With the coronavirus epidemic getting severe, the government has reinstated the prohibition on 2-people gathering. Eateries complain bitterly of hardship. Having lunch with buddies at a restaurant, Zuo Ding Shan saw a lot of idle tables dappled with sporadic customers, the waiters and waitresses listless and the captains expressionless. How long such a gloomy scene where eatery-owners lose money every day is going to last is anyone’s guess.

Dining at Luk Yu Tea House today with three friends of mine sitting at separate tables in two groups, I felt quite turned off. Then, I caught a glimpse of a diner reading the news on the front page of Apple Daily about Jimmy Lai arrested, not remanded on bail and taken into custody till April next year. He was mumbling while perusing it, and in the end bursting out, “Justice is blind!” Zuo Ding Shan felt even more morose. Having dined at Luk Yu for forty years, I’d had the most depressing meal today. The so-called “fraud” case was, to everyone’s surprise, tried by a judge designated to hear cases related to national security, and the trial was unexpectedly put off till more than four months later with the defendant denied bail. It really doesn’t make sense. According to the case details, it is at most about a dispute over land-lease terms, or a breach of a tenancy agreement. Is it necessary to make a fuss over something that happens numerously day by day?

Going for a stroll after meal, I called to mind on the way the prosecution against Lei Chen in Taiwan, which took place when I was still a primary school kid. Not until I had entered the Chinese University of Hong Kong and started lapping up Yin Hai-guang’s writings did I know the case. Yet now, my recollection of it has already gone blurred. Thanks to the modern technology, after hastily rushing back to my study room to comb through websites, I found a lot of information about it online forthwith: On September 4, 1960, Lei Chen, the chief editor of Free China, was charged with “haboring communist spies, concealing what he knew and continuously writing in favor of traitors’ propaganda, and sentenced to a ten-year imprisonment by a military tribunal”. After Hu Shi returned to Taiwan, he met with Chiang Kai-shek and spoke to him for Lei. In Chiang’s remarks about Hu, it seems Hu believed more in Lei than the government! Later on, when the Ministry of National Defense re-adjudicated on it, Chiang handed down in person a sentence of ten years at the very least. Hu gifted to Lei on his 65th birthday a copy in his own penmanship of “Guiyuanpu”, a seven-character-folk-song-styled verse penned by poet Yang Wanli(1127–1206) of Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279). The poem says: “A whole mountain range stops a single stream from running; the interception prompts the stream to clamor; having flushed into the foot of the mountains, it runs through the villages towards the sea in torrents.” Being powerless to strive for Lei exempted from punishment and celebrating a good friend’s birthday with “Guiyuanpu”, Hu definitely acknowledged Lei’s endeavor to labor over freedom of speech and democracy.

Going on seventy-three on December 8, Jimmy Lai had not thought of not being able to celebrate his birthday, Christmas and Chinese New Year with his family and friends, and being taken in custody for four months. Someone did rack his/her brain for a way! Jimmy was introduced to me by my late high school classmate in 1986 at Hong Kong Jockey Club. I went to his mansion for dinner afterwards, then got to know he was spurred by the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 into vowing to run a magazine. He then founded Next Magazine in 1990 and Apple Daily. It has been 30 years since then. It is overwhelmingly saddening to see him probably thrown in jail like Lei Chen!

(Zuo Ding-shan, columnist)

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