Stepping Into Emptiness
The following is a translation of a feature story documenting the trauma experienced by two Hong Kong journalists that was published recently by the exile outlet Flow HK (如水).
By Cao Yu (曹雨)
As “Loft,” who was in Vancouver, came online for our interview, I was struck at first by the unusual brightness of the image. In a flat tone, he explained that this was part of his therapy. Even as he discussed the past, bathed in that radiant light, his expression did not falter — though his voice at times, punctuated by sighs, grew intermittent.
In 2020, the Hong Kong College of Psychiatrists revealed that the incidence of depression and anxiety during the anti-extradition movement within groups such as journalists, medical staff, and property management personnel rose to around 30 percent — double the 14 percent found in the general population. During that time, college president Ng Man-kin (吳文建) said that reporters covering conflicts at the city’s various protest sites, who often found themselves in the gap between protesters and police, endured tremendous psychological pressure.
More than five years later, Hong Kong is no longer a place of conflict. But left behind are shriveled and empty spaces. For journalists working at that time, trauma did not disappear — it simply took root. Flow HK interviewed two Hong Kong journalists now living abroad, both in different ways representing microcosms of Hong Kong's past, having borne witness to what seemed like an era of promise, but both experiencing immense loss after 2019, so that they felt their lives had stepped into emptiness.
"You're living in a real world,” said one of the interviewees, describing the path they had walked, “but existing in an unreal one.”
The Wondrous Old World
Speaking from her one-thousand square foot basement space, V looks a bit better than she did shortly after her arrival in Canada. Still, though, she is thin. Trauma, for her, means bearing memories of the past while moving forward through reality. That may seem at first no different from what ordinary people experience. But for V, the memories she carries document the closure of two important Hong Kong media outlets.
Hong Kong is no longer a place of conflict. But left behind are shriveled and empty spaces.
In 2018, V graduated from the journalism school at Hong Kong Shue Yan University and interned at a media outlet she wasn't at first particularly keen on joining: Apple Daily (苹果日报). "I remember reading accounts from previous students. One wrote about needing to learn how to get past security guards, and I thought, 'This is bad, I can't do these things. The account also mentioned how you needed to produce quick, beautiful, accurate, and explosive reporting, which I felt I couldn't do either."
It was at this media outlet, which stressed the need for “quick, beautiful, accurate, and explosive' reporting,” that V learned from her colleagues what it really means to be a journalist. She recalls how when Haruki Murakami's novel Killing Commendatore was classified as a Class II indecent article by Hong Kong's Obscene Articles Tribunal, she and a photographer spent an entire night going through the text word by word to find the passages deemed indecent. She remembered the Tuen Mun triple homicide case, where the photographer taught her how to observe, how to gain access to buildings, and search out witnesses at hospitals. She remembers that year's commemoration of the June Fourth Incident, when she was asked to document how people born between 1990 and 1995 viewed the incident. After wandering around the memorial event for a long time, she finally found an environmental group specifically collecting used candles from the crowd, which became the focus of a story.
"Apple Daily was the place where I first learned how to be a reporter,” she says.
After her internship ended, in 2019, V took the elevator to the fourth floor of the Apple Daily building to join Next Magazine (壹週刊). Compared to Apple Daily, the mid-level management at Next Magazine were more flexible in certain ways, and this was also at the time that the anti-extradition movement was starting to intensify. V recalls that over that turbulent development of the movement, she began to face struggles she hadn't experienced during her time at Apple Daily.
V remembers following a protester as she tried to elude capture by the police: "She went to the bathroom to change clothes. I was really afraid she would be caught, so I put my arm around her shoulder and pretended to chat with her about her studies as we left [the bathroom] . . . She had removed her gas mask, but then she was determined to go back and extinguish tear gas canisters, so I gave her my full-face mask." V isn’t sure now what this episode means for her in terms of her professionalism as a journalist. "It seemed like I had become a participant at the scene rather than just a reporter,” she recalls.
Beyond the struggles journalists faced on the scene, back in the newsroom, with the National Security Law in effect, Next Magazine arranged for lawyers to review articles. V had to navigate between self-censorship and risk, while also facing her supervisor's demands to "enhance the entertainment value" (娛樂化) of reports. However, where there is pressure, there is also persistence. V established a set of core values about journalistic professionalism. "I just wanted to persist... At that time, I felt that recording the truth and documenting the era was an important mission on its own. This set of values, I feel, gradually became engraved, deeper and deeper, in my heart.”
Even amid these turbulent times, Hong Kong still seemed full of possibility. That year saw the rise of various online media outlets, big and small, and even greater activity by citizen journalists. To some extent, the anti-extradition movement saved many traditional media that had been in decline. Generally, journalists maintained a clear sense of journalistic ethics. The movement built upon 20 years of deep cultivation of civic values: various civil society mobilizations, spontaneous demonstrations, protests, union involvement, leveraging international connections. Looking back, Loft believes Hong Kong was in a state of activation. “You felt you could participate in everything, and you felt that any method you applied might accomplish something.”
Compared to V, Loft had a more complex identity in the midst of the protests. Beyond his role as a citizen journalist, he was visible in non-profit organizations, unions, and community organizations. "My perspective has been more about participating in social movements, even on an advocacy level, which I've been doing for the past decade or more." From Korean farmers coming to Hong Kong to protest the WTO, to the Star Ferry and Queen's Pier preservation movements, to the anti-high-speed rail and anti-national education movements, Loft followed Hong Kong's pulse closely in various roles, directly experiencing the vibrancy of the era.
Loft remembers that in 2012, American sociologist Ho-fung Hung (孔誥烽) and InMediaHK co-founder and professor Iam-chong Ip (葉蔭聰) co-wrote a paper saying that Hong Kong provided a free environment, with the free flow of information, that could serve as an offshore civil society for China. He also recalls that the paper made clear at the time that Hong Kong's current state of affairs had an expiration date.
"I think, in our hearts, we all knew this would come to an end," Loft says.
Coming to the End
As early as the end of 2019, rumors circulated online that Apple Daily would be disbanded. Around the time the National Security Law was implemented, various messages spread through media industry group chats. However, V consistently dismissed these concerns. "It's purely those people trying to intimidate you,” she said, explaining her feelings at the time. “I always felt Apple Daily was very secure, with support from many Hong Kongers. At that time, I also felt that while Hong Kong might not be a completely democratic society, it could at least be regarded as semi-democratic."
In May 2021, Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai was arrested. On the 11th of the same month, Apple Daily's management decided to hold a staff meeting. V felt the situation was serious but still believed the leadership would persevere. By June, as the news became more certain and some Apple Daily staff began to resign, V thought she still had Next Magazine as the final fortress in her efforts to record unfolding history. As a member of Next Media, she felt she could document the final days of Apple Daily from an insider's perspective. "Next Magazine's editor-in-chief called on June 21 and said, 'Hurry up and take photos.' He even said, 'We will return victorious.’"
Two days later, while V and a photographer were working on the beat, they received a news alert from other media: "Next Magazine President Wong Lai-sheung announced on the official Facebook page that Next Magazine will cease publication, and he bid farewell to the magazine’s readers." Some colleagues, Wong wrote, could not bear to let go, and they persisted in harboring a glimmer of hope. But he warned them: "Don't harbor illusions!"
V didn't have time to reflect on whether she herself had been harboring illusions. "My first reaction was that I was working, I was in work mode." She was thinking to herself, "When will we finish up with the filming? Will there be enough time for editing? What about the article?" She had promised her colleagues at Apple Daily that she would document the story. "I would be letting them down," she says, remembering her thoughts at the time.
“Don’t harbor illusions!”
— Next Magazine President Wong Lai-sheung to staff amid the pressure on Next Media.
She maintained a state of work. When she finally returned to the office, the editor-in-chief said there was no need to write the article up if there wasn't enough time. She kept writing and writing regardless. She didn’t stop, not even for group photos. With help from other colleagues, she eventually completed the article. But even then, V still hadn't truly comprehended the fact that Next Media would soon cease to exist.
It was then that she came across a university classmate. "Had I gone up to the rooftop, he asked me. He said there were people down below shouting. I said no." When she made it to the roof, she saw that people were gathered down below, holding up their phone lights like candles and shouting, "Go Apple!" and "Go people of Hong Kong!" The sound rose and fell in waves. V finally collapsed into tears.
"The social movement had ended,” she recalls. “We couldn’t return to the world we had before."
This was just the beginning of a series of endings. For Loft, who had multiple identities, it was the start of wholesale endings. "From 2021, the entire society collapsed all at once,” he says.
As a citizen journalist, everything seemed somewhat acceptable. Like V, as a journalist, one needed to be objective and neutral, emotions tucked safely behind the front of professionalism. With the submerging of the entirety of civil society, however, the emotions couldn’t be stopped from flooding through. First, the Civil Human Rights Front, which had organized July 1 marches for many years, was dissolved. Shortly after, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, which for years had organized annual June Fourth vigils, discussed whether it should dissolve. "I shared my view with friends. Don’t dissolve, I said, because once it's truly dissolved, there will be nothing left... Why should things come to that point?... I was so resistant to things continuing to unravel that way, but I also knew there was no…” Loft pauses and sighs. “There was no way out, because at that moment, our heads were already being trampled on."
Then came the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, which had been Hong Kong's largest union coalition. "As an executive of a CTU affiliate, that day I went up there, and at one point I grabbed onto someone. I couldn't hold back. I really cried. I couldn't take it anymore,” says Loft.
One after another, organizations in Hong Kong went under. Then it was the turn of individuals. A number of people close to Loft faced the imminent risk of arrest. "At moments like that, you’re in this state of remaining very calm, but you know, emotionally, that things are terribly wrong. With those kinds of emotions, everything mixed together, it’s extremely difficult — but you have to handle it rationally somehow." Before long, it was Loft’s turn. "Usually on your phone, you have a favorites list. Our first call wasn't to our spouse, it was to our lawyer. Everyone's emotions were wound up so tight back then."
"Starting from the 2014 Umbrella Movement, when everyone said our goals were unachievable, to our work at the community level, persisting for five years, six years . . . we’ve watched our entire identities slip away,” he says, pausing.
"Truly, everything is gone."
Moral Injury
Moral injury refers to the suffering caused by witnessing, implementing, or failing to prevent events that violate one's moral beliefs and values. In the past, discussions about moral injury have focused primarily on military personnel. In recent years, however, due to research by University of Toronto psychiatry professor Anthony Feinstein, academic research has begun to focus also on the moral injury that journalists suffer. As a group, journalists tend to uphold idealism.
After the tears came that evening on the rooftop of the Apple Daily building, V's tears seemed to flow unremittingly. After the dissolution of the media group, she and her colleagues returned to the building to pack up and have dinner. They wept as they ate pizza together late that night. She cried all the way home on the bus. At hone, she cried quietly, trying to avoid frightening her family.
"Truly, everything is gone."
"We were supposed to continue, but suddenly it stopped, and we couldn't go on. Apple Daily said it would uphold its principles, but suddenly it had vanished. It really felt like a complete blank," she says. As a journalist, V feels, you have to cross red lines to expose the truth even as they loom right ahead of you. But in reality, it’s not as simple as stepping across the line. She felt angry that her family and her friends — and even many of her colleagues — seemed not to understand the root of her pain and her persistence. "People simply feel that losing Apple Daily is tragic, but I often think they don't know why losing Apple Daily is tragic... The thing is: Hong Kong has lost a value so fundamental value. It has lost press freedom. It has lost its pursuit of and insistence upon the truth."
This state, says V, lasted for about three months. As time went on, and as she found a new reporting position at Stand News (立場新聞), the immediate trauma gradually subsided. Until, that is, Stand News too faced dissolution.
While V faced a constant internal conflict over her values, Loft faced the constant prospect of friends being imprisoned. Many of the Hong Kong 47, [pro-democracy figures charged with conspiracy to commit subversion], were his close friends. "As we covered the national security case proceedings, we had to suppress our emotions. A very close friend, the night before he reported to the police, kept saying, 'It's okay, I'll be out soon, we'll drink and play games when I get out.' But you knew he was just trying to comfort you."
“People simply think losing Apple Daily is tragic, but I often feel they don't know why losing Apple Daily is tragic.”
"You feel like suddenly a group of people disappeared all at once. Or friends of friends, disappearing one after another," says V. After the Hong Kong 47 case, Loft's life revolved around prison visits. "Every week it was prison visits. Every holiday there were prison visits. Going to Stanley Prison is really exhausting," he says. In the visiting room, under the surveillance of correctional officers, prisoners and visitors can only have conversations that aren't straightforward. "He has to pretend everything is fine, and you have to pretend everything is fine,” he says.
But he was willing to go on this way. As long as communication could be maintained, any method was acceptable. Until he had to leave Hong Kong entirely, for reasons that were beyond his control.
"When, after everything else, you have to leave, you find it difficult to accept. Even harder to accept. It makes your emotions even more difficult." He told himself he was leaving with a purpose. He carried investigative materials to Canada that colleagues had jointly worked on at both Apple Daily and Stand News.
The time difference between Hong Kong and Canada was a major new challenge for Loft as first. “It was extremely deadly for me," he says. With Hong Kong and Canada separated by more than 10 hours, news would break in Hong Kong in the middle of the night in Canada. Loft felt totally disconnected. And this was not just about time. By that point, most of his good friends had emigrated to the UK. "We had a group of friends for meals [in Canada], and suddenly one said, 'It's so boring eating hotpot now — our friends are either in Lai Chi Kok [in prison] or over in the UK.' We all felt … so ridiculous."
With interpersonal connections severed, his personal aspirations became difficult to fulfill. Several graduate thesis topics he had planned were impossible to realize due to various reasons and risks. "Rationally, I understood, but at that time you couldn't control your emotions... In my admission statement, I clearly wrote that I wanted to come to do things that couldn't be done in Hong Kong. During that period, I wondered, ‘What am I doing here in Canada?"
Once he had graduated [in Canada], he had difficulty adapting to [the culture in] media organizations [there]. "The media ecology here is very community-based, focused on what happens in the community and its relationship to society and the entire political system,” he says. “It’s more like a feature writing approach. But our situation in Hong Kong is such that because many issues stem from systemic problems, we tend to write things starting from the system itself.”
Loft recalled sitting in the newsroom with other reporters, typing continuously, and the sense of wanting to persist in doing meaningful work. "You would see one person after another leaving, and of course you wanted to be the last one standing, to continue the work. Well, then finally you have to leave too. You move on to a new environment, thinking somehow you can accomplish something. But you can’t. At that time, I felt this painful sense of regret."
When autumn and winter arrive in Canada, the sunlight disappears, and the sense of despair rises. "You don't know what you're doing,” says Loft. “Sometimes you just lie there in bed not knowing what you're doing. You worry a lot, feeling you must have some kind of output, whether academic or journalistic. Without any output, there's no point in continuing. But you can't muster the heart to do things, and finally you tell yourself that you’re even more useless." Loft felt as though he had broken away entirely from the pulse of Hong Kong — that no longer were there any risings and fallings.
Exodus
During her first year in Canada, V became frighteningly thin. This was due to difficulties adapting to life, persistent illness, and also the dissolution of Stand News. Unlike with Apple Daily, V's emotions didn't explode this time. "Knowing your boyfriend will leave one day versus having no idea he's leaving — these are two different states of mind," she explains. Since the dissolution of Stand News and the arrest of two editors, the team has continued to hold regular gatherings, sending off prison vehicles, writing letters, and visiting prisoners. Though the world collapsed, they still held fragments in their hands. However, this emotional connection was also a source of trauma.
"The fear of colleagues being arrested is actually the greatest trauma," she says. Recently, she has experienced a recurring emotion that fills her with anger. "Did they know they wouldn't be arrested? Actually, they did know. But they deliberately chose to act, to secure our freedom. People like them who insist on ideals or truth shouldn't be arrested. I can't accept it. I'm angry, very angry. I hate the government, but I can't do anything, and I'm also angry at my own helplessness."
But at least she still has a place to continue writing. Now working at a Canadian Chinese newspaper, V feels her trauma has become a slow-flowing stream. "I think the scar buried in my heart is still a scar. You just don't get as agitated as before, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist," she says. She remembers once when she returned to Hong Kong, a colleague told her that Hong Kong had nothing worth reporting anymore. There had also been some passionate and capable journalists who were forced to leave their jobs due to harassment and intimidation. "Just having space to write already makes me more fortunate than others," says V.
"Somehow, it feels like I've returned to square one. I feel I don't need to care about what others think. I just need to record myself, doing the best I can,” she says, before adding: "This might be a good state I’m in right now, but if you interview me again later, I might say something completely different."
As for Loft, he has recently received psychological counseling specifically for his trauma as a journalist, and occasionally this involves medication. His condition has improved a bit, and he has also resumed writing and also gone out filming. He imagines that one day, when all the political cases are over and his friends are released, he might be able to move forward too, considering his next steps. "Maybe I can do more civil society work, or maybe policy and research — or maybe I can do things I didn't have the courage to do before."
In May this year, Loft went to the UK to visit friends and attended a hearing in the case of Matthew Trickett, the former Royal Marine accused of spying for Hong Kong’s intelligence service. At the time, an editor contacted him, asking if he might like to help with filming while he was in the UK. "Of course I followed up,” he says. “The environment felt familiar because I could understand those cases, and they were national security ones. That day I stood for five hours, from 11 AM to 5:30 PM, but I felt just fine — I even enjoyed it." Only later did he remember that he had arranged to have tea with a friend at 2 PM, but had stood them up. The filming work had put him in such an excited state that he had considered nothing else.
"This was exactly what it had been like before [in Hong Kong] to be a reporter,” he says. “You would disregard everything just to rush out, ignoring everything else to get out there and work. You'd think to yourself, my family will understand, and my friends will definitely understand."
It was then that he recalled a photojournalist telling him that after covering conflict scenes in 2019, they had become accustomed to the feeling of adrenaline addiction. The journalists had said that upon returning to the calm of daily life, "you feel like many things just don't elicit any emotion.” Perhaps Loft hadn’t experienced the same frontline battlefield-like experiences as that photojournalist, or perhaps his own post-traumatic stress disorder arose from somewhere else. But the photographer’s words came back to him with fresh understanding.
"It’s like living under a curse.”
The original Chinese-language version of this article is available at Flow HK. The outlet, which published its first edition in Taiwan in February 2020, announced last month that it would publish its final edition in June this year.