VANCOUVER -- On a rainy winter night, artists in Vancouver projected a selection of blog posts and texts written in Chinese characters onto an outdoor wall of a Gastown coffee shop.

They were messages of solidarity from around the world that had been sent to a website in Hong Kong last year and then projected onto the side of a tall legislative building in a large-scale art exhibit.

At the time, Hong Kong was gripped by massive street protests. Demonstrators blocked main roads for almost 80 days, clashing with police and demanding greater autonomy from mainland Chinese rule, including the right to choose their own leader.

The former British colony is officially part of mainland China, but it has tussled with Beijing before over a “one country, two systems” framework that was conceived so its freedoms and way of life would be protected for 50 years after it was handed back to Chinese rule in 1997.

It was poignant that these projections could be shown in Vancouver in a way that echoed the presentation in Hong Kong, says Melissa Lee, a lecturer and freelance curator who worked with the artists.

“We thought it was quite interesting. It was formation of community through art,” she says of the exhibit.

More recently, Lee, a Vancouverite who teaches at a university in Hong Kong, has seen a fresh wave of anxiety there over the loss of civil liberties as well as local traditions and practices.

There has been the muted return of a few Hong Kong booksellers who ran a store publishing and selling gossipy books about leaders in Beijing. Despite holding foreign passports, some of them were abruptly abducted in October from Hong Kong soil by mainland Chinese authorities and taken in for questioning, a move that previously was not thought to be possible because of the formal border that divides the two places.

At Lunar New Year, there was a violent crackdown on street food vendors selling fish balls, with bricks thrown and shots fired, resulting in scores of injuries. Unlicensed vendors have long been allowed to peddle their street snacks at the beginning of the annual holiday when many other businesses are closed.

Then, in late February, thousands of viewers were aghast and complained when Hong Kong news station TVB ran subtitles using simplified characters, the kind used in mainland China, instead of the traditional ones commonly used in Hong Kong.

“There is a general feeling that every day there is something in the news that irritates us. I do feel pessimistic,” says Zoe Lam, a researcher who moved to Vancouver in 2011 and visits her hometown about once a year.

Vancouver has long been intimately tied to this kind of soul-searching about the future of Hong Kong.

Hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong Chinese became Canadian citizens in the late 1980s and 1990s after the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing in 1989 and in the years leading up to 1997. But many later returned to work and live in Hong Kong as mainland China prospered economically.

At the same time, a generation of Chinese and non-Chinese Canadians from Vancouver also packed their bags and headed to Hong Kong seeking adventure, work and ties to their heritage as political fears gave way to the lure of interesting opportunities — often, again, tied to the rise of mainland China.

As such, both groups, especially those with more established business interests, are generally more constrained to speak up publicly for Hong Kong’s interests, though many will privately sigh.

“Concerns for Hong Kong go hand-in-hand with needing to also consider their beneficial relationship with China,” observes Helen Hok-Sze Leung, associate professor at Simon Fraser University, who grew up in Hong Kong.

Lam and others, however, are part of a younger generation in Vancouver who relate with peers in Hong Kong who have become more strident in identifying themselves as being part of a Hong Kong that is culturally separate from mainland China.

“It’s the city where I grew up so I have stronger ties and I naturally feel bad” about what is happening, says Lam.

“I go onto Twitter and Weibo and see Hong Kong young people writing (in the local dialect) of Cantonese and declaring themselves as Hong Kongers first,” says Leung. “This is a generation that was born under (mainland) Chinese rule and yet their sense of local (Hong Kong) identity and asserting that culture seems stronger than in my generation, and this percolates to migrants (who move to Vancouver).”

Lee, the lecturer, recently spoke about independent film Ten Years, which became an unexpected hit in Hong Kong when it was released in mid-December. The film consists of five ominous short stories hypothesizing what Hong Kong will be like 10 years from now. In one, cab drivers who speak Cantonese instead of Mandarin have their livelihoods clipped when they are prohibited from picking up certain passengers. In another, books are censored and banned ones are pulled off shelves.

According to Reuters, the film broke box office records in Hong Kong for attendance, but around a month later, after mainland Chinese state-controlled publication “denounced Ten Years in a January editorial,” the filmmakers were told by cinemas in Hong Kong they couldn’t continue showing it because of scheduling issues.

“People in Vancouver heard about (the film), so they contacted me,” says Lee. “There are people in Vancouver who feel it would be so popular to show this movie about Hong Kong’s dystopic future so we are trying to get it screened at (a place such as) Pacific Cinematheque or at Centre A (a contemporary art gallery in Chinatown.) I think it speaks to how involved people are in the future of Hong Kong that there would be this immediate interest in Vancouver in a film (like this).”

jlee-young@postmedia.com

===

Click here to report a typo.

Is there more to this story? We’d like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about.