Alec Ash

 Hong Kong Mo Ming zig-zagged through the tear-gas. He ran across a central Hong Kong flyover in a low crouch he learned from the shoot-’em-up video game Counter-Strike. It was 1 October, China’s National Day, and the confrontations in Hong Kong were in their 17th week. I followed him as he picked a path through the thickening fog, slingshot at the ready for a counterstrike of his own against the police’s water cannon — their most formidable weapon, which sprays protesters with blue, irritant-laced water. It fired just short of our position, and we made it across to the far side, where other pro-democracy fighters had retreated.

Tenzin Wangmo, a 20-year-old Tibetan nun, woke up to clear skies on October 17th. At around noon, she gathered the things she needed and walked down the valley to the bridge below her nunnery. Once there, she found a suitable spot, perhaps thumbed the prayer beads strung around her neck one final time, and began to shout. "Let His Holiness the Dalai Lama return to Tibet!", she cried. "We want religious freedom!" Then she set herself on fire. She walked up and down for about eight minutes, a witness says, before collapsing. Ten days before, two teenage former monks set themselves alight in the same region, Aba county in ethnically Tibetan western China, near where I once taught English. A few days before that, it was a 17-year-old monk.