(p. 8) It was never just about the neon, that Cubist, consumerist razzle-dazzle cantilevered over Hong Kong’s streets announcing pawnbrokers and mooncake bakers, saunas and shark’s fin soup shops.
. . .
Because while the government’s crackdown on the neon signs stems from safety and environmental concerns, the campaign evokes the fading of Hong Kong itself: the mournful allegory for an electric city’s decline, the literal extinguishing of its brash flash.
Nights in Hong Kong these days feel as if still in the pall of a plague, or a deep political malaise.
Many of the tourists and resident foreigners are gone, the old party spots unsullied by their beer-guzzling excess.
Hong Kongers have left, too. More than 110,000 permanent residents departed last year, and the city’s population of those worth more than $30 million shrank by 23 percent, according to government and wealth survey data.
Their departure, a quarter-century after the territory reverted from British to Chinese rule, has been spurred by the territory’s economic decline and by an acute diminishment of political rights.
. . .
A national security law, imposed in 2020, criminalizes acts considered threatening to the state. Students, former legislators and a former media mogul sit in prison because of it.
. . .
The Hong Kong filmmaker Anastasia Tsang’s directorial debut, “A Light Never Goes Out,” is about a family coping with the death of a neon sign maker. The film, Hong Kong’s submission for next year’s Oscars, is an elegy for a disappearing craft that could also be a requiem for something larger.
“Hong Kong people have a very strong feeling of loss,” Ms. Tsang said. “Every day you’ve got a friend or relative who’s going to emigrate. Every day you feel like some part of your flesh is being taken from your skeleton.”
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(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 9, 2023, and has the title “Where Did All the Hong Kong Neon Go?”)