When Kenneth Ip and Natalie Wong left Hong Kong in early 2021, they carried little with them except for some luggage and a fake invitation to a Taiwan wedding. In 2019 they’d been arrested at Polytech university, where they had been part of the Protect Our Children deescalation organisation, a group of older Hongkongers who acted as physical buffers between the young pro-democracy protesters and the riot police.
They escaped being charged, Ip tells the Guardian, but police still considered them suspected rioters and they no longer felt safe in Hong Kong. So they fled for Taiwan, where a government was offering to help them.
