Umbrellas Against Pepper Spray

While I was lying in bed on a Monday morning treating my alarm like a personal insult, students in Hong Kong were trying to storm the city’s government headquarters. Hundreds of protesters in hard hats, holding umbrellas against pepper spray. I’ve never fully gotten over that contrast.

The umbrella had become the symbol of the Occupy Central movement by then—something domestic and unremarkable, repurposed as a shield. There’s a whole sentence in that image about what ordinary people reach for when ordinary means have failed them. The movement had been running since September 2014, demanding free elections and genuine universal suffrage, a future not pre-arranged by a mainland government nobody in Hong Kong had voted for. That these demands counted as provocation serious enough to warrant mass arrests says everything necessary about the space available to them.

Isobel Yeung was reporting for VICE News, moving from corner to corner through the streets, close enough to the action that you could feel the pressure of it through the screen. She talked to Joshua Wong—nineteen years old, the most visible face of the movement, calm and specific and unintimidated in a way that would have been remarkable in someone twice his age. She also talked to the pro-Beijing counter-protesters, some of whom had been organized and possibly compensated, and the contrast between the two groups didn’t need any commentary to land.

I followed all of it from a screen in Berlin and felt the particular uselessness of caring about something from a distance. You could read every article, watch every video, understand exactly what was at stake—and still wake up the next Monday morning, and the Monday after that, completely untouched. The pepper spray never reached you. The hard hat was never yours.