Friendship From a Distance

by Brian Hioe

I learned the other day that it’s been a year since he was jailed. A year, hmm? Much about the world has changed in that year—and much about myself—and all of that year, he was behind bars. I’ve called him a friend when I explained to my friends in Taiwan why I was so intent on campaigning for his release. The truth is I didn’t really know him at all. I met him for a total of five minutes on the streets during a protest a very long time ago. A mutual friend introduced us. He seemed to know me from the internet—or at least he acted like he did, out of politeness.

We’d had a lot of trouble finding that protest, wandering around for over an hour before we found it. It’s odd, since then I’ve gotten to know more than one person whom I met for the first time at that same protest. But that’s often the case in activism—you might realize that someone you’re working with quite closely with today took part in some action years ago, and you were both in the same place at the same time and just never met. It’s a small sphere of activity. Sometimes, I think to myself darkly that you could probably pack all the activists in the world into a football stadium and blow it up.

We added each other on social media after that action. But when I met another mutual acquaintance some months later, they explicitly said they didn’t want to add me on social media—to avoid monitoring, they said, even though they were happy enough to tell me how to reach them if needed. It was only a few weeks after that that he was arrested. And it’s been a year since then.

I later met his sister and his partner. To them also, I referred to him as “a friend,” though I was quick to acknowledge that we had met only briefly.

A different acquaintance died behind bars. I also didn’t know her, but I also referred to her as “a friend.”

I was having dinner, some years ago, with activists from still another country. They remarked on how people like us would eventually end up in a prison camp, sooner or later. I never forgot that.

Another friend, a former political prisoner, told me that not much had actually changed in the five years of his imprisonment. Even though Covid hit during his time in prison, it hadn’t changed the world as much as he’d thought it would.