Canadian values may not be many Hongkongers' cup of tea
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While I applaud her community spirit, It's a bit like shouting, 'Make Macau gambling free!' It would be hard to find another country more tolerant and even sympathetic to drug addicts than the Great White North.
Miu said she and her family recently moved to Canada. I gather they now live in Richmond, Vancouver, the home of many former Hongkongers, including some of my own relatives and friends.
'Today, my family and I came out together to say NO to three toxic directions of the government,' she told her fellow protesters and probably neighbours.
'The BC (British Columbia) government has always regarded itself as a saviour, saying they want to save people with addictions. Those of us who are willing to take responsibility for our lives not only have to pay for them, but we are also labelled as their persecutors.'
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The provincial government pioneered legalising the consumption, but not trafficking, of hard drugs and the setting up of injection sites that provide a safe environment with first aid and sterilised drug paraphernalia such as clean needles. The practice has spread to other provinces in recent years.
Neighbours in Richmond have been fighting against having such a site in their community. If you remember, a Caucasian woman last year had to apologise publicly after shouting racist remarks at such a rally. She was captured on video which went viral with her claiming China was responsible for the fentanyl crisis and telling those she was arguing with to go back to Hong Kong.
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Wearing dark blue medical masks, Wendy and her younger sister stepped in front of the audience at a book launch. The two, hesitant to reveal their faces, used pseudonyms, still wary that they could endanger people still held captive in Myanmar scam farms. Wendy's sister – identified only with the pseudonym 'Luncheon Meat' – was trafficked across the Thai border into Myanmar last summer after she took up a purchasing agent job in Thailand. Upon arriving in Chiang Mai, a city in northern Thailand, the recruiters seized her identity documents and drove her across the border into Myanmar. Soon after, while staying in a complex at the border town, she was forced to conduct investment scams targeting wealthy American men. Cases of Hongkongers trafficked to Myanmar were widely reported last year, following a surge in 2022. 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'There were lots of things that I was afraid I did too late… or that I didn't do enough,' Wendy said at the book launch event last week. 'It felt like we had to be alert for 24 hours a day,' she said, recounting how she and the rest of her family would stay up late, fearing they might miss her sister's messages. Keeping up with her sister's whereabouts also proved to be an ordeal, as she was moved multiple times between interconnected compounds that rapidly sprang up over the past few years amid the civil war in Myanmar. Since a military coup ousted the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021, triggering armed conflicts with ethnic militias, human trafficking has surged, along with other forms of transnational crime. In lockstep, scam compounds have cropped up along Myanmar's southern border. After Luncheon Meat was found texting her family over WhatsApp, her captors demanded a US$500,000 (HK$4 million) ransom for her release, but her family could not afford it. There was no way they could scrape together such a hefty sum, never mind that there was no guarantee her captors would honour their promise. 'We all knew that paying the ransom would not save them, and would even allow the captors to take advantage of the situation,' Wendy says in the book. She also recounts seeking assistance from vigilante-style groups on Chinese social media, which she suspects had ties to the Myanmar syndicates. Some claimed they could help rescue people in the compounds under a 'two in, one out' agreement — an 'absurd' condition that would require Wendy to 'bring' two people into the scam farms for her sister's rescue. 'There were also times I was afraid that I had done too much,' Wendy said at last week's event. 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The trafficking victims were released gradually over the span of about three months. As of mid-March, three Hong Kong residents were still waiting to be rescued from scam farms in Myanmar, according to the city's government. Cautionary tale Yu, who is scheduled to give a talk on the book later this month at the Hong Kong Book Fair, said he hoped the victims' stories would serve as a cautionary tale, particularly for young people facing economic precarity. The book is the first of its kind, laying out Hongkongers' accounts of the Myanmar cybercrime compounds, he added. Yu said that the victims and families were advised against revealing too much to the public – an approach he disagreed with. 'Shouldn't the public know what's going on in those compounds? The government is always talking about educating people against scammers, but a better and more realistic approach would be to tell the true stories of the victims,' he said. Yu also said that he had notified Undersecretary for Security Michael Cheuk about the book's publication. Earlier, without naming the ex-councillor, security chief Chris Tang had said that commenting publicly on the trafficking cases without a full understanding of official operations 'may not be a good thing' for those who were still waiting to be saved. Yu's co-author, Fung, said that the book might help young Hongkongers who are unaware of the methods used in job scams stay vigilant, adding that crime syndicates in Southeast Asia could strike again. If the government believes the book could be useful for young people with limited experience in the workforce, it could be placed in school libraries, he said, while also calling on the authorities to step up anti-fraud education. After the event, Yu also pointed to the lack of human trafficking laws in Hong Kong. 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