What it means to be a body in Hong Kong
The protests confront us with a difficult question.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw someone shoot another human being. One of Hong Kong’s major democracy marches had just ended, and thousands of demonstrators were beating a tense but orderly retreat down one of the city’s main thoroughfares. The view from my restaurant window resembled a classic side-scrolling video game: waves of black-clad protesters scurried from left to right, pursued by a volatile sea of riot police. One officer slowed down, raised his orange-stocked (officially: “less-lethal”) shotgun, and fired a volley of rubber bullets into the crowd. Moments later a second muzzle exploded, filling the street with acrid plumes of tear gas.
This was a far cry from the Hong Kong of my youth. Growing up I had worried more about homework, grades, and childhood crushes than my own physical safety. Yet to walk around Hong Kong these days is to be constantly aware of one’s body—of its utter helplessness against tear gas, rubber bullets, or worse.
These protests raise the question of what it means to be a body. They confront us with the inescapable truth of our physical bodies: their susceptibility to pain and death. They awaken us to the existence of social bodies that safeguard our vision of the common good. And they reveal the need—and opportunity—for the church to reclaim its identity as an ecclesial body that dares to wade in the waters of political discernment.
