Читать книгу Rebel City - South China Morning Post Team - Страница 19

Jasmine Siu and Chris Lau

A love story gone badly wrong in Taiwan sparked Hong Kong’s biggest political storm. The search for justice has not ended.

It was a Valentine’s Day vacation that went horribly wrong. When Chan Tong-kai and Poon Hiu-wing boarded their flight to Taiwan on February 8, 2018, they were a picture of happiness, two young adults celebrating a pregnancy and the prospect of a long, loving future together. Yet by their return flight just nine days later, that picture would be shattered. Only one of them would make the journey back to Hong Kong; the other would be dead, the corpse abandoned and left to rot in an unfamiliar land.

When Poon’s badly decomposing body was found in thick bushes on the outskirts of Taipei a month later, all the evidence pointed to Chan. He had not only explained in detail to police where to find the body, but had also admitted to the killing, saying he had attacked Poon after hearing the baby was not his and viewing a video of his lover having sex with another man.

To a stunned city, the details of the case were shocking and tragic enough. Yet this was a tragedy in two acts. And what nobody could have foreseen was that, like a butterfly causing a far off tsunami with the flapping of its wings, the ripples of a single crime of passion in Taiwan would one day become a tidal wave bearing down on 7 million Hongkongers.

Nobody could have known then that the city was about to be swept into one of its worst periods of civil unrest; that Poon’s murder would expose a loophole in its justice system; or that attempts to close that loophole would spark widespread violence and the arrests of thousands.