Outspoken activist Christina Chan shot into the public eye with her high-profile protests of the Beijing Olympics and the high-speed rail link. She is now considered by many to be the face of the young protest movement. She tells June Ng her story.

I was born in Hong Kong. I went to study abroad in Britain when I was 10. It seemed to be a sensible thing to do at the time, as we were approaching the Handover.

My mom treated me as her career. She used to be a career-driven woman but she quit her job and took care of me full-time. If I didn’t score above 90 marks in a subject, I’d get into trouble. My dad is a former civil servant.

It’s funny that it was actually my parents who got me into activism. When I was a kid, they used to point at the television at people like Long Hair, saying that activists give Hong Kong hope because they fight for the rights of Hongkongers. They’re so cool.

But now I’ve gotten to know these people more. I realize many pan-democrat icons don’t really fight the way I had expected them to. You know Tony Jaa, the Thai action actor? I’m just like him—I thought that everything that Jackie Chan does on screen was real.

My parents are still supportive, even though they keep asking me not to go to protests. They actually get a lot of pressure from my grandparents and extended family members as well. Thank God everyone doesn’t call me directly.

When young protesters say we’re going to do something, we’ll do it. Maybe that’s what sets us apart with the older ones.

The thing that really gets to me is that if we protesters want to hand a letter to an official, we will hand it to that person, not to the police. But a lot of older pan-democrats will just hand the letter to the police and let the media take pictures.

The government is politically unwise. Take Donald Tsang’s habit of running away from protesters. He can simply take the letter, smile, and let the press take a picture. Then people will be like, “oh, he’s listening to us after all.” But the officials won’t even do that.

When I was a kid, I actually wanted to grow up to be a police officer. But I gradually lost faith in police officers. I understand they are just doing their jobs, and sometimes they have to do what they are asked to.

Society forces me to be an activist. My friends and I were joking that we should write a letter to Donald Tsang and say, “Can you please stop making all this fuss so we can finally have time to write our thesis? We really need to graduate.”

Young protesters are more like, we read about something in the news, and we go out, and we do whatever we think is right. It is kind of random depending on the issue.

We’re not an organization, we have no rules, and we have no leaders, but it’s a lot more flexible. In a political party, everyone has to send out the same message. But not us.

We definitely aren’t upset because we don’t have a swimming pool in our clubhouse as John Tsang likes to say. We’re frustrated because we were born under British rule and we were taught that Hong Kong people would some day rule Hong Kong. But now we’re young adults and we realize that was a lie.

Some people ask me why I put on so much makeup to go protest. But I wear eyeliner when I go out anyway—why would I need to look different when I’m protesting?

I did some one-off modelling before. But I found it quite boring and hideous. I have a lot of respect for the occupation though. I don’t know why society likes to label all pretty girls as “brainless”.

Hong Kong is going to become just another Chinese city with nothing special about it. In the past, we didn’t have national education and we didn’t have to learn Putonghua. Once, some mainlanders asked me how come I don’t speak their language. God damn it, why don’t YOU speak Cantonese?