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Part III: My ‘American Moment’ in Asia

• Click here for Part I
• Click here for Part II

Once again, it’s your “knife journalist” checking in. It’s a name that tends to stick. Especially if you throw it around just right.

For you Juan and Juanita-come-latelys, I was given the sobriquet by a Brit-inspired tab in Hong Kong, the I-Mail, after I had asked the question whether the Hong Kong police had been a bit too overanxious when eight of them took 45 minutes to figure out my 1-inch knife was no threat to international security. Arrest me for bad syntax, but please, not for my knife!

I had my key-chain special on me because I had wisely cut a few mangoes that morning for breakfast in my hotel. I was in Hong Kong to produce a half-hour documentary on China and Hong Kong for NCM-TV: New California Media — The New America Now (Friday on KCSM-TV at 7:30 p.m. and Midnight, and Saturday at 4:30 p.m.).

As my story goes, I lined up to cover a speech by President Clinton (yes, he is everywhere), I gave the security force my knife as an act of courtesy and diplomacy.

Security never likes it when you make their job easy. To them, it’s like some suspicious surprise, some sort of perverse reverse psychology. I am giving them my knife, so it must be … hmm … some kind of … KAMIKAZE ACT!

Fortunately, I survived this minor event by being a subdued amok. I did not run. I was a polite and cooperative detainee. It was my reverse-amok strategy. Normalcy.

But in the aftermath, my brush with Hong Kong authorities has left me feeling a bit like Patrick Henry. You know, “Give me liberty or give me death.”

It was my American moment in Asia, a land struggling to be comfortable with freedoms that are more than just the ability to make, profit, deposit, or cash in your name obscene sums of money made in any way you’d like (except with a knife).

In America, freedom is one of those intangibles, it’s hardly noticed. You can cut mangoes in your hotel room with a knife and no one says boo. You can do all those things and more, with or without a sharp implement, if you wish. That’s how much freedom we’re used to in America.

In a foreign country, you never know when someone will review how much of it you have in your account.

For a few moments while I was surrounded by Chow Yun-Fat clones, like the tough guy star, just more real and not acting, I could feel all the freedom sucked out of my life.

It didn’t matter that coming to Hong Kong I was immediately up 8-1 (that’s $HK8 to every good old fashioned American greenback).

Ah, but what price for freedom? Sure, in Hong Kong you have the freedom to buy counterfeit Gameboy games at the Mongkok markets. But there’s something else that’s priceless. And it’s not something you buy with your Visa card. In Hong Kong, in China, you discover how freedom is not constant, if it really exists at all. And at that point, based on what you find, you discover how American you are.

Take Amy Liu Ying-Li, a naturalized American who teaches marketing at City University of Hong Kong.

When I called Mrs. Li, it was early in the morning. After days of trying to find her among the 7 million in Hong Kong, I finally traced her number. She didn’t want to talk to a reporter. She just wanted to sleep.

“It’s too early,” she said. “You call later.”

I understood that she’d probably like to forget the things she’s been through recently. On Feb. 25, her husband Dr. Li Shaomin, a naturalized American since 1995, crossed the border from Hong Kong into the mainland in Shenzen where Chinese authorities detained him, without formal charges.

Despite her weariness, Mrs. Li agreed to meet with me, a western reporter. “The Hong Kong reporters…” she said to me shaking her head and muttering something not nice. But then I lucked out, too. Her daughter’s cello lessons were near my hotel in a neighborhood in the Western district near Pok Fulam Road.

When we met, she looked tired, eyes puffed, dressed in black. I broke the ice with cordial small talk. She said she had many friends in California, that often they would stop in San Francisco or Los Angeles as a short hop between Princeton and Hong Kong.

“One year, we went with my daughter to Disneyland,” she said, recalling happier times. “We even thought of living in California, except for the earthquakes.”

Of course her husband’s detention has been even more devastating than any natural disaster.

When I saw her it had been nearly two months since she heard anything about her husband’s fate. She recalled the first and last time she heard any news.

“I was home. It was many days after I had been looking for him. He was simply missing … And when I heard [news about him] my first reaction was well, he’s alive.”

Dr. Li has now been formally accused of being a spy for Taiwan, a charge that brings a maximum penalty of life in prison. While he has engaged in activity with Taiwanese universities, was he a spy? I asked Mrs. Li point blank.

“I don’t think so, he’s a scholar. He did nothing wrong. He does his research. And I absolutely don’t believe that [he is a spy],” she told me confidently. “I cannot see any reason for his detention.”

There was even a suspicion that he may have been involved in the leak of the Tiananmen Papers, the book that makes the Beijing government look like the Keystone Cops.

“No,” she said, and then the passion came out. “This is not personal. This is an academic freedom issue. If you are a scholar studying in China anywhere, you may be in danger.”

There we were, two Americans pondering the idea of freedom in a place that boasts of “one country two systems.” I think of the conversation often. Almost as often as I’m reminded of an American imprisoned by the Chinese whenever I open my pocketknife.