The Masked Kiss

James Pomfret is Reuters Chief Correspondent South China / Deputy Bureau Chief, Hong Kong

It was a fleeting moment on the night of August 11 as we ran from the men in blue and green with their guns and truncheons. The black-masks streamed down into an MTR station amid the heat, tumult and acrid swirl of tear gas lingering on sweat-soaked clothes. An underground train pulled into the station with a burst of light and silver. It filled with protesters, then drew away, speeding into a dark tunnel like a freedom express.

For a while now, I’ve been trying to photograph birds in wild places, striving to capture those elusive flashes of beauty between earth and sky. As a journalist covering the protests, such escapades into nature offered a counterpoint of serenity and kept me sane. By focusing my lens on our city’s rich birdlife across mangroves, mudflats, forests, grasslands and mountains, I learnt hard lessons in photographic abstraction. Blurred leaf, bare branch, empty sky became my constant motifs.

Afterwards, when I tilted the lens towards our strife-torn urbanscapes, I discovered something strange. People seemed to move more slowly, as though underwater.

That evening, as the protesters disembarked and clamoured on the platform in Prince Edward station, there amid the chaos came a sliver of stillness between the massed bodies. I saw a young masked couple lean towards one another. Time froze. Reflexively, I lifted the viewfinder to my right eye, and squeezed down with my right index finger, knowing as I pressed that this was the moment I’d been waiting for without knowing how or why.

The masked young man leans down to the young woman, herself leaning upwards, as their slender arms hold one another’s faces, eyes locked, lips separated only by the dark membrane of their masks.

This kiss would take wing, out of the mouth of the underground, up over the skyscrapers and beyond the granite visage of Lion Rock, to soar into the night skies.

The violence has been unrelenting, the politics intractable, the divisions deep, but in that kiss we were all reminded of a shared humanity, and an enduring hope in our city of sadness.

Only love can defeat injustice. It is ultimately love for a place, for a cause, for another, that helps muster our courage to strive for a better tomorrow.

There is a place in our hearts, our hills, our harbour, our high-rises that can never be violated. A quiet refuge that lingers.

Hong Kong remains a reservoir of freedom, and this freedom, like love, cannot be vanquished.