Protesters gather outside the headquarters of Hong Kong’s government, October 4, 2014. Photograph by Adam Ferguson/The New York Times​/Redux

For those of us who grew up in the nineteen-eighties in the sooty inland city of Chongqing, Hong Kong was both intimately familiar and impossibly far off. In our imaginations, the place gleamed. Everyone I knew hummed the hits of Hong Kong pop idols and gawked at the city’s skyline in films, but we understood that, as mainlanders, few of us would ever be permitted to see the Fragrant Harbor ourselves. The reason, known even to the youngest schoolchildren, concerned the most awkward aspect of the glittering metropolis: In 1842, in the humiliating aftermath of the First Opium War, the city, with its strategically located port, had been leased to Great Britain, as a concession, for a hundred and fifty-six years. To Mainlanders, Hong Kong felt like a kept woman, one upon whom material comfort is bestowed at the cost of compromised dignity. Hong Kong’s residents were the object of both our envy and our pity.

The democracy protests that engulfed Hong Kong these past two weeks happened to coincide with National Day, the anniversary celebration for the foundation of communist China, sixty-five years ago, and the beginning of a weeklong holiday known as Golden Week. In recent years, the vacation has meant, for many mainlanders, a trip to Hong Kong. The British handed the city back, in 1997, as China was beginning its economic ascent, and Hong Kong had lost its quality of mythical unattainability. The throngs of people we would see in photos of Central, the city’s luxury-shopping district, which seemed so glamorously chaotic back then, are now mostly an inconvenience. And yet, seventeen years after the reunification, the strait between Hong Kong and the mainland remains vast. For many of the of the 1.4 billion Chinese living across the strait, the protests epitomize the moment in which their nationalistic sense of brotherhood with Hong Kong clashes with a fundamentally different sense of values.

Throughout the seventies, eighties and early nineties, when outside influences were just beginning to penetrate post-Mao China, any imports from Hong Kong seemed glamorous and sophisticated. We preferred Hong Kong movies to domestic ones and assiduously followed the lives of its stars and beauty queens; we had so few stars of our own. The city’s inaccessibility—coupled with China’s dim awareness of the outside world after so many years of isolation—further shrouded it in an air of romantic mystery. It seemed quite possible that actual Hong Kong citizens might live the dazzlingly, decadent lives that movies like “Heavenly Fates” portrayed.

On other days, Hong Kong’s western chic, or yang qi, was derided as slavishness to foreign devils, or yang gui zi. The city—and the very cosmopolitan influences that contributed to its reputation as a metropolis—triggered memories of the darkest period in Chinese history, when China had been pulled apart, in the language of our schoolbooks, like a “great fat piece of meat” by the likes of Great Britain and the U.S. The territorial insult was an irrevocable assault on Chinese pride.

State broadcasters called out longingly to our “brothers and sisters” in Hong Kong (and Macau and Taiwan) in our annual televised Lunar New Year celebrations and prayed for their swift return to the motherland. This kind of emotional indoctrination is powerful. On July 1, 1997, almost five years after my mother and I had left Chongqing for America, the two of us watched the handover ceremony on our TV in Stamford, Connecticut. When the crimson Chinese flag was flown over the harbor, we hugged each other in the living room and cried, “Finally!,” as if we somehow personally had a hand in reclaiming our long-lost island.

Two years later, when my best friend Claire, a native of Hong Kong, invited me to visit her home, I couldn’t believe my luck. The prospect of seeing the place I had imagined so many times before kept me wired during the twenty-hour flight. Prior to arrival, I had asked Claire if my inability to speak Cantonese, the native dialect of Hong Kong, was going to pose a problem. Knowing that I spoke Mandarin and English, Claire responded only half-jokingly: Don’t speak English because you’ll be considered uppity with your Chinese face. Don’t speak Mandarin either because people will think you are a mainlander.

She wasn’t wrong. When I went bargain hunting at the night market on Temple Street, an older woman balked when I low-balled a pair of slippers. “Where do you think you are?” she barked in heavily accented Mandarin. “Go back to your mainland if you want low-quality, cheap goods!”

For Hong Kong, the past seventeen years have been a lesson in adaptation. While the Hong Kong locals have steadily griped about the influx of mainlanders—pejoratively known as “backward locusts”—and their consumption of Hong Kong resources, mainlanders regard the Hong Kongers as haughty and, most offensively, disloyal. Tensions have erupted with increasing frequency. Two years ago, when a mainland girl spilled dried noodles on a Hong Kong subway car, where eating is strictly prohibited, the confrontation that ensued was captured and uploaded online, and recriminations continued on social-media platforms for weeks. Earlier this year, the parents of a toddler who defecated on a crowded street became the object of ire. Hong Kong demonstrators took to the street to mock their visitor’s lack of manners; meanwhile, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, People’s Daily, denounced the protesters as hooligans and skinheads.

Such incidents rile both sides and point to the profound cultural differences that still divide Beijing and the former colony. This rift is critical for understanding the indifference and skepticism that mainland Chinese can seem to feel toward their fellow citizens’ fight for political freedom.

Despite the small percentage of extremely wealthy Chinese, disproportionately represented in the press, that seems to sweep up every commodity with a designer logo, the average Hong Kong citizen still makes seventy per cent more annually than the average mainlander and has a higher standard of living. This difference gnaws at mainlanders, who tend to think of the Hong Konger, as the common Chinese saying goes, as “born into luck that he does not know to appreciate.” The tension is heightened by the disgruntlement Hong Kongers feel in the other direction as they lose their jobs to newly arrived mainland laborers willing to work for lower wages.

Along with economic wealth, the residents of Hong Kong developed a political awareness that remains largely foreign to those on the mainland. Twenty-five years after the democracy protests of 1989, the Tiananmen Square massacre still remains a taboo subject on the mainland. For the country’s striving youth, it is a censored blip. But, in Hong Kong, Tiananmen is commemorated each year with the largest candle vigil in Asia.

Now mainland ideologues accuse the Hong Kong demonstrators of being “British running dogs who are committing treason against the motherland,” a prominent blogger wrote this week. The Hong Kong protesters’ assertion of their entitlement to democracy is alien and almost sanctimonious to their mainland counterparts, for whom economic stability is the value to be safeguarded and political involvement is as frivolous an indulgence as the Louis Vuitton bags that tourists go to Hong Kong to purchase. Yet, to those undaunted few who have sedulously fought China’s great digital firewall for the freedom to demand democracy and judge events like Tiananmen for themselves, the work of their fellow citizens in Hong Kong must feel like an act of kinship.

For mainlanders who are watching the city’s main thoroughfares, aswarm with the glare of ten thousand backlit phone screens—that modern tool of protest—Hong Kong has gleamed, lately, with a very different set of lights.