The Hong Kong protests of 2019-2020 were a geopolitical, ideological, and media discourse flashpoint. We talked to artist and filmmaker TIffany Sia about her book Too Salty Too Wet, which also defies simple categorization. In the author’s words, it is “a hellish scroll,” using elements of memoir, family history, post-colonial theory, geopolitics, and the ephemera of digital communication to document the heat, claustrophobia, and embodied intimacy of street protests, police repression and international media attention. The book presents a tangible sense of ‘what it was like to be there,’ without a constraining interpretation of ‘what it was.’
In our conversation with Sia, we talk about the embodiment and presence of history, how conditions of labor determine the contours of resistance, the international circuitry of tactics, and untranslatability. Questions half-asked and barely answered include: Was it a liberatory movement for democratic rights against police-state violence and authoritarian governance? Was it liberal-bourgeois reaction, reflecting capitalist-imperialist interest in restricting Chinese sovereignty? What was the class composition of the protests, and how did it contrast to previous moments of unrest in the territory? What is decolonization? How can asking these questions help us approach international solidarity?
Tiffany Sia
https://twitter.com/t1ffany4scale
https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/GSwT4bceeCRdGY6c9
https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/5J3G1p4nSJGyZmZa9
https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/HCoeV8ZJTMMTcfbY9
Too Salty Too Wet
https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/57273
Articles and discourses on HK
https://lausan.hk/
https://chuangcn.org/2020/05/remolding-hong-kong/
https://chuangcn.org/2020/06/frontlines/
The Unseen Book Club
https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast/
Art by Eli Liebman