Nearly four years after his death, LGBTQ activist Edgar Ng was vindicated by Hong Kong’s top court Tuesday as judges ruled in his favour on housing and inheritance rights for same-sex couples.
The outcome is a major step forward for Hong Kong’s LGBTQ community, but one Ng will never see.
In 2020, aged 33, he died by suicide.
“(Ng) was a strong and cheerful person on the outside, but he experienced a lot of pain,” recalled his husband Henry Li in a 2023 interview with AFP.
“He relied on his good cheer and spirit of service… thinking that, by solving others’ problems, he would solve his own.”
After Ng’s death, Li took over as plaintiff even as he continued to be confronted with further examples of discrimination.
The morgue at first refused to let Li identify Ng’s body, saying Hong Kong did not recognise same-sex marriage.
“They were telling me that my husband was not my husband and that I was nobody,” Li said. “I couldn’t react. I froze.”
The government relented and changed the procedures after Li took legal action.
And on Tuesday, the government’s appeals in the housing and inheritance cases were unanimously dismissed.
“I have lived in pain, but I have never given up your desire to pursue equality, and I have continued to work hard on our case to defend the fact that we have always been a family,” Li wrote in a letter addressed to Ng after the latest victory.
“Without you by my side, the government’s… arguments in the cases seemed even more cruel.”
He added: “I hope I didn’t let you down.”
‘We didn’t feel safe’
The couple first met while working at the same accounting firm in Britain and married in London in 2017.
Ng insisted on having an additional ceremony in Hong Kong to show they had nothing to hide — an idea that took some convincing for Li.
Photos from the private event found their way onto social media, where some people reacted with vomit emojis, he said.
For a while the newlyweds lived in Hong Kong public housing, but found themselves targeted by anonymous complaints as those flats were, by law, reserved for heterosexual couples.
“There was a lot of pressure and we didn’t feel safe in our own home,” said Li.
That was the genesis of Ng’s first legal bid in 2019, to “ask the court to tackle this problem directly, instead of burying our heads in the sand”.
Ng took the government to court a second time, also in 2019, over inheritance rules that treated same-sex couples differently from opposite-sex ones.
The ‘storm’
Around that time, Ng was retraining to be a canoe coach because he loved spending time on the water, Li said.
But in December 2020, Ng, who had struggled with depression, took his own life.
Li compared it to observing a storm approaching a house in slow motion.
“Neither the house nor the people (inside) could run away and you watch the house slowly disintegrate. And then there is nothing left.”
In 2023, Li — now a lawyer — lived with his cats in the Hong Kong flat that he and Ng once furnished together, looking out over the glittering waters of Tolo Harbour.
The walls were adorned with reminders of their Catholic faith, a “winning” court document, as well as a photo that showed the couple on their wedding day.
Li said at the time that he hoped Hong Kong would one day protect same-sex couples’ rights in all stages of life: growing up, growing old, illness and death.
“Our case has finally come to an end… I hope you can still hear our affirmations of you,” he wrote in his letter to Ng on Tuesday.
“Our cats and I await the day when we can be reunited.”
