Raphael Wong and Figo Chan entered Hong Kong’s Stanley prison on a winter morning in 2022 to meet Jimmy Lai, the media magnate who had been detained two years earlier and was awaiting trial on national security charges.
They had all participated in the violent demonstrations that shook Hong Kong in 2019, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to call for greater freedom and democracy on Chinese soil. Additionally, they would frequently get together for dinner, sometimes opulent meals, where they would chat and joke around over dim sum, pizza, or claypot rice.
However, neither of them had anticipated a reunion at a maximum security prison, the suppression of protests, the imprisonment of friends and fellow activists, and the transformation of Hong Kong while maintaining its noisy nature. And the man who had earned the mocking moniker “Fatty Lai” was no longer there because he had shed a significant amount of weight.
Even though they were decades apart, Wong and Chan were roughly 40 years younger, while Lai was in his 70s, they continued to see a different Hong Kong. Lai had a significant role in the demonstrations, using his most powerful resource the wildly popular newspaper Apple Daily to try to transform Hong Kong into a liberal democracy.
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