Most of the prospective front-liners he’d interviewed came, as he did, from working-class families, which he thought reflected the fact that Hong Kong’s wealthiest citizens insulated themselves from politics. “Plus, would the wealthy permit their children to get hurt or, if it comes to it, to die?” he said. I asked if he was willing to die for the cause. He did not hesitate to answer. “I don’t mind being the one to die if my death has a purpose and makes an impact,” he said. “If destiny chooses me, so be it.”

Our food arrived, and, as No Name attended to a plate of sweet-and-sour chicken, he loosened up somewhat. He was born in the mid-nineties, he told me, to a couple from a Guangdong fishing village. In the eighties, the family had managed to sail to Hong Kong. His mother is illiterate, and his father, who worked in construction, has a primary-school education. They never talked about the past, he said, but early on they were so poor that they survived by foraging for food in the mountains that make up much of Hong Kong’s landmass.

Growing up, No Name frequently defied authority at home and in school. “I never liked to be forced into doing something without explanation,” he said. “I was the smart-ass always asking questions. I was always getting beat.” He clashed with his father, who was hot-tempered and governed the family with his belt.

Despite having fled Communist China, No Name’s father, who was proud of his own father’s service in the People’s Liberation Army, was a stickler for order and hierarchy, and gradually the father-son confrontations acquired a political cast. As a high-school student, No Name joined demonstrations against a Beijing-backed plan to introduce a national education program, which many protesters believed would amount to indoctrination. During the Umbrella Movement protests, he spent many nights at the sit-ins. That’s when his father delivered an ultimatum: “If you’re going to protest against the government, don’t bother coming back home.” But, by then, No Name was in college, living in a dorm. His father, he said, “no longer had the power to lock me out, and he couldn’t beat me into submission.”

After dinner, No Name and I walked around the neighborhood, and stopped by an all-night 7-Eleven for a cold soft drink. We stood outside, drinking and chatting on the empty sidewalk, but after a few minutes he abruptly lowered his voice, saying that we should go elsewhere––there might be surveillance cameras in the store. “We aren’t doing anything wrong,” I said.

“They’ll get you if they don’t like you, no matter if you are doing anything wrong or not,” No Name replied. By “they,” he meant the police, the government, the transit authority, and “everyone who colluded with them in their coverups.” He started talking about the so-called August 31st incident, at the Prince Edward subway station, when riot police were filmed storming the terminal, rushing into subway cars, and assaulting passengers with batons and pepper spray. The transport authority closed the station, denying access to journalists and first-aid services. Although ten people were seen being taken to the hospital, the number of injured was later reported as seven. Ever since, among many protesters, it’s become an article of faith that three people were beaten to death.

I asked No Name if he believed that theory. He took a gulp from his soda and told me it was very possible. Still, could the police successfully silence the family and friends of three people indefinitely? No Name looked at me hard under the dim lamplight. “Do you know how easy it is for the police to just disappear people?” he said. “You have no idea what they are capable of.” Distrust of social institutions had spread like a contagion among the young. “On some level, it doesn’t even matter if the deaths are true,” he said, with a shrug. “The possibility of these deaths gets people riled up and will keep them coming out.”

“The truth doesn’t matter?”

“The system is rigged,” he said. “The truth is that the government doesn’t give a shit about exercising brutality against unarmed citizens.”

It was late and beginning to rain. We had wound our way back to the restaurant where we’d met. A few men remained, smoking and swigging beer, their shirts rolled up, revealing slack, pale bellies. Now, five hours into our conversation, No Name told me that this neighborhood was where he’d grown up: “Many people here still want to live the way they lived in their home villages—they haven’t assimilated to Hong Kong life.”

And yet wasn’t life in Hong Kong about a sense of upward mobility? I suggested that, whatever his reservations about his father, the man had done something impressive in coming to a foreign place and raising six kids who graduated from college. And all of them were fluent in four languages: Cantonese, Mandarin, Southern Min (the local dialect of their parents’ home village on the mainland), and English. No Name was in no mood for generosity. “When he was in his twenties, he risked everything to go to a strange place to find a better life,” he said. “How can he not understand that I’m fighting for a better life now?”

I thought of No Name a few days later, during a conversation with a pro-democracy activist and prominent businessman, Jimmy Lai, who came up with a familial analogy for Hong Kong’s struggle. The Communist Party, he said, saw the insurgent territory as a bratty child bringing shame on the family name; Hong Kongers saw mainland China as an abusive parent. In 1989, when Deng Xiaoping ordered the Army to put down the Tiananmen uprising, the Communists were able to mete out punishment behind closed doors, just as No Name’s father had done. But concealment is impossible in an age of smartphones and social media. “Now the door is open,” Lai said. “The neighbors can hear what’s going on. China has to find a way to pinch them hard but secretly.”

The decentralized structure of this year's protests has helped demonstraters thwart the efforts of police. Photograph by An Rong Xu

In Beijing-influenced media outlets, it’s become common to paint the protesters as a fringe group of disaffected youth; they are described not as idealists but as people merely frustrated by Hong Kong’s declining economic status relative to that of the booming mainland. When China took over, in 1997, Hong Kong’s G.D.P. accounted for 18.4 per cent of the country’s total, a number that, within two decades, had shrunk to 2.8 per cent. Still, survey data show that, while more than fifty per cent of protesters are younger than thirty, a notable number are in their fifties and older. But the Confucian parallel between the state and the family remains strong in China, and Beijing’s emphasis on the protesters’ youth betrays its inability to see political resistance as anything other than filial disobedience.

“The intra-household, intergenerational struggle in Hong Kong is something that’s almost unprecedented,” Ryan Manuel, a political scientist who runs a research center in Hong Kong, told me. “Many parents of today’s millennials were refugees fleeing from poverty or political chaos—their one goal is survival and stability. But their children were raised in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. They grew up in the epicenter of globalization, privy to first-rate social services, medical care, and most of the pillars of a liberal society. They speak three languages at least. They’re culturally sophisticated, and have a sense of themselves as individuals.” Older generations, whether in Maoist China or colonial Hong Kong, grew up without any expectation of political empowerment. Out of a sense of self-preservation, they kept their distance from politics. To their children, this position seems like unforgivable quietism and complacency.