Extraordinary time — Visiting a hunger striker at Castle Peak Bay Immigration Centre
The Chinese version of this article is here:
At the Castle Peak Bay Immigration Centre, time passed in an extraordinary way. On 14th August, I arrived at the main entrance at 10am but waited until 11:40am to visit one detainee who was on hunger strike.
Waiting outside the waiting room
Time passed extraordinarily slowly.
I stood at the reception, beside the row of lockers for visitors to store their electronic devices and fire lighter, waiting for the staff to confirm that I could visit the detainee. She just called the staff upstairs to ask for the consent of the detainees and asked him to call back. My friend J who came with me, already entered. That staff registered information for other visitors, marked down visiting time, locker number and other information, after checking their identity documents. Those few visitors all got confirmation about the detainee’s consent and walked through the metal detector. She put down her pen. The phone did not ring.
Time passed extraordinarily slowly.
While I was waiting, I looked at the two staff that sat beside her. The one on the right was responsible to look at the CCTV and function that gate of 5m height outside the car park. As he pressed the button, the gate would give some sound of siren, “AH AH AH AH”, slowly folded to the two sides. However loud the sound went, the gate moved in millimeters. As if it would go out of order anytime.
Time passed extraordinarily slowly.
There was a bottle of alcohol sanitizer for visitors to use in front of the reception. Behind the glass, in front of the staff, there were two more bottles of sanitizers. The staff that sat in the middle, took one bottle of sanitizer from another four more bottles behind him. He slowly shook it and played with it, as if he had to verify the existence of the transparent liquid. Existence verified. He put down the sanitizer. In a moment, he took a USB cord and verified that the two ends could not match. He put it down. When I looked back again, this time, he put both hands on the legs of his eyeglasses to move it forward, backward, to verify that he had normal eyesight.
I was also so bored to scrutinize the details on his uniform. His name was embroidered with white thread in a font that looked quite graceful. I was so bored that I recited the name of this idling staff.
Around 20 minutes were passed when the staff called upstairs to confirm the consent of the detainee. She said, “Next time remember to reply my call.” Well, what was it that occupied the staff so much that he forgot to call back?
Waiting inside the waiting room
I finally got into the waiting room. There were a few rows of chair and the notice of “keep social distance” was put on every other one chair. Opposite to the chairs was another reception. There were some drawers for storing documents behind it and a TV was hanged on the wall. There were around 5–6 staff here. I handed my health declaration and documents for visiting.
Time still passed extraordinarily slowly.
Without a phone, I took in a book for reading. After a while, the staff called the numbers of a group of visitors. J was one of those to enter the visit room.
Each visit was required to finish within 15 minutes.
J finished his first visit and went out to register for his second visit. I got impatient and asked the staff, how long did I have to wait? He said, “Just wait for a while. …in process now. Trying to speed up already.” Given the Cantonese special syntax and grammar, he skipped the subjects of the sentences. I did not know why I did not ask, what exactly made me wait? What was in process? I just sat back on the chair, irritated.
Time dragged on. J came back and saw me reading in the same position, expressionless. He stood there and said a few words for me, then the staff said to him, “Sir will be patrolling soon, could you please sit down?” He said he wanted to go to the washroom, but the staff insisted, looking embarrassed. J sat down. In a minute, the door at the end opened and a squad of officers marched in and bypassed everyone. What I thought would entail complicated procedures ended in a blink.
Then I saw the staff switched the channel of the TV from TVB News to ViuTV. There was a moment when I thought, Oh, do they also insist on avoiding the TVB channel? It was an innocent guess. I realized that after the petrolling of the higher rank officials, they switched to the ViuTV Sports Channel to watch NBA and gathered to chat.
It has been long time since I had such focused reading time. I already reached the middle part of my book when it was 11:15am. I started to worry that I could not visit the hunger striker at all. When I asked the staff again, he said, “I am helping you to ask them. Already pressed them. You will get to visit in the next turn.”
During the visit
When I finally got to visit, it was 11:40am. My friend J also conducted his second visit.
Each visit was required to finish within 15 minutes. Time went extraordinarily quickly.
We were separated by a glass and I had to talk to S through a receiver, which made it even more like the bygone times when I had to compete with time during the expensive long-distance call. Simple greetings and introduction in Urdu, asking about his health condition, learning about his legal needs, listening to his story of coming to the centre, his story before he came to Hong Kong, looking at the documents he received few days ago, learning about the other hunger strikers’ condition… Every question I asked entailed an answer that meant a huge cloud of emotions, but I nearly dared not take a pause in between.
The visiting room could accommodate numerous detainees and visitors at the same time. There was partition between us and each of us talked to a distinct receiver, but all sounds blurred into noisy chaotic echoes. It was difficult to hear his response clearly.
When I greeted him with Urdu, “Aap kasay hain?” (How are you) He smiled and said “theek” (I’m fine). He said, no problem, this was his 48 thday of hunger strike (Note: by the time I finish this translation it is already the 50 thday). He only drank water and sometimes tea. He did not encounter serious health issues, but would feel a bit dizzy and found it a bit difficult to walk. Yet, he would still continue. The other 12–13 hunger strikers would also continue.
How could that be anything cloes to “I’m fine”?
I asked him if he needed some books and whether there were activities for him during detention.
He said he did not have anything to do and could only sit all day long. At around 10am he already replied that he was willing to be visited, but could only come down to the visiting room after one and a half hour.
I asked, what were you doing during that time?
He said, nothing. He was only waiting and was not allowed to come down. And now (he pointed to the machine that transmitted his voice), they (the Immigration Department) are recording.
The anger in my heart had already been boiled slowly for one and a half hour. I said, even if they are recording, I will have to say “you are shit.”
When he heard me say this, he laughed out cheerfully. That was his happiest look throughout the 15 minutes.
I said, “Do you know that the Immigration Department just wrote a declaration statement a few days ago? It claimed that they had never treated detainees inhumanely.”
His eyes were wide open in disbelief, then he laughed drily. “Those are lies! They are lying.”
He came to Hong Kong for political asylum. He was concerned about livelihood of residents back in his home country and strove for better life with others, only ending up with 18 charges. He said, the government was corrupted, and the court was not reliable at all. The arrestees could just disappear without any news. I kept nodding in understanding. He had come to Hong Kong for 13 years, in which one and half year was spent here in detention. And he had totally no clue as to when he could be released.
He did not know that the news of Immigration Department writing the statement, though he was the concerned party of the news. Yet, he knew that JL was arrested and now on bail, and that L is out of Hong Kong. He showed support to Hong Kongers’ protest naturally without any doubts.
“Think of W and L. Why does L leave Hong Kong? You know the danger. I fought for the rights for people when I was in Pakistan, now I am still fighting. We need justice everywhere.”
The staff came in and said time’s up. I used my eyes and gestures to show support and finally bid farewell. Hopefully when I see him again in the future, he is still fine.
After leaving CIC
When we left CIC, my friend J said, one of the means used by the Immigration Department to punish the hunger strikers was to limit their time on telephone. They were allowed for two phone call in the whole week of 3 minutes time. I tried to think of what to say in a 3-minute conversation…
He added, “But, even if you are not on hunger strike, there’s not much difference. You would be allowed for two phone calls, each also 3 minutes.” We both laughed out at such dark humour.
I have been thinking about these units of time. 50 days. 1 hour and 40 minutes. 15 minutes. 3 minutes. 3 minutes times 2. 13 years. 1 year and a half.
I have been thinking about that staff who played with the sanitizer. He still had pimples on his eyebrow and looked like a fresh graduate. His face spelled out innocence and a make-belief that he could be detached from the dirtiness and filthiness of the world and be disinterested in everything. He looked like the person that when he went home he would complain to his mum that his job was boring, and he would lie down on the sofa to play with all his ten fingers from left to right, right to left, refusing to do the dishes. I imagined that he probably could utter these words, “How annoying are those people, still playing with hunger strike. It’s lucky that I am not responsible for that floor.”
While that staff was playing with the sanitizer, USB cord and eyeglasses; while those staff were watching NBA; while that staff casually said “I’m helping you” to me; while they could fill their pockets with at least $21780 to $30100 salary each month at ease, there were a group of people, at a few floors above them, with the determination to face death, facing the risk of death, just because it’s better to die than to live like this in CIC. Do they know about this, seriously? Can they at least do something? Or, are they consenting this to happen, or even, causing this to happen?
P.S. The book that I had been reading in the CIC was this: The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China by David Wang Der-wei. Let me share some quotes here.
“The way Li Qing portrays Wei Zhongxian’s villainy, or lack of sufficient villany, should not be taken lightly. Precisely because the gap between Wei’s mediocre character and the great disaster he causes is so obvious, one has to rethink Li Qing’s notion of the human capacity to err. If he was not born with an extraordinary endowment for doing evil, what makes Wei Zhong-xian such a monstrous being in later years?”
“The paradox bomes all the more poignant in modern times, when monstrosity has taken on an unprecedented multitude of forms. Particularly in view of the massive scale of violence and pain that the Chinese administered to China in the name of enlightenment, rationality and utopian plenitude, one senses that the line between understanding and complicity had never been so difficult to discern.”**
“In a century that yearns for enlightenment and revolution, the monster of violence had long since used even more delicate ways to permeate into the texture of daily life, when we may not even cast a doubt on it.”*
(*In my original Chinese writing, I quoted this line from the introduction of the book, but could not find the English equivalent of it, so I translated it by myself, and added another quote** from the English book that entails similar meaning.)
Please support the hunger strikers and follow CIC Detainees Concern Group
Related information:
CIC Detainees Rights Concern Group's Press release in response to the ImmD's statement