Food, Weather, and Cats

Late last week, one of Hong Kong’s most celebrated writers of fiction, Hon Lai Chu (韓麗珠), announced that she was backing out of a regular column for one of the territory’s most popular broadsheets — already seven years running — after her drafts were twice rejected within several days for being “rather sensitive” (比較敏感). Hon’s case offers the latest glimpse inside a press environment in Hong Kong that has grown more and more repressive and risk-averse since Hong Kong’s National Security Law took effect in 2020.

The next installment of Hon’s column in the “Life” section of Ming Pao (明報), a Chinese-language newspaper launched back in 1959 by novelist Louis Cha (查良鏞), was due to publish on September 11. On September 9, however, after submitting a replacement for a draft that had already been rejected over sensitivities, Hon was told by her editor: “This topic is rather sensitive right now and needs to be handled carefully, and the final paragraph’s reference to recent events isn’t quite appropriate in this context.”

Which “recent events” were in question? Titled simply “Awareness” (覺察), the rejected column, Hon said in a public statement on Facebook, had opened by discussing a 2008 John Berger novel in which a woman pens letters to her incarcerated partner, who has been jailed for resisting an unnamed authoritarian government. The column apparently juxtaposed this opener with recent cases in Hong Kong, including the arrest of staff members from several independent bookstores.

Hon said in her statement that she “sympathizes” (體恤) with editors at the paper, and understood that “[they] too must have borne so much unimaginable pressure.” Adding that while she understood that playing it safe in her writing — focusing on “food, weather, and cats” — would mean avoiding danger, she simply could not make such a compromise. “But . . . the things happening in Hong Kong continue to cause me pain,” she said. “I am not deliberately magnifying them — it’s just that I do not want to look away.”