Hong Kong is rapidly entering wintry nights. Blistering wind without stars, all signs of life seem to have been buried.

What people need most on nights like this are sparks. They might be tiny and weak, but just a few of them can warm people up. Sparks can also light up the small area in front. We might not be able to see very far, just as long as we can see the road in front of our feet, we could make our next step with ease.

For the Hongkongers walking in wintry nights, the sparks represent the unextinguished fire of hope in everyone’s heart. Some might ask, can people still have hope in such despairing circumstances? Some also feel that talking about hope while being suppressed by the regime is just an illusion sold cheaply.

I don’t actually know how hope is being formed in people’s hearts or how it does not extinguish in the storm. I can only say that I keep seeing these people around me, whose fire of hope stays burning in their hearts. They even use their fire to relight the others’ hope. These other people than light up more people’s. The fire of hope gets to be passed on and spread out.

These people are alien or even crazy in the eye of pragmatic people because they do not act logically. Strangely, those in power would see them as people who endanger society. If what these people hold onto is just empty hope, then it should not be dangerous as it would not happen. The fact is those in power understand that a system that relies on power to maintain could not be very stable. As long as we persist in our faith, one day, our hope will be realized.

When hope is widely spread among people, the change will happen one day. That is why those in power and vested interests would do everything to destroy the people’s hope to stop change from happening. When those in power start a full-on attack on people’s hope, the wintry nights have arrived.

But no matter how cold winter is, how dark the nights are, and how fierce the storm is, some people’s fire of hope remains burning. Maybe this is the law of humanity that prevents human beings from extinction. Not everyone who persists with hope and faith can bring visible change, but the numerous big changes in human history only got to happen because people like this had lighted up the fire of hope.

Perhaps it is beyond the world belief people have in their hearts that provides them hope for the future. This belief could be originated from religion, or the observation from history, or just a simple belief of the nature of good people. It makes people with hope believe the future will be better than now, and society will have less injustice in the future.

But we have to be realistic. When the wintry nights come, the wild wind would blow off the fire of hope from many people’s heart at once. Not many people can keep this fire burning, and sometimes theirs would also eventually got blown off by the never-ending blast.

If we find a place and make a huge bonfire, those in power can easily focus their energy and put it out. Therefore those who still have little sparks of hope and spread out to different places should gather the others nearby who also have these sparks so that their weak sparks could join together and become a much bigger fire. That would also allow people who have lost their sparks to regain their hope.

When everyone does the same in different places, a picture would be formed: some weak, small sparks can be seen in the corner of a piece of pitch dark land. These sparks gather and the light gets brighter. It slowly becomes a small fire. The same thing happens in the other corner of the land. Most of the land is still dark, but when more and more of these sparks start burning and gathering, the land will also become brighter. People in dark places can find more places with warmth and light, which is hope. We can then rely on these sparks to get through the dark winter and anticipate the arrival of the spring sun.

(Benny Tai Yiu-Ting is a Hong Kong legal scholar and democracy activist.)

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