To soldier on, be like water

There is no question that Hong Kong people love to shop; that’s why they call the city a shoppers’ paradise. This past week, citizens took our national sport to a whole new level. Gou wu – which means shopping in Mandarin – has become the battle cry for pro-democracy protesters to call on one another to visit Mongkok in large numbers. The goal is to overrun the area and wear down the police in response to their heavy-handed clearance of the Mongkok protest site a week ago. These shopaholics were hard at work in Kowloon even during Sunday’s violent clashes outside the Government Headquarters on the other side of the harbour. They have also found unlikely allies in the United States, where citizens have been organizing “die-ins” at shopping malls by playing dead on the floor in protest of the fatal police shooting of an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Missouri.

Mongkok, or MK for short, has always been a colourful and somewhat rough-and-tumble part of the city. It is a cross between Harajuku and the Bronx, where shopping centres tower over decades-old tenement buildings, where young buskers belt out Cantopop oldies next to a 55-year-old hula-hooper, and where triad bosses patrol the neighbourhood to check up on seedy bars, nightclubs and massage parlours. Since tough streets beget tough crowds, you don’t expect MK protesters to take kindly to the government’s declaration of war last week.

And so when CY Leung called on citizens to resume their shopping routine after Nathan Road reopened, protesters self-organised into legions of retail warriors and descended on MK by the hundreds. These “shopping sprees” begin after dinner (to maximise turnout) and continue well past midnight. Shoppers walk in slow motion to clog sidewalks, pretend to drop and pick up loose change to stop traffic, and stand still for hours to watch movie trailers in front of a giant LCD screen. Never mind it’s 2:30 in the morning, shoppers holler “I want to buy a gold watch!” or “Sell me an iPhone 6!” in mocking Mandarin while marching down the busy thoroughfare. It gives new meaning to the expression “shop till you drop.”

But even retail therapy can get a little tense. Once in a while, shoppers raise their right hands and give the famous three-finger salute from The Hunger Games in defiance. To taunt police, some recite passages from the Bible while others chant unintelligible verses from the Nilakantha Dharani, an ancient Buddhist script. And when their path is blocked by police barricades, they fall into a tactical formation like a Roman battalion and use umbrellas and homemade shields to break through. The gou wu operation was most intense last Friday, when shoppers led police on a wild goose chase through a dizzying web of backstreets between Mongkok and Tsim Sha Tsui in an all-night game of human Pac-Man.