Why can't Hong Kong honour the bravest of them all after she died in a knife attack?
What would you do if a leisurely evening at a shopping centre erupted into shocking violence, with a knife-wielding maniac suddenly stabbing people at random?
And what if a woman was being stabbed repeatedly in this sustained rampage, while the only person trying desperately and unsuccessfully to save her was her companion at the scene? Would you help?
Be completely honest now, because you would be answering only to yourself in this hypothetical situation, without fear of any judgment by others.
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I found myself asking these uncomfortable questions after what happened here in Hong Kong last month with the double murder of two young women in full public view at a shopping centre.
And now the medals for bravery that the government handed out this month as part of its annual Honours List have left me wondering about our official metrics for quantifying and rewarding levels of courage. Surely this also merits further contemplation on the wider meaning of bravery itself as a subjective concept and, by inverse corollary, what constitutes cowardice.
Over decades of working as a professional journalist, I have watched more video clips of shocking, deeply disturbing, real-life violence than any normal person should have to in a lifetime - not to derive any sense of twisted, voyeuristic entertainment but rather to acquire the better understanding and context that the nature of my job demands.
And of all those video clips, which have accumulatively desensitised me to some extent, the one capturing the senseless savagery of the shopping centre attack in Hong Kong, my home city and still one of the safest urban centres in the world, bothers me the most.
Taken from a stationary security camera, it shows the knifeman suddenly attacking a young woman at a shop entrance, sending everyone scattering - including someone in a security guard's uniform at whom I am just going to shake my head in dismay rather than take off on a distracting tangent about the definition of security.
Over the next minute or so in the video, the assailant goes about slaughtering his victim without any interference - again, this is in a busy shopping centre in full public view - save for her companion who keeps diving into the fray in a futile attempt to stop him.
She tries again and again to get the knifeman off his victim, fighting him with her bare hands, even trying to drag the fatally injured woman away. She ends up getting herself killed.
It has to be the bravest thing I have ever seen. I don't know about you all, but in my book, a supreme act of self-sacrifice of this magnitude in such circumstances tops any bravery chart by any measure.
But no one is even talking about her.
Five Good Samaritans were honoured by the government this month for stepping up to help on that terrible day, most prominent among them a have-a-go hero chef who, armed with two stools from a nearby restaurant, subdued the knifeman after the attack.
His Bronze Medal for Bravery citation commended him for stopping the assailant from stabbing anyone else after the two victims, and displaying "an extraordinary level of gallantry and selflessness" by subduing him with a stool and guarding him "to prevent the suspect from fleeing the scene until police officers arrived".
The other four heroes helped with administering first aid to the two women while their killer was still at the scene.
Without taking anything away from these well-deserved awards for acts of valour, would it not be remiss if no one were to ask why there is no posthumous award for this brave young woman whom we know little to nothing about still, even after seeing or hearing about her incredible courage?
Media reporting has gone so far as to identify the woman and her companion as a live-in lesbian couple. I would hope and pray that, in this day and age of purported enlightenment, puritanical prudishness and medieval judgment of morality had nothing to do with the perplexing official reluctance to recognise her tremendous sacrifice.
While her bravery is beyond dispute or denial, just as the absence of any interference from spectators until it was too late raises troubling questions, what happened at the crime scene also reflects the unpredictability of human nature and how different people react to life-and-death situations on the spur of the moment.
Can we judge in absolute terms who is a hero and who is a coward, without factoring the real possibility that a supposedly brave person can end up fleeing danger while a reputed coward stands and faces it?
When I was a schoolboy many years ago in another country where my hometown was gripped by an armed insurgency, I found myself caught in a textbook wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time situation.
A paramilitary thug jammed the barrel of his assault rifle under my chin and threatened to blow my head off, sending me into catatonic shock. I was no hero then, and I wonder if I can be one now.
A wise man once defined a coward as a hero with a wife, kids and a mortgage. I'm not sure what that makes people in my demographic.
Yonden Lhatoo is Managing Editor, Content, at the Post.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
Copyright (c) 2023. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
