Utopian vagabond

When Italian priest Franco Mella first came to Hong Kong in 1974 he was only planning a quick stopover before heading to China, where Mao’s Cultural Revolution was in full swing. He didn’t expect, 37 years later, that he would still be here fighting for people’s rights and championing the city’s many social movements.

Mella is something of a connoisseur when it comes to activism. His preferred method of resistance is to hunger strike, and he has achieved a decent amount of success by doing so. At various times in his life he has been on hunger strike for the democratic movement, for boat dwellers, for Mainland wives and for single mothers without Hong Kong identity cards. Like George Orwell before him, the 62-year-old has even willingly become a down-and-outer in order to get closer to Hong Kong’s homeless and impoverished.

Naturally, he’s something of a cult hero in our city and has inspired a film, 1999’s Ordinary Heroes (千言萬語), where he was partially portrayed by Anthony Wong Chau-sang. The film won at both the Hong Kong Film Awards and Taiwan’s Golden Horse Film Awards that same year, but he doesn’t see himself as ‘Father Gump’ (甘仔) in the film. “Father Gump is like a saint, a hero. I’m just a vagabond, a bit naïve, living for my dream,” he says.

China has been of everlasting interest to Father Mella since his student days in the 60s. “At that time many Italian youths were influenced by the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s theories,” he says. “They started to care about society. Some even left rich families to live with the poor. So I decided to go to China and see what a new society was like.” Yet upon landing in Hong Kong he became so upset with people’s living conditions that he joined a squatter movement in Diamond Hill. “At first I wanted to do it Italian style, writing letters to the government,” he fondly recalls. “The dwellers told me ‘this won’t work in Hong Kong; you need to make banners, chant slogans and court the media’. So I did what they said.” The squatter movement was a major news story throughout 1975.

In 1978 he began supporting the boat dwellers at Yau Ma Tei Typhoon Shelter for their right to live on land. A year later, he was arrested in a protest and bound over for 18 months. The movement lasted 10 years but in 1989 the boat dwellers finally won their appeal, and Mella, after a long fight, stopped living on boats and moved on.

In 1999, Hong Kong’s highest court ruled that the children of parents who have the right of abode in Hong Kong should also have that right, including those born on the Mainland. The ruling would have granted the right of abode for up to 300,000 people on the Mainland seeking reunion with their parents in Hong Kong. It caused an instant panic. The next year, Hong Kong’s government asked the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress to reinterpret the Basic Law, which overturned the ruling. This launched Mella on a crusade to fight for the separated families’ right of reunion. “It took 10 years for the boat dwellers to get their land, so I know this fight will be long and difficult,” he says of the still unresolved issue.

Mella is concerned for the current public bashing of Mainland mothers-to-be rushing to Hong Kong to give birth. “Now that Hong Kong people don’t want to have babies, we can’t blame Mainland mothers for giving birth here,” he says. “The mothers are contributing to the city, as are foreign domestic helpers. The helpers have been serving Hong Kong families for decades. Why can’t they have the same right?”

Mella first visited the Chinese mainland in 1991. Since then, he has spent many months living in China teaching English in cities and towns. However, in July 2011, Beijing denied him an entrance visa, supposedly due to the worsening ties between the Politburo and the Vatican. “I’ll try [to apply for a visa] again this year,” he says hopefully.

Clearly he doesn’t view 21st century China as a real communist society. “Media censorship, putting Liu Xiaobo in jail, blocking Facebook – these are not acts of communism. We should help China to become a real new society where people – not money or the government – rule the country. If we pursue our dreams, we are blessed.” Shirley Zhao