Sharon Yam | A Hong Kong academic in the US —“We need to document our own history”
Sharon is a 30-year-old professor at the University of Kentucky, who teaches and researches politics and rhetoric. At a place with few Hongkongers nearby, she finds every possible way to stand with Hong Kong: from getting an umbrella tattoo on her arm, to advocating for the social movement in Hong Kong through teaching and public speaking.
“Writing is a tool to refine our thinking, to interrogate where our beliefs come from, and where our arguments stand. I think it is important to teach students writing as a way to self-reflect and interrogate the sources of their opinions.”
Journalist: Tea Leaf
Photos: Provided by Interviewee
I’m trying to intellectualise my feelings about the movement, and there is a lot of dissonance between my everyday life in the US and my emotional attachment to Hong Kong. As a diasporic Hong Kong academic in the US, there are times when I feel like my identities are colliding – while I am able to engage in theoretical discussions about the movement as an academic, I would have been more emotionally unhinged if I take off my intellectual hat.
As I repeatedly educate my social circle – including my colleagues and students – about the movement in Hong Kong, I still have this lingering guilt that nothing I do is ever enough. Moreover, the movement coincided with a lot of other events in my personal life: last summer, while I was renovating the fixer-upper my partner and I just bought as our first home, I was also watching live streams of the protests and police violence in Hong Kong on my phone. I shouted, “The police just fired teargas in close range inside the subway station where I grew up!” And then I walked out of the door in Kentucky, everyone and everything was normal, as if no violence had just transpired…
I am Sharon, I am a professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of Kentucky. Despite leaving Hong Kong at 17 for college, my whole family and many close friends still reside in Hong Kong. I still care about Hong Kong a lot and have a lot at stake there – unlike what Carrie Lam has said about young folks who support the movement. As an academic in the US, I have the opportunity to mobilise my expertise and influence to educate a broader audience. While I am torn by the fact that I am not physically in Hong Kong, the sense of obligation I feel to educate students here keeps me grounded. Here, I teach different frameworks of social justice, and the rhetorics of social movements--topics that allow me to draw on what is happening in Hong Kong.
Discussing Hong Kong affairs in academia
I met a New York City-based Chinese American activist at a feminist studies conference. She reminded me that in any social movement, you first need to find pockets of joy through which you could sustain yourselves. She also reminded me that injustices everywhere are connected--so while I might not be able to dedicate all my time working directly to Hong Kong, I was still working towards justice when I taught my students about the women-of-color led reproductive justice movement in the US.
In my professional life, my current research trajectory is on reproductive justice. Reproductive justice essentially says that we all have three central rights: the right to have children, the right to not have children, and also the right to parent children in a safe and sustainable environment. I was teaching a course on this topic, and I explored what justice is by giving students a framework to analyze power and to push back against the existing power structure. Although I was teaching it primarily in the US context, these ideas are relevant to Hong Kong as well.
Indeed, the public health crisis resulting from the rampant deployment of teargas in Hong Kong is a form of reproductive injustice. This is what I am arguing about in an academic article I am writing – that teargas threatens environmental safety, making it dangerous for parents who want to raise their children in a safe environment, and for folks who want to get pregnant. Hongkongers as a community are responding to this crisis in ingenious ways, such as doing citizen science to test the constituents of teargas and the water cannon sprays when the government refused to provide such information. This is all related to creating a sustainable and safe future, contrary to what Carrie Lam said that “the youths don’t care about the future of the city.”
Teaching controversial topics such as race or abortion in the US classroom can be as tense as discussing the anti-authoritarian movement in Hong Kong in front of mixed audiences. How can one navigate the tension between seeing this topic as an academic intellectual endeavor without losing sight of the political fraught lines in a university setting? I have led workshops and discussions on the topic of Hong Kong protests, and they demanded a lot of emotional management, especially when the audience has very different beliefs and stances.
Rather than asking students to explicitly state their personal stances in class, or telling them that certain views are outright wrong, I would start a conversation. By first presenting the readings from different perspectives, I would then ask students why people might hold particular beliefs, and how these beliefs are informed by specific lived experiences. I invite students to think about how their lived experiences have formed their worldviews as well. Students who believed very strongly about one thing before might then realise, “oh, I’ll have to reconsider some of these nuances.” This is what I like about teaching writing – it is more than just teaching students “proper” grammar or complex vocabulary. Writing is a tool to refine our thinking, to interrogate where our beliefs come from, and where our arguments stand. When you write, you inevitably have to reconsider your assumptions and preconceptions.
I would do something similar when I discuss Hong Kong protests, sometimes with students and faculty from the mainland. I invoke what I study in rhetoric to guide these discussions: how do people make meaning, and how do we use symbols to move people, both physically and emotionally. I would ask students about their feelings when they are on different media sources: what kind of ideologies do you think these sources represent? What kinds of visual rhetoric do you see in action?
I think the tension here is very similar to that after the 2016 presidential election: Kentucky was a predominantly conservative state, yet some of the students were very liberal. We need to reflect on the narratives we tell ourselves, stories that motivate our political beliefs and decisions. I would ask students and participants what experiences they have had that led them to certain conclusions. I think sometimes inviting people to interrogate their thought process is enough. Students and people may not change their mind, but this activity defamiliarises their existing ideologies and makes them realise that their opinions came from a particular context. I have let go of the pressure of thinking that I must change their view. People are autonomous beings and should be treated as such. It would be counterproductive to my goal of fostering autonomy if I were to try and change their mind. As an educator, my responsibility is to give students the tool to explore their own beliefs. In the end, if they change their views, that’s their call. If not, at least I’ve given them a toolset they can use. I am of the opinion that our beliefs are not Truth with a capital T, because our view of truth is always informed by external circumstances and forces.
Besides discussing the Hong Kong movement with my students, I also engage scholars in the international community to build on our coalition potential. I am putting together a transnational conference panel that includes me, alongside colleagues from Puerto Rico and Kashmir, places that are in neocolonial relationships with more powerful nation-states. We wish to see how these parallels are playing in different cases all around the world. Part of colonialism is about power imbalance on who gets to decide what your identity is, and how you are going to live your life. We ask: What are the different strategies that colonised people are using to resist suppression and oppression? Although the contexts across these locales are different, are there any similarities and parallels we can learn from each other? I really hope that we can answer some of these questions transnationally.
Who gets to write history?
Publishing articles in academic journals and op-eds in public media channels is a means for me to document what is happening on the ground, so I can let people know that Hongkongers are brave, resilient, and creative in coming up with ways to counter the state’s oppression. I think a lot of research on social movements stems from a more detached perspective, measuring the value of a social movement based on whether it has successfully incurred some kind of concrete policy or regime change. For example, Erica Chenoweth[*1], a professor at Harvard, shows in her studies that during the 1990s, 70% of protests were successful in yielding regime or policy changes. However, the success rate went way down to only about 30% in the 2020s ever since the internet became popularised. On the other hand, non-violent resistance strategies, like the Yellow Economy Circle, in Hong Kong tend to work a lot better than frontline confrontations. Looking at these research conclusions, and then watching the protests all over the world, there is this pessimistic part of me that thinks that people on the ground are losing. Indeed, the movement in Hong Kong is not entirely defined by optimism –it’s more like, “if we’re going to go out, we might as well go out with a bang.” There is no end in sight, and the end is likely not going to be pretty. I think we cannot measure the success and impact of the movement by whether the five demands are met. Maybe we need to redefine what success means: success can simply be that we have come together as a community, and have devised creative strategies of resistance.
That’s why I hold on to the view that we need to document our actions, amplify every little act, rather than retroactively writing about how this ends. Maybe we can stop measuring the actions of protesters and everyday citizens simply by their immediate political outcome. Rather, we can recognize their willingness to engage in the movement and sacrifice in the process, valuing the solidarity that has been fostered. For example, Hongkongers went from being openly racist towards the South Asian community to beginning to form a connection with them. The civil society in Hong Kong has come such a long way in this movement. Even if the five demands might not be met, we have done a heck of a job already, and that in and of itself is worth global acknowledgment. Even before knowing how this movement may end, it matters that we are taking every little step to promote justice. And really, who gets to write this history? It’s usually those who are in power. However, when we are documenting the diverse narratives and experiences on the grassroots level, we are telling our own stories and writing our histories.
Research as self-help
I majored in English, Politics, and Philosophy in college, and I’ve always been interested in racial politics in Hong Kong. I researched this topic in graduate school and wrote my first book, Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship, based on that research. Part of my research studies emotions. I am interested in the way emotions generate and help fuel social movements, and also the ways emotions prompt people to cling to social and ideological categories that have a lot of consequences: for example, whether we see someone as an insider or outsider of the community.
Within emotions, there’s also trauma. I have been thinking a lot about the ways in which Hongkongers are traumatised. We need to attend to how this movement is affecting people’s mental health. This long-term political unrest has no end in sight, so what kind of new emotional problems is it posing? This is not the same as a singular traumatic event, like a car crash or natural disaster that causes PTSD. How are we as a community from all over the world dealing with this trauma? What kind of tools do we need to build in order to promote collective healing?
While overseas Hongkongers may not have been the direct victims of police brutality, they nevertheless experience a certain degree of trauma or guilt, a kind of survivor’s guilt, and a deep sense of powerlessness that comes from bearing witness from afar. This survivor’s guilt always creeps up on me, and there were moments when I felt like my academic tools were falling short. I just want to be constantly doing something while asking myself, “Is that enough? I don’t know what is enough.” I questioned myself repeatedly for the decision not to go back to Hong Kong at the height of the protests, even if that decision was made after weighing many conflicting considerations. I questioned myself on what I want to achieve, and what could be achieved with the articles I publish in academic journals. Sometimes the research feels so theoretical and brainy, and I started to feel like an armchair academic. I ask myself often, “I didn’t take to the streets in Hong Kong, am I really qualified to speak on this?” The academic side of me knows that there’s no point to calculate this with a formula, like “participating in this number of protests would equal the contribution of creating this amount of educational materials.” But somehow, I cannot get over the lingering guilt that I have not passed the true litmus test of being a responsible Hongkonger because I have not put my body on the line. Therefore, I sometimes feel like I’m not a good Hongkonger as I didn’t go back. I cannot rationally, and intellectually think my way out of this. I don’t know whether other diasporic Hongkongers are wrestling with this as well, and I still haven’t figured out the answers to these questions myself.
Despite all these struggles, I am grateful that I am snapped back to reality by some of my colleagues who reminded me of my duty in my day-to-day life as an educator and researcher. My teaching and research are related to systems of power and justice. Although nothing gives me all the answers to the questions about social movements and protests, there is always hope that somebody someday will write something about it. I can always go back to my research, continue to document the truth, and figure out the answers along the way. I will teach my students to do the same, to recognise and push back against injustices, and bear witness as history unfolds.
“I am Sharon Yam, I am a HKer.”
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(Sharon has put together a digital binder about the movement as an educational tool: https://www.livebinders.com/b/2625703)
[*1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/16/how-social-media-helps-dictators/