Worry turned into panic in Hong Kong in June 1989, when the Chinese government opened fire on student protesters in the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement. In 1990, the year after the massacre, some 62,000 Hong Kongers, or about 1 percent of the population, emigrated. The wave continued in the following years.

The Tiananmen crackdown unnerved my family and prompted some to take action. My own parents and most of my aunts and uncles left in the early 1990s.

“A regime that kills its own young people — that’s just too scary,” said one of my aunts, who had two young children at the time. They moved to Australia; other relatives went to Canada, New Zealand and Britain. My parents, already in their 50s, gave up their stable jobs and went to Britain, where I was attending a university.

Much of my family, especially in my generation, returned to Hong Kong years later after having acquired citizenship abroad. Most of us prefer to be closer to our cultural roots, and there were more job opportunities here. The general thinking was that if anything awful happened, with a foreign passport in hand, we could all flee again.

That time has come. Beijing’s refusal to grant genuine democracy to Hong Kong — it insists on screening candidates for Hong Kong’s “election” for the city’s leader in 2017 — and its hostility toward people clamoring for free elections, plus its avowed determination to instill a sense of patriotism among our children, makes many Hong Kongers, especially parents like me with young children, nervous.

I dread the idea of my children growing up in a society where the values of Hong Kong — such as the rule of law, freedom of press, speech and assembly — are being eroded.

More and more, we feel Hong Kong is becoming just another Chinese city. Since the start of the Umbrella Movement in late September, we have seen the police using tactics against activists that resemble those used in China to prosecute critics of the government.