China is targeting my family and put a bounty on my head but I wont be bullied out of my fight for freedom

On a quiet night last week, I received an unnerving message: My parents in Hong Kong had been taken away by the national-security police for questioning.Hours later, they were released — only to be met by a crowd of journalists, summoned by the authorities to photograph and humiliate them.I sat thousands of miles away, feeling every mile like a weight on my chest.

There was nothing I could do to protect them — not from the knock on the door, not from the cameras, not from the authorities who have destroyed my home and made me a wanted fugitive for defending the freedom we once had.It was the second time they’d taken my mum in for questioning since the Hong Kong government placed a bounty on my head for my advocacy overseas.Anyone who turns me in to the authorities there can win a “prize” of a million Hong Kong dollars.

My face — along with those of 18 other Hongkongers abroad — is plastered across news bulletins around Hong Kong.And now my family — whom I’ve had to avoid since I left Hong Kong — was made to pay the price because I refuse to be silenced.I was born in 1999, two years after the United Kingdom handed Hong Kong over to China under the promise of “one country, two systems.” I grew up with the freedoms that were once guaranteed to my people.

When I was 7, I joined my first public assembly in exercising these rights, and by 2012, as the erosion of our liberties became more urgent, I began actively participating in the social movement to defend them.I didn’t know then it would one day mean exile.I didn’t know I’d watch my homeland disappear behind layers of silence — just as Beijing has erased pro-democracy voices in China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.In 2021, I became the first Hong Kong activist to secure political asylum in the United States, which has welcomed me and my calls for freedom in my homeland.

I still remember the moment I received the news: A quiet relief washed over me, followed immediately by g...