We called the open-air school the "mong school".
"Elections are where all the desires gravitate," Chan told me, back in the heyday of the Mong Kok occupation.
The Mong Kok area is notorious for organized gangs or triads that extort payments from the many small businesses there, or in some cases own the businesses.
The police said in a statement that protesters blocked five roads over Thursday night in the Mong Kok neighborhood and disobeyed police orders to disperse.
The anarchists were already avoiding the Mong Kok encampment after the hot-pot incident, and, with more trouble in the offing, they have returned to the work they were doing before the protests began.
They were lounging around the edge of an occupied road in the Mong Kok district, which was then a stronghold of the pro-democracy movement that had begun blocking off some of Hong Kong's main arteries in protest.
The anarchists usually hung out at the margins of the Mong Kok occupation, throwing laid-back parties or hosting performers; on one occasion, a band rapped protest songs in Cantonese.
The Mong Kok district was the scene of more confrontation on Saturday, evidence that after a week the conflict has slipped beyond the grip of leaders on either side.
All of Hong Kong's influences are there to be seen, with cricket sweaters sitting next to varsity jackets and silk ties with prints of tenement buildings in the Mong Kok and Yaumati districts.
The skirmishing opened in the Mong Kok neighborhood, a hive of shops, apartment blocks and hotels that is one of the world's mostly densely populated places, and quickly turned ugly.
Joshua Wong and Lester Shum, whose detention was reported by the Hong Kong Students Federation and the South China Morning Post, came after a night of clashes with police in the Mong Kok neighbourhood.
