I rarely post single videos as the subject of a blog post, although I probably should. This is an exception because of the truly unmeasurable feeling historical weight of its subject : capturing a deft incarnation of the actual form of the Iron Curtain, not only as it exists socioeconomically or in the shady world of statecraft and Cold War boundaries, but in the actual architecture of a train station designed to lead nowhere—a kind of physical funnel for wayward humans that in fact is the shape of hell.
It is impossible to describe the cost of this relatively sparse video on my mind, body, and analytic faculty. It wasn’t even until reediting in September 2026 that it dawned on me that what I had experienced and documented was in fact the Iron Curtain—one of the most imposing and least understood boundaries in history.
I leave it here for your consideration, especially granted the dire circumstances and my own non-partisanism. I was a refugee seeking asylum statuses on both sides, once all other options had been exhausted.
To call this boundary of chaotic transit, information, infrastructure, concrete, cityscape, light, sound, coersion, conflict, and hyperrealism bewildering and disorienting is beyond what most people could conjure to mind using mere words.
I had imagined that Hong Kong was a benign apeture of the mostly now-historical neoliberal West that was politely tolerated by the actual brokers of geopolitical influence there who held firm reigns for the Chinese mainland.
I was devastatingly mistaken. What I met there was ruthless, unabaiting, and nearly incomprehensibly entrenched colonialism treating the ports of entry and exit like a geopolitical bug zapper, made of neon lights and skyscraper districts.
Dizzying. That is the sensation I feel looking back at that one particularly onerous fragment of the global Iron Curtain.
Gongguang Hell Money:
Hong Kong’s Physical Iron Curtain.
This is a re-edit and re-upload of the original video posted to my old TikTok account around January 27, 2025.
The subject is my time in Hong Kong, from December 2024 to January 2025, where I was attempting (in vain) to seek asylum.
I don’t know if you can tell, but I’m afraid to film or directly investigate the most important features of this complex. That is for a very good reason. First, I am under strict behavior coersion that is not easy to detect or surmise on video because it is ambient and en masse.
As ugly as it is, a natural and even rational response to mass hostility and constraint is to simply freak out, which I do sometimes (to stay sane ironically).
But the result is what is desired—you are gaslit by authorities and circumstance into a narrow interpritation of circumstances where the ambient v*olence that is persecuting you (WHY AM I IN HONG KONG AGAIN?) is ignored and excused without any investigation (it is recognized and condined by the legal infrastructure, in part because of its geopolitical importance and historical secrecy).
So even in overt circumstances of surreal cognitive dissonance (a resturaunt that does not actually have a kitchen to cook the food on its menu, an airport full of flights on the board with no passengers in it, a train station with no path between the security check and the departure gate—and possibly no real ticketing system at all, or a ramp that disappears into the nothing of disorienting architecture)—I am terrified to actually get it on camera, because I will be punished for it.
I think the irony here is that I am probably being treated as a spy caught on the wrong side of the iron curtain, but as a form of whistleblower retaliation for having uncover a covert pogrom targeting me, and likely my entire subculture and philosophical tradition, in the United States. With my life in accute danger, I called it in to federal oversight authorities and filed a report regarding an Inspector General of the entire U.S. Intelligence Community (which oversees multiple agencies that alone would be terrifying to talk about).
The irony, of course, being that if you are a spy you don’t talk about it—and if you can talk about it, then possibly you are a spy. I was simply the victim of a state-scale program that I believe corrupted basic democratic guarantees, and for surviving, I was punished. I was silenced. I was forced out of every form of safety and dignity imaginable. And the only recourse is to firmly rationalize the hypocracy and incoherence of this entire program of persecution, while my life remains in grave danger.
