An 11-year-old community activist was met with a punch to the face after asking an elderly man in a park to lower his music volume.
Joel Wong, founder of the Tin Shui Wai Concern Group, had received complaints from residents in the district about seniors dancing and playing loud music at Tin Sau Road Park. He went to the park on Sunday with another member of the group, hoping to find the man and ask him to turn his speaker down, he said in a live Facebook video that evening.
“[I] said politely to the ah bak,” Wong said, using a local colloquial term meaning an older man, “‘We’ve received complaints from residents that your music is too loud, can you lower it?'”
“Then, the ah bak yelled at me and attacked me for no reason,” Wong said, gesturing that he was punched in the mouth.
Video filmed by Wong during the confrontation shows the elderly man shouting, “I’ll kick you if you don’t leave!” and blocking the camera.
Wong, who was not majorly injured, went to the police station with other members of the concern group to report the incident. Authorities later arrested an 80-year-old man on a suspected charge of common assault.
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In a Facebook post Monday evening, the concern group clarified that Wong was not trying to tell the group off for dancing, but was merely requesting that they turn down their music.
Founded last summer, the Tin Shui Wai Concern Group is a youth-led organization serving the northern New Territories district. The group has about a dozen members, according to Stand News, all of them upper primary or lower secondary school-aged students with an average age of around 13.
Mirroring the work of district councilors, members of the group spend their after-school hours and weekends patroling the neighborhood and handling residents’ complaints, their work ranging from handing out face masks to pressuring shopping mall management to repair cracks in the floor.
