Still a protester at heart

It’s a pleasant afternoon when I arrive at Tamarind, a tasteful and elegant Asian eatery surrounded with glass walls spilling warm sunshine onto the sparkling silver cutlery, where Adam Najberg is already studying the menu in a quiet corner.

But not far away, outside the government headquarters of Hong Kong at Admiralty, hundreds of Occupy Central protesters are still in a tense standoff against the government, surviving on food donations in sweltering heat.

“I’m really excited that Hong Kong people have something they want to stand up for and believe in, I didn’t see that coming in Hong Kong,” Najberg says of the pro-democracy movement.

“For a lot of times during the 1990s, I really wondered whether anyone felt anything about something more than money. And the answer for now is yes.”

Graduating with Asian studies and journalism degrees from the US, Najberg is among the few media veterans who masters both Asian and Western journalism.

The 45-year-old is a battle-scarred journalist and author who has served many news corporations for the past 25 years, such as The Washington Post, The Associated Press, ICRT, and now The Wall Street Journal.

I set my mind on the mini kebabs to go with the deep-fried beef brisket yellow curry, sided with baguettes. Najberg, who claims to be on weight control with a low-carb diet plan, follows with the same order, but also asks for yet another diet Coke. I laugh, but I understand.

The weeks-long demonstration may have been occupying headlines on some of the world’s biggest news corporations for weeks, but to Najberg, it’s nothing quite like the Nanjing anti-African protests in 1988-89 (that led into the Tiananmen Square massacre) when he was a young journalist working for The Washington Post while in Beijing as a college student on a visa in his junior year. The memory is still reverberating

“From the day when Hu Yaobang (a senior officer in the Communist Party of China) died on 14 April 1989, I marched with the students, interviewed them, took photos … until the martial law was declared on 20 May,” says Najberg, who interviewed Chai Ling, Wu’erkaixi and Wang Dan, three widely considered as the most visible student leaders in the 1990s who were little-known at the time.

“I remember things got more serious in late May,” he says.

“I sat on the monument in a big coat at Tiananmen Square for six hours from night to morning because my job was to run across the street to the Beijing hotel, wake up the gate keeper to go inside and tell my boss at his apartment if something important was happening, as back then, no one had cell phones.

“I remember the students were on a hunger strike. Because they were not very well-nourished, after two to three days, they started to really collapse.

“There was a constant stream of ambulances going back and forth from Tiananmen Square to the hospital. And the whole place smelt really bad.

“At the same time I had a student visa that was expiring. The Chinese government ... they weren’t mean to me or bad to me … but they just would not renew my visa because my activity was incompatible with my visa status.”

He had to leave China on 31 May.

Indeed, much of the Occupy Central movement offers the same dramatic intensity as the Nanjing anti-African protest did.

“In those days you didn’t really think how significant anything was. But the thing that worries me about Hong Kong right now, is they take it (the protest) like a party too, until it wasn’t.

“Things can change in a second. And I think the students there (Nanjing anti-African protests) weren’t prepared for it, and the students here (Occupy Central) are not prepared for it either.”

He tries to visualise the situation in Beijing in 1989 at his age of 20. “I was stuck in front of the gate, and you always read about people getting trampled in a crowd filled with people saying ‘spit!’ and pushing the gate. I couldn’t move. It was really scary.”

Asked of the reason he put his safety at risk to stay, he candidly admits: “At that time it was all about booze and girls and studying. I was just a kid, didn’t really have a moral composite at that age.

“I just wanted a job, get paid, I wanted to be a journalist that was sexy and interesting. And then you see violence just happen in a second, now I’m very, very cautious.

To this day, now as a digital editorial head, he insists on being at the centre of the protest, in a suit, to report the story that concerns at least half the world.

Protests such as this, Najberg says, are an opportunity for news corporations to build and solidify credibility.

“We love underdogs when we read the news,” he says.

“You have this confluence of a highly visual situation, with perceptions that little guys are going up against big guys asking for democracy, especially in the western world.

“This is what they (readers in the Western countries) went through and they all see a bit of themselves, a bit of their history and the past, on the future of Hong Kong.”

Mastering six languages, including English, German, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Hebrew and, marginally, Cantonese, makes a big difference to understanding the subjects he reports on, says the polyglot.

“I feel better able to communicate with people (in the protest) now that I am speaking English and Cantonese. I feel like I have a better sense of people of what they are thinking and feeling.”

It applies to the ongoing protest, where the spirit of the slogans written or spoken in Cantonese cannot be fully interpreted when translated in English.

“I love to hear people’s stories. A lot of people who have interesting stories to tell don’t speak English. Language is an amazing tool, even if you speak it marginally well, it opens doors.

I’m interested in how fluent he speaks in Chinese. So before we ask for the bill we switch to Cantonese and Mandarin for five minutes.

“My Cantonese is not perfect. It’s not an easy language as it’s full of slangs. I prefer Mandarin,” he speaks awkwardly, yet endearingly, in Cantonese.

So we switch again to Mandarin: “I have a Beijing accent, you know, what they call retroflex consonant.”

Undeniably, his Mandarin is impeccable, if not, at least, more advanced than I am.