One of the things that shocked me when I first entered the prison, was that there are no clocks. At the workshop, I would not know how much longer I have to labour before I could have my meal. Though I am tired, I am not allowed to lie down on the chairs in the canteen; nor do I know how much longer I would have to wait before I could get back to my cell for rest.
In my cell I would fall asleep, and wake up from a dream not quite sure what year it is. Many times I would freshen up, do my morning exercise, only to realize that my cell-mates remain quite still. Then I would see that it must still be the middle of the night, and I would go back to sleep.
I ask my cell-mates why there aren’t any clocks in the jail. Some say that it is to mentally torture the inmates; others say that it is for security reason - to prevent prisoners from plotting an escape with those outside. I consulted a “senior prisoner” and he murmured, “the time in the prison cell passes fast yet the day passes slowly.” He told me to savour it slowly too.
Before the mid-16th century, Europeans were not entirely familiar with the concept of numbers. Peoples were usually uncertain about their own age. Neither did they expect any accuracy in time. At the end of the 19th century Max Weber observed that industrialization had drastically and fundamentally changed the work ethics in Germany. For him, Benjamin Franklin’s famous line, “Time is money,” best reflects the spirit of the era. That is to say, before modernization, time can be freely squandered.
My youth was spent running around in the resettlement area, musing on the clouds that fly by. The days were slow. After I have become a professor and the director of two research centers, teaching and research duties made life busy. Apart from work at the university, I used to organize academic seminars and discussions, write proposals, and issue statements to promote political reforms. My lunch time would be split between eating and writing articles on current affairs and politics.
Outside Hong Kong, I travelled far and wide in mainland China to deliver speeches, publish articles, and organize trust funds for the promotion of civil society.
I had taken up a visiting professorship at a university in Guangzhou, and I often found myself on the train to China immediately after teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I would go through the Lo Wu customs and get on the China Railways High-speed (CRH) for Guangzhou, gobbling down a quick meal during the train ride. Then I would get off the train, grab a cab, and head off straight to the lecture hall to teach until 9pm.
Usually students would stay after class to discuss issues raised in class; it would be almost 10pm by the time I would drag myself, exhausted, back to the university guest house. There, waiting for me would often be friends from different NGOs; and we would spend the rest of the night in long, candid discussions.
Competing with time, I would therefore often read and write on the train or the airplane. Once, realizing too late that I brought no books with me on the train, I found myself simply idling at my seat. It was an unwonted experience. I tried to count each second as it passed by, and realised that the length of every second was very different from what I used to know.
Another time, I was in Taipei for a conference, and a good friend took me to a tea house. The moment we settled down at our table, he went bouncing to the next one and began chatting with someone else. I felt uneasy having waited a while, and began strolling around the tea house. Many were doing nothing in particular, merely watching children play. The owner of the tea house, a retired professor, was digging up bamboo shoots. I have always liked the grace of bamboo, and the sweetness of bamboo shoots, so I stopped and watched him as he carefully loosened the dirt and cut the shoots. I picked one up and examined it closely, and felt that time, too, was sweet.
A few days into the conference, the organiser took us to Dharma Drum Mountain. Walking along the streams that lead up the mountain, with the sound of birds chirping and water flowing, we arrived at a pool in front of a temple. There, my stray thoughts cleared up as I saw the silhouette of hundreds of turquoise pebbles flickering in the water.
As we reached the peak, a scholar, who kept discussing academic topics with others during the hike, asked me a few questions concerning civil society. I told her, though, to cast her eyes instead to the coastline afar and breathe in the air untainted by scholarly concerns.
I very much admire this trail up Dharma Drum Mountain; it taught me to live in the moment. In the last ten years, only by emptying my mind this way, leaving blanks in my hectic everyday life, was I able to devote myself to the fight for democracy with peace.
In the beginning prison life was not easy. I had to get used to strict rules, a dirty environment, and poor food quality. Time seemed to have stopped as I stared at my calendar awaiting my family to visit me. It was especially tragic to see the tally marks that a previous inmate scraped on the hard bed counting his days. Now I learnt to first ignore the calendar, and focus instead on the satisfaction from my daily reading; I learnt to be mindful of which muscles I am training when I move wooden boards.
I learnt too, to examine each passing cloud during my time in the yard, reminiscing my days of youth; to feel myself quite blessed listening to classical music on the radio till I fall asleep. In an instant, I understood time can indeed fly by if one lives in the moment. Contrary, it crawls if I count my days and fixate on the end.
I now know how to figure out time, but this has become immaterial after I finally comprehended the senior prisoner’s motto. I am floating in the ocean of time. If I struggle violently, I will be overcome by the current. Rather, I am resolved to see my prison sentence a “ blank” in the painting of my life. By humbling myself, I have become a raft unmoored, bobbing up and down in the water, and have allowed the flow to carry me to the shore yonder.
Written on July 21, 2019