, Maria Tam, deputy director of China’s NPCSC Basic Law Committee, said, “Having just one person running for [chief executive’s] office does not mean we have fewer choices,” in a semantically illogical statement.

Paradoxical doublespeak in Hong Kong today occurs not only as a sprinkling of isolated incidents, but is deeply existential. Earlier this year, news broke regarding new textbooks for schoolchildren in Hong Kong that would assert that Hong Kong was never a British colony. In his speech at the handover anniversary celebrations, President Xi Jinping asserted that “true democracy” in Hong Kong only began after Hong Kong was returned to China. When questioned by a UN rights committee about press freedoms and disbanded NGOs, the secretary for constitutional and mainland affairs, Erick Tsang, retorted defensively that “in fact, democracy has taken a quantum leap forward since the return to the motherland in 1997.” All this presents a crisis of rhetoric and of ideology. If Hong Kong was never a colony, it couldn’t “be returned,” but if this was so, then what was being celebrated on the first of July? Meanwhile, pro-democracy activists are deemed unpatriotic and persecuted. Is one to understand if democracy is desirable or not? And does Hong Kong have one, or not?

The thing about erasure is that it tends to be indiscriminate. The censorship of these issues means turning away from a moment of social strife that the central government may not care to record, but it also means erasing nuance from the issue of identity in Hong Kong. In fact, while monuments to the Tiananmen Massacre have been steadily dismantled in Hong Kong, the protests in the city in 1989 were born out of a deep nationalism, even a love for China, and there was a desire among many to (re)join with the mainland, wishing to bring democracy to the motherland.

It is because of the specter of this amnesic and sterilized future that these traces I’ve noticed, insignificant and paranoid as they seem, have felt so important. Resistance—impressively creative and brave—has had to find a way to go undetected, and in defiance of everything, survives. As French philosopher Jacques Derrida explains, the trace is the "mark of the absence of a presence, an always-already absent present,” and this allows it to be capacious and therefore subversive. In evading surveillance and defying governance by persisting as a trace, (an absent presence, something not there, which cannot but be felt) against all odds, history persists.

Derrida’s trace perhaps finds its most ideal expression today in the indelible, inexpungible realm of cyberspace. Bodies are crucial to a mass demonstration, they are what give them their weight and transformative stakes. As Judith Butler writes, as “bodies congregate, they move and speak together, and they lay claim to a certain space as public space.” But what happens when bodies cannot organize this way? When the threat, both material and existential, is unthinkably great?

Forced to think beyond the body and disappear into the anonymous digital ether, protesters in 2019 creatively and effectively evaded surveillance and bypassed China’s Great Firewall by sharing key protest details through AirDrop, on Tindr profiles, and even on Pokémon Go. Ordinary citizens banded together, and volunteers shared live maps to help demonstrators on the ground, with icons signifying first aid, rest, and supply stations.

Even today, under the weight of the new security law, students find a way to act without their bodies. Early this year, weeks after the Tiananmen Massacre memorial at the University of Hong Kong was removed, students employed these same digital tactics in "protesting" the removal, organizing an invisible digital flash mob through AirDrop. They left pamphlets with slogans like “Shame on HKU” and “People Will Not Forget” scattered throughout the campus, and then, also via AirDrop, tipped off journalists on where to find them.

It is likely that the desire for democracy in Hong Kong seems to have waned because in order to survive, it has had to persist in new forms that are not necessarily legible to democracy's most vocal supporters (though not necessarily its best practitioners) today. If this is scandalizing, it is only because Western democratic nations often want to make democracy only in their own image, to rescue others elsewhere, even as their own democratic structures prove to be flawed or are increasingly unrecognizable as such. Freedom of speech might in fact be more precious in spaces where it is not guaranteed—where the stakes of voicing one’s beliefs are not only high, one also has to back those words with literal skin in the game, and possibly blood and jailtime. If history's long and irregular arc ultimately bends towards a freer world, we would do well to consider the ways in which these creative forms of disruption as resistance are just as, if not more, hopeful and creative—indeed, more brave—than is necessarily registered by onlookers elsewhere and act as a way of staving off political amnesia and whitewashing. It is to insist on the fact that one option does not a choice make—to know in your heart, as surely as it beats, that a deer is not a horse.