Michael Barbaro

And earlier this month, after five years of waiting behind bars, Jimmy Lai was summoned for his sentencing hearing.

And when he arrived at the courthouse, what became clear is that the movement he once helped lead had now become a shell of itself.

A small group of pro-democracy demonstrators had gathered outside, their faces hidden by scarves and masks for fear of being identified.

They, like Lai himself, were waiting to learn his sentence.

20 years?

Jimmy Lai's son, Sebastian, was also waiting.

He spent years trying to free his father and learned the news of his sentence from thousands of miles away in Paris.

Wow.

You know that number very well.

Today, we speak with Sebastian Lai about his father's sentence, what it means for the pro-democracy movement, and where Hong Kong goes from here.

It's Friday, February 27th.

So five years ago, we, Sebastian, made an episode about your father around the time when he was first arrested.

And so many of the details from that episode stick out to me.

He was born in mainland China and grew up in poverty during the communist takeover there.

There was widespread famine at that time.

And he recollected the story of

Working on the trains.

Carrying the bags of rich people who were going to Hong Kong back and forth.

And how one man gave him a piece of chocolate.

that was so extraordinary in his memory, because this was a sweetness he had never known and a luxury he couldn't really even imagine, that it prompted him eventually to flee to Hong Kong.