The Hongcouver | A Bubble Tea Summit brings together pro-Hong Kong and pro-China protesters in Vancouver
- The rivals sat together for almost three hours, trying to understand how the other came to such wildly different views about Hong Kong’s protests to their own
- Their conversation shows how personal and family histories cast the same events during the unrest in very different light
Fenella Sung sits across from Victor Feng at a narrow bench table at Bubble Queen on Vancouver’s Oak Street.
She’s nursing a hot rose jasmine tea – a somewhat radical choice in a bubble-tea joint – but it’s “fantastic”, she assures Feng, who sips a cold milk tea with tapioca balls, the classic variant of the genre.
“I like to keep things simple,” he says.
Three weekends earlier, they had faced each other under very different circumstances in this Canadian city that has 188,000 mainland-Chinese immigrants, more than 71,000 from Hong Kong, and all the tensions that implies.
Sung, 61, a long-time pro-democracy campaigner, was among the black-shirted activists rallying in sympathy with the Hong Kong protest movement.
They were met by large crowds of pro-China counterprotesters, including Feng, who works in finance. He paid for Chinese flags waved at a series of events that weekend.
