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COLUMN: Silent night a powerful night of remembrance

Causeway Bay is a neighbourhood at the centre of Hong Kong Island and it is always alive with excitement. The apartment my mother and I share there is in the middle of it all.

Causeway Bay is a neighbourhood at the centre of Hong Kong Island and it is always alive with excitement. The apartment my mother and I share there is in the middle of it all.

We are 25 floors up from the street and usually it is amazingly quite, with the only sound emanating from the air conditioner and the dehumidifier. But on Friday night, when I arrived from Chicago, things were markedly different.

Sitting more than two-dozen floors from the ground, it sounded like we were on top of an amusement park, with the sounds of humanity building into an incredible crescendo, much like the sound of a rollercoaster.

I was exhausted from the 15-hour flight (and in my usual fashion, I didn't sleep a wink on the plane) but as many cross-continental travellers know, the best way to beat jet lag is to force yourself to stay up at your destination until bed-time. I knew if I crashed early, my body clock would stay on North American time for days. And honestly, the cacophony of sound downstairs was begging for me to join the crush of humanity.

My mom and I headed downstairs and brushed our way through the crowd with arms linked. This was not an ordinary night in Causeway Bay, no not at all.

This was June 4 and the day marks the 22nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. On the streets, there were performance artists and protesters. Mom quickly purchased us matching t-shirts that read "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" As I have stated before, I am a big fan of this contemporary Chinese artist, who has been detained in his homeland since April 3.

Nowhere is the concern for Ai Weiwei's health and welfare greater than here in Hong Kong. There have been a number of protests and artists have made statements by projecting his image on government buildings and posting graffiti messages about his detention everywhere. Artists here have been detained for doing so but they will not be silenced.

A rash of recent detentions of dissidents, artists and activists in China seems to have enlivened people here. Yes, Hong Kong is a Separate Administrative Region of China and has been since 1997, when it was handed back by the British, but the reality is that this city-state is vulnerable and, last Friday night, I witnessed an amazing statement by the population.

Victoria Park (at the end of our block) holds major events all year long. On Friday night, the park was filled to capacity with candle- holding citizens who came out to remember the events of June 4, 1989. Tens of thousands of people came out to remember the hundreds (maybe thousands) of people who were killed in Beijing 22 years earlier in an incredible candlelight vigil. As well as remembering Tiananmen Square, clearly people were there to show their concern with the detainment of individuals such as Ai Weiwei and Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Prize Laureate who is serving an 11-year sentence in China.

Yes, I was probably quieter than usual because of the jet lag but experiencing this display of solidarity and compassion in the park on Friday night was inspiring and left me speechless. The people of Hong Kong seem determined to make their collective voices heard on the streets.

And the silence in the park, with thousands and thousands of candles punctuating the darkness, was one of the most powerful spectacles I have ever witnessed.

Naomi Yorke is a Port Coquitlam student who lived in Shanghai, China for four years, writing about her experiences twice a month for The Tri-City News. She now lives in Chicago, where she's attending art school, and continues her column.