OCT. 8, 2014
Chan Ming-fai, a pro-democracy supporter at the protest site in Mong Kok on Tuesday. Credit Alan Wong
HONG KONG — Elaborately tattooed, adorned in rock-star jewelry and flaunting a shock of flamingo-pink hair, Chan Ming-fai usually sells plastic models of movie superheroes at his shop in Mong Kok, a teeming, neon-soaked part of Hong Kong. Now he volunteers as a helper at the protest camp here.
He is not, he boasts, the stock profile of the pro-democracy demonstrators who have rattled this global financial capital for nearly two weeks. While the students leading the protest across the harbor cite theories of civil disobedience and quote Gandhi, Mr. Chan is apt to describe his anger with Beijing in terms of the latest Transformers movie, in which a benevolent China defends Hong Kong from evil metallic aliens.
“The movie bowed to Beijing,” he said with disgust. “I love Transformers, but the last one I couldn’t stand.”
The face of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement most seen by the world has been a polite university student encamped near the city government headquarters, but the gritty, lower-class neighborhood of Mong Kok has become a mosh pit of more freewheeling protest, attracting a bigger proportion of workers, shopkeepers, artists, agitators and some outright oddballs.
Pro-democracy demonstrators sleep near a barricade on a main road in the Mong Kok shopping district in Hong Kong on Wednesday. Credit Philippe Lopez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Thrumming with boisterous indignation, Mong Kok reflects the movement’s appeal beyond the university-educated middle class and displays a diversity and combativeness that could be harder for the authorities to bring to heel, making it a key test of the movement’s staying power.
“It started out as a student-led movement,” Mr. Chan said. “But it’s now a people’s movement. We are not represented by anyone.”
While the Mong Kok sit-in has its share of undergraduate earnestness — someone has plastered posters quoting the political philosopher Hannah Arendt — it has also kindled a populist raucousness that will not be easily curbed, even if student leaders, now negotiating with the government, urge the protesters to withdraw.
“It’s impossible to give up Mong Kok,” said Kevin Kwong, a 25-year-old Ph.D. student in philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He had just woken up from a night sleeping on Nathan Road, a street usually thronged with shoppers. The protest encampment at the government center, in Hong Kong’s Admiralty section, is “under the control of protest groups,” he said. “In Mong Kok there are no leaders, and no groups.”
Irwin Mong, a hyperkinetic 38-year-old bass guitarist with the band Wonder Garl, known by his stage name, 762, said many of the Mong Kok protesters were jaded about politics but had been jolted onto the streets by the sight of the police firing tear gas and pepper spray at demonstrators who surrounded the city government offices on Sep. 28.
