Political activists Liu Linna and Yeung Hung met on Valentine’s Day in China two years ago and their romance blossomed, eventually leading to marriage.
Their relationship was based on their shared beliefs, but divided by where they lived.
Liu, better known as Liu Sha Sha, was a mainlander who had questioned the Beijing authorities for decades. Yeung, who identified himself to Spectrum as Yang Kuang, was a Hong Kong resident banned from travelling to mainland China.
But late last year following the pro-democracy Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, the couple decided they wanted to be together for good.
Their three-month quest saw them hop from Hong Kong and China to Vietnam, Cambodia and ultimately Thailand, all the while fearful they would be detected by Chinese authorities and repatriated to face imprisonment.
“My husband can’t go to my land [China], and I can’t go to Hong Kong,” Liu said at a budget hotel on Sukhumvit Road on Jan 30. “I am a human rights defender, so my government punished me.”
After spending more than two months at secret locations in Bangkok, the couple finally received a visa to travel to Canada where they will seek political asylum. They flew out of Bangkok at 8am on Wednesday. During their stay in Thailand Liu learned she was pregnant.
“I wanted to go as soon as possible to a better and peaceful country, to give the child a stable environment,” Liu said before her departure.
STAR-CROSSED LOVERS
The couple first meet on Feb 14, 2013, when they were introduced by mutual friends. Yang had been delivering gifts to children in the Daliang mountains, on the border of Sichuan and Yunnan provinces.
“I thought it must have been fate,” Yang said. “We didn’t even realise it was Valentine’s Day until the next day when we went back and looked at the pictures.”
They married in August 2013, but being together in the one place would prove difficult if they were to continue their activism.
Hong Kong, a former British colony, is designated as a Special Administrative Region of China, and still maintains an immigration border with the mainland.
Liu is banned from leaving China through official routes, while Yang’s travel permit to mainland China was revoked in 2013 after the couple tried to visit the wife of Lui Xiabo, a jailed human rights activist and Nobel peace laureate in Beijing. The pair were detained and questioned for hours before being released.
Yang was again detained by police in Shenzhen, Guangdong, in December 2013, when he tried to cross from Hong Kong to meet Liu. He was reportedly jailed for eight months on charges of “illegally crossing a border”.
An earlier run-in with the authorities saw him detained and deported by Japan after he captained a converted Hong Kong fishing vessel carrying nationalist activists to the disputed Diaoyu islands in October 2012.
New York-based writer Rose Tang, a survivor of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, has known the couple for several years. She says Yang proposed to Liu inside a prison van.
During the Umbrella Revolution he put a banner on his tent saying “Yang Kuang loves Sha Sha” as he camped with protesters, after she was barred from entering Hong Kong.
“The couple’s romance reminds me of the romantic yet tragic tales of a number of Chinese activist couples, some of those couples have both been jailed or beaten up,” Ms Tang said.
NO PLACE TO GO
The couple decided to reunite last November. Liu illegally entered Vietnam from the neighbouring Chinese province of Guangxi, according to Radio Free Asia, while Yang went there on his Hong Kong travel documents.
“We were considering whether or not we should return to China, because my husband was concerned I would be captured and beaten,” Liu explained to Spectrum through an interpreter.
On Jan 22, they were discovered by Vietnamese government officials at their hotel in Hanoi. The staff were suspicious of Liu’s passport, which did not contain stamps from authorities in China or Vietnam.
Initially, they were to be repatriated to China. But there was a dramatic turn of events following social media campaigns and mainstream media coverage regarding the couple’s plight.
A day after Vietnamese police threatened to send Liu back to China, the couple was told Liu’s illegal entry into Vietnam was “not a serious problem”. The Vietnamese government fined them four million Vietnamese dong (about 6,000 baht).
“The Vietnamese officials started to rethink sending us back to China,” Liu said. “Instead, they asked which country we wanted to go to.”
That place was Cambodia, where they had obtained visas to visit.
In Phnom Penh, Liu again said she feared imprisonment and torture if repatriated, adding that three friends in China had been jailed in the aftermath of the Hong Kong protests.
SEEKING ASYLUM
After staying in Cambodia for a few days, the couple flew to Thailand on Jan 28, where Liu was issued a two-week visa on arrival. Since Yang is from Hong Kong, there was no requirement for him to have a visa to enter Thailand.
For Liu, the looming expiration date on her visa was cause for anxiety. “I love Thailand because it’s my first time here, but I haven’t been able to enjoy the place and settle down,” she said.
Liu and Yang initially planned to seek asylum in Thailand, which they believed would make it easier for them to relocate to Europe or the US, where Liu said she hoped to study English.
The couple’s asylum-seeker friends in the US introduced them to some Chinese friends in Thailand, who told them the process of applying for political asylum in Thailand would take up to two years.
“We’re still considering whether or not to apply [for refugee status], because if we have to wait for two years, it’s too long,” Liu told Spectrum in January.
Eventually, with the help of international agencies, they decided to relocate to Canada. The agencies helped in providing coordination between the couple and the Canadian embassy and paid their fines for overstaying in Thailand. Last week, they obtained a visa to Canada.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees refused to comment on the couple’s situation, saying they do not comment on individual cases.
A COMMON PLIGHT
Tiananmen survivor Ms Tang read about Liu and Yang a few years ago and got in touch with them on Twitter last year in the lead up to the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre.
“Both were very vocal about their support of the Tiananmen movement and were open about how they were inspired by Tiananmen,” Ms Tang said by email.
Though Yang was a Hong Kong resident until recently, he is originally from mainland China. He was active in Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution, camping out with other protesters. By the time Ms Tang went to Hong Kong to support the protests, Yang had already left for Vietnam to be reunited with Liu.
“Liu’s plight is a typical one for an activist inside China. They operate on shoestring budgets and often out of their own pockets, battling constant government harassment,” Ms Tang said.
Liu is part of what Ms Tang calls the Post-Tiananmen Generation — activists inspired by the student protests.
Liu attended high school in a small town in Henan province during the 1989 democracy movement. Her impoverished family pooled their savings to buy a black and white TV to watch the coverage of the protests a few days before the Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4.
Along with other “rights protection” (in Chinese the term is weiquan) activists, Liu’s work in China involved travelling around voicing her concerns about injustice and offering support to detained activists. She used social media to publicise the issues.
“She would hold a placard with a message outside a detention centre or other sites and have her picture taken and uploaded on social media such as Twitter,” Ms Tang said.
MISSING HOME
While chopsticks are common in Vietnam, they are rarely used by Cambodians. On her first night in Cambodia, Liu cried.
“At that time we were in very difficult position, so my husband couldn’t allow himself to feel sad at all,” Liu said.
“But once we reached Thailand, where we thought we were in a safer zone, Yang felt upset because he also missed home and chopsticks. But the chicken in Thailand is better than in China.”
Although the couple spent two months in Bangkok, the majority of their time staying at a cheap hotel in Chinatown, they were unable to relax.
Liu was constantly worried about her friends in prison.
“Even those who are already out of prison and know that we moved to Thailand still feel upset because two of their brave soldiers have moved out of the team,” Liu said.
Things worsened on Feb 27, when Liu started vomiting. Five days later, she was in the pharmacy buying a pregnancy test, which came up positive.
Her pregnancy and morning sickness prevented her from meeting people and travelling while she was in Thailand, but she hopes that in a few years she will be able to visit the country again with her baby.
The couple do not know when or if they will be able to return to China.
“We have a future to think about. She wants to study, and I want to work. Right now it’s time for us to sort out our emotions,” Yang said. “But we want to go back to having normal lives instead of running around.”
Liu sighed. “Although it’s hard there, here in Thailand I’m like a beggar,” Liu said. “In China I’m a soldier.” n