Wan, can you hang in there without Red bull?

Having been a friend of Wan’s for more than ten years, I didn’t have an opportunity to work with him until recently. The Wan I used to know was an affable senior politician readily listening to different voices. Not until I worked with him did I understand him further that he likes Red Bull, always wants to squeeze time out of his tight schedule to work out in the gym every day, buys his colleagues meals more often than not(not me though, haha), prefers being a social worker to a lawmaker, and denies he is a “chubby guy”.

If a LegCo member were asked if the most time-consuming job of a councilor is to show up at LegCo meetings, the answer from a slothful lawmaker would be “yes”. The councilor by my side, however, had to regularly meet up with the citizens, organizations and government officials, work on individual cases, spend time in studying government documents, as well as attending LegCo meetings. A Housing Authority member, Wan was approached by quite a number of academics and representatives of pressure groups, who are concerned about the local housing problem, for discussing policies concerned. When he could find time to work out in the gym once in a while, he burst into laughters like he had won the Mark Six lottery.

Being busy is one thing. I am convinced that he has a pretty fuzzy impression on the citizens. It is undeniable that Wan gained relatively low popularity among the new bunch of councilors. Sometimes colleagues couldn’t refrain from telling him that “it’s the age of information explosion now, so you have to let people see what you have done or else the citizens will think you have done nothing”. Most of the time, he would grin and say, “I’m of the old school, so I don’t know how to hog the limelight.”

As far as I remember, a policy secretary once cried from the housetops an “innovative policy” to reconstruct school and industrial buildings into transitional housing, which was actually what Wan had been advocating! Couples of years ago, Wan championed by all means that the government should call in most of the brownfield land, and that if the building of public housing couldn’t keep up with the scheduled progress, idle land, discarded school and industrial buildings should be put back in use and reconstructed into transitional housing as a “stopgap”, which could also help subdue the rentals of sub-divided flats. He even went to do on-the-spot investigation in Britain and the Netherlands into how to erect transitional housing, and how to manage these small communities. If the loyalists had done that, they would have yelled “we fight for it successfully”. However, he just said: “The reporters following the housing issue would know it, and would find me if needed.”

Despite a lot of people having expected the regime cracking down on dissidents by hook or crook, seeing Wan lose freedom and get separated from his family was just so heart-breaking and overwhelming that I couldn’t even gasp for breath. I remember Wan once asked me about “the last day” anxiously. When I was still wondering what he meant by “last day”, he said that still being a LegCo member, he had to remind colleagues about paying more official visits to the imprisoned. It is said that paying a visit to those behind bars can tinge their monotonous and gloomy life with a bit of colors, so I stand in a queue in the hope of seeing him for 15 mins after his family members and lawyers.

Packing up at his office in the LegCo building on the parting day, he gifted me a kettle. I still bantered with him the saying that “the Chinese Communist Party is forcing its way through, and soon we may not be able to see each other again, so let’s take a pic as a souvenir”. I feel so sorry that the inadvertent saying augured a misfortune.

(Sai Fai, Andrew Wan Siu-kin’s ex-colleague)

Click here for Chinese version

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