T.C. usually spends his lunch break eating in one of the many restaurants near his office with his law-firm colleagues, chatting casually about the cases they’re working on. But lately, he’s been skipping lunch altogether to join hundreds of other office workers in protests in Hong Kong’s financial district, where midday, flash-mob style demonstrations have brought the business hub to a standstill every day this week. The lanky 22-year-old lawyer is hard at work overturning garbage cans onto a major road that skirts Central, as the financial quarter is called, when he stops to talk to TIME.