You Major in What?

Autumn is a flowery season and flowers embrace the campus from the main entrance to the square. An accounting graduate bounced to my office for photo-taking and I congratulated her. She is now working in one of the Big Four. Good for her. After wishing her luck for the coming examination in Christmas I withdrew to the office and picked up again Katherine Brooks's You Majored in What? Mapping your Path from Chaos to Career (NY: Viking, 2009) by my side.

Brooks addresses the key challenges faced by many uni students. An English major does not necessarily translate into a job in the publishing sector. Linear-path thinking usually applies only to pre-occupational majors like accounting and medicine. Non-specific liberal arts majors like English or foreign languages are open to more possibilities.

As a commentator said Brooks's work "is truly a great guide for the soon-to-be-launched students" and "has provided liberal arts grads with exactly what they need to compete and succeed." A university career counsellor suggests the book "should be sent to all students with their letters of admission or given to every first-year student at the start of orientation." Unfortunately, the book is no available in our own library (I borrowed this book through interlibrary loan) and I hope the library and the career centre would make the book available soon.

Since I am teaching compulsory liberal arts courses, which are widely seen as a pointless chore, for non-liberal-arts students, some discussion in the book attracted my eyeballs. Brooks provide a common scenario for students: you required to take class you really don't want to take. She provides two tracks of thinking, i.e. negative and right-mind, a student might have.

THOUGHTS:

Negative thinking (NT): "I have to take this required class I'm going to hate."

Right-mind thinking (RT): "I have to take this required class. I don't think I'm going to like it, but because I want to do well I'm going to see what I can do to make it a good experience."

BELIEF:

NT: "I shouldn't have to take this class. I'll never need this information. This is ridiculous. It's a complete waste of time and a stupid requirement."

RT: "I can't control the class, but I can control my experience of it."

EXPECTATION:

NT: "This class will be boring and useless."

RT: "I'm going to see what I can learn from this class."

ATTITUDE:

NT: "There's no point in putting much effort into it. I'm just going to do the minimal amount of work to survive and suffer through the semester until it's over."
RT: "I'm going to make this a personal challenge. Because it's a required class, someone must think it's valuable. And the professor must think there's something valuable in what we're studying. I'm going to find out why. If nothing else, I'll have a great story for an interview about how I survived a difficult class."

BEHAVIOUR:

NT: "Cut class. Sit in the back row. Use the time to instant-message friends or play a game on your laptop. Do minimal work on assignments."

RT: "Attend class. Take good notes. Study for the tests. Keep looking for something interesting about the course - even if it's just the professor's bad wardrobe!"

PERFORMANCE:

NT: "Get a C or worse."

RT: "Get an A or the best possible grade in the situation."

WHAT YOU'VE LEARNED:

NT: "I'm helpless and at the mercy of ridiculous rules."

RT: "I'm in control. I can make the best of a bad situation. I can challenge myself." (p. 51-2)

Is it very hard not to come up with some choice adjectives to describe these classes: useless, boring, awful, wasteland, and so on?

My uni

It is the best of times. The 2010 congregation is drawing joyful and promising young graduates back to the campus with their gratified parents and excited friends to celebrate their once-in-a-lifetime ceremony with triumphing smiles. It is always heart-warming whilst passing by them and even when I turned to be an amateur photographer for a moment or two.

It is the worst of times. The heart-breaking news about our record high fresh graduate unemployment rates as high as nearly 8% among all eight universities in Hong Kong hit everyone from the President to students.

It is the age of wisdom. The university is, finally, able to situate its unique role as a research-based professional university endeavouring to transform students to young professionals by liberal teaching and learning. I hope it is the spring of hope.

It is the age of foolishness, however, if the executives are yet to identify the hurdles and overcome it with determination but try to fool the stakeholders in particular students with non-employability-related university rankings. Perhaps the winter of despair is not far.

The Curse of Knowledge

Knowledge makes us weak and vulnerable. And it curses us.

"This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has 'cursed' us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind."

"There are, in fact, only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge reliably. The first is not to learn anything. The second is to take your ideas and transform them."

How? Chip Health & Dan Heath have the answers to transform ideas to beat the Curse of Knowledge, and literally make ideas stick to make people listen, understand, remember, believe, care, and change.. In their Made to stick: why some ideas survive and others die (New York : Random House, 2007; or Chinese translation: 姚大鈞譯：《創意黏力學 : 簡單、意外、具體、可信、情緒、故事》（台北市：大塊文化，2007）), the Heaths present six principles of sticky ideas: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and Stories - SUCCESs.

It is an interesting and easy-to-follow book. Strongly recommended.

Autumn breeze and The Shadow of the Wind

Autumn breeze gently touches my face and carries me away.

The Spanish novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind (2004 [2001]) came to life, to my life in Edinburgh last summer. During my three-month stay, I finished only one and a half fictions. The Shadow of the Wind is the one. Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves (2010) is still unfinished on my bookshelf (one-third to go). I picked up writing and editing this blog recently and found my excerpts from The Shadow of the Wind. It is brilliant! It is a book connecting two generations of mysteries, romance, and friendship in Barcelona. It is also a book with lots of wisdom, some from the main character Daniel Sempere's confidant Fermín Romero de Torres.

"if you ever have a daughter, you'll begin, without realizing it, to divide men into two camps, those you expect are sleeping with her and those who don't." (Isaac Monfort, p. 70)

"Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it's like electricity: you don't have to know how it works to get a shock." (Fermín, p. 89)

"Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption and gossip. That's the intrinstic blueprint for our 'ethical behaviour'" (Fermín, p. 95)

"As Freud tell us, women want the opposite of what they think or say they want, which, when you consider it, is not so bad, because men, as is more than evident, respond, contrariwise, to the dictates of their genital and digestive organs." (Fermín, p. 134)

"man, going back to Freud - and excuse the metaphor - heats up like a lightbulb: red hot in the twinkling of an eye and cold again in a flash. The female, on the other hand - and this is pure science - heats up like an iron, slowly, over a low heat, like a tasty stew. But then, once she has heated up, there's no stopping her. Like the steel furnaces in Vizcaya." (Fermín, p. 134-5)

"the echo of my footsteps followed me through the corridors and galleries that led me to the cloister...sitting on one of the benches, her silhouette outlined against the fountain" (p. 177-8)

"One has to pay some price for being able to piss standing up." (Fermín, p. 194)

"Womandkind is an indecipherable maze. If you give her time to think, you're lost. Remember: warm heart, cold mind. The seducer's code." (Fermín, p. 195)

"Love is a lot like pork: there's loin steak and there's bologna. Each has its own place and function." (Fermín, p. 200)

"There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite." (Mr. Barcelo, p. 201)

"The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich. That is the poison with which capitalism blinds the [poor]" (Fermín, p. 203)

"Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you." (Daniel, p. 215)

"Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visit. You have to go for it yourself." (Fermín, p. 233)

"Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen." (Mr. Barcelo, p. 303)

"This city [Barcelona] is a sorceress...It gets under your skin and steals your soul without you knowing." (p. 496)

"I leafed through the pages, inhaling the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books." (p. 504)

Route 312

In order to escape from research and teaching, I usually immerse myself into the books interested me and out of my field unrelated to my research interest, yet sometimes in one way or the other useful for teaching. One of my favourites recently is Rob Gifford's China road: a journey into the future of a rising power (London: Bloomsbury, 2007).

Talking about reading, I used to insist on picking original English edition in particular for scholarly ones. But for leisure ones, I very often turn to Chinese translated edition when I surf the library catalogue by series and grab the books interested me most in a lot of five or six, or even more, through the interlibrary loan system because they are not normally available at my university library so I have to turn to other libraries.

While searching for particular series, I tend to turn (or limit) myself to the books translated and published in Taiwan. First, I prefer standard Chinese characters because I feel it natural and comfortable with standard characters rather than lifeless simplified characters, and perhaps simply because I, as a Hongkonger, was born and bred with it. Second, Taiwan's Chinese translated versions release earlier and more often are the only available Chinese versions.

For this Gifford's book, I first checked out the Chinese translated version (published two years later in 2009) and returned to the original English one for this post to quote some interesting excerpts. The Chinese version invented another title that is completely different but rather terrific to Chinese readers: Route 312 (in Chinese 312號公路, but in mainland China, it should be called 312號國道, which refers to National Highway instead of merely Highway), which virtually means next to nothing to English readers unfamiliar with China. Anyhow, I was deeply attracted by this juicy title and I guess if I know the English title first I would probably turn away as it is to me just among one of the many journalistic accounts of China, uninteresting and boring. Yet I find this one the opposite.

to be continued..

In defense of Confucianism or harmonization?

In defense of Confucianism as a lively and useful model of virtue in the post-financial-crisis modern world, the latest number of Journal of Medicine and Philosophy covers two indispensable articles contributing to Confucian ethnics in medical decision making. They are Xiaoyang Chen and Ruiping Fan's "The Family and Harmonious Medical Decision Making: Cherishing an Appropriate Confucian Moral Balance"(Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Vol. 35, No. 5, Oct 2010, pp. 573-586) and En-chang Li and Chun-feng Wen's "Should the Confucian Family-Determination Model Be Rejected? A Case Study" (Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Vol. 35, No. 5, Oct 2010, pp. 587-599).

Both articles curiously juxtapose and painstakingly polarize the modern Western bioethics and the classical Chinese Confucian bioethics by generalising the former as essentially individualist and autonomous and the latter family-and-harmonies-oriented.

Chen and Fan unfold their discussion by generalising and essentialising Chinese bioethics as "a family-based and harmony-oriented bioethics embedded in the Confucian way of life" "to defend the legitimacy of this Confucian Chinese model in contemporary Chinese health care and medical practice". With the sheer aim to showcase the Confucian values of family and harmony against the Western ones, Chen and Fan introduce the Chinese family-based and harmony-oriented model of medical decision making to English-readers and explain how it presumably differs from, however familiar or unfamiliar to western readers, the modern Western individual-based and autonomy-oriented model in health care practice. They endeavour to justify that being embedded in Confucian virtues the Chinese "have justifiable reasons to continue to apply" the Chinese way against the Western model.

The case in Li and Wens' article refers to the Li case that a young nine-month pregnant woman and her baby died as a result of the failure to receive a medically necessary c-section due to the hospital having failed to secure her family's consent for the c-section simply because her partner refused to sign the consent form despite having been offered a free-of-charge c-section.

"we recommended that relevant Chinese laws be further developed and specified and that, most importantly, Chinese physicians must cultivate the Confucian virtue of benevolence in their practice of taking care of patients in a virtuous way, along with patients' families."

By establishing the Confucian ethical model of medical decision making as a family-determination model and referring to the so to speak unbroken Confucian ethical tradition dating back from more than two thousand years ago, the authors defend the Confucian values in question and, most important, conceptualize and essentialise Confucian ethical tradition in a monopolar and self-orientalist way.

I was confused. Ain't we going back to Confucianism, or the underlying agenda of the Chinese society at large, harmonization?

a thought-provoking Monday

On the way to the office on the MTR on a melancholy Monday, my languid mind was sparkled by Willem H. Boshoff and Johan Fourie's scholarly article "The significance of the Cape trade route to economic activity in the Cape Colony: a medium-term business cycle analysis" (European Review of Economic History, Vol. 14, Issue 3, Aug 2010, pp. 469-503) in which I, being completely ignorant of the economic history of the Cape Colony, learned that bread-baking was one of the lucrative industries, the other being beer brewing, given the VOC's monopoly in early seventeenth century. Bread-baking could be a lucrative industry in a colonial context.

I then thought of one of the traditional scandals against the colonial settlers in early British Hong Kong related to a bakery appealing to Europeans in which bread was poisoned by the local Chinese. The case reflects the multifaceted aspects of social history of colonial Hong Kong in particularly the conflict between the colonizers and colonized. Inspired by Boshoff and Fourie's article, I began to drive beyond the traditional perspective to the economic and cultural history of the colonial settlers in Colonial Hong Kong and Asia at large and to look at the food production (e.g. farm and raw materials), importation (e.g. wheat and meat), and consumption (e.g. bakery and restaurant) among the Europeans in the Far East, such as Japan and China.

企業（家）的社會責任

香港恒隆地產公司董事長陳啟宗在今日（2010年10月21日）的《明報》的觀點版（A33版）上，發表〈企業家的社會責任〉的文章。碰巧我又在手上的《從貪婪到慈悲：啟動金字塔底層的商機》中，讀到自由經濟主義經濟學家，1976年諾貝爾獎經濟學得主費利民（Milton Friedman）四十年前（1970年）在《紐約時報雜誌》刊登的〈企業的社會責任〉文章。兩者對企業（家）的社會責任的觀點幾乎不謀而合。陳啟宗的立場，大抵上沿襲自費利民。費利民多年前撰寫文章，批評「香港錯了」；又適逢金融危機，自由經濟主義被大肆批評為貪婪的根源。陳氏也就難以在文中揭櫫費利民的大名，反擊社會大眾對企業／企業家有不切實際的期望。

假如說現在的香港有仇富／不公義／經濟特權的社會氛圍，費氏當時身處六、七十年代之間的美國，也不遑多讓。「在目前普遍對『資本主義』、『獲利』、『無靈魂的企業』等產生反感的氛圍下」，「企業家也要侃侃談論『自由企業制度下的社會責任』」。費氏開宗明義：「『企業』何來責任？只有人才有責任」，「要負責任的個人是企業家，也就是個人業主或企業主管。」

如果我們要求企業負上社會責任，捐獻慈善公益事業，「若企業主管把錢花在股東、顧客或員工不想要花錢的地方［他們不一定認同有需要共同承擔交稅以外的社會責任］，那麼，企業主管是在執行不同的『社會責任』，不是擔任股東、顧客或員工代理人。企業主管這麼做，實際上是一方面對股東、顧客或員工課稅，另一方面又自行決定如何花用這些稅收。」「我們之所以讓股東挑選企業主管，其合理與正當性就在於企業主管是照顧其委託人之利益的代理人；當企業主管為了社會目的而課稅及花用稅收時，這樣的合理與正當代就消失了。在這種情況下，企業主管名義上雖是私人企業的員工，但實際上已經變成公共部門的員工、公僕。」

「個人業主的情形則有些不同。若個人業主為了實踐他的『社會責任』而降低來自事業的報酬，他是在花自己的錢，不是花別人的錢［企業主管則是花別人的錢］。若他想把自己的錢花在這類目的上，那是他的權利，我看不出為何要反對他這麼做。」不過，「在過程中，他同樣可能把這麼做的成本加諸於員工和顧客身上」。

企業可以透過捐助對本身有利的慈善事業上，藉以建立形象、改善聲譽、吸引人才等。即使費氏這些行為有「偽善裝飾」之嫌，但他也「不能喚起公憤讉責他們，更何況，是大眾的意向與態度造成企業為了私利而以這種方式掩飾它們的行為。」（粗體外加）「有影響力與名望的企業家使用『社會責任』的幌子、假『社會責任』胡扯，這樣的舉止確實傷害了自由社會的基礎。」

更重要的是，「另一個目光短淺的例子是，企業家針對『社會責任』做出的言論。這些言論或許能使他們贏得短期聲名，但卻幫助強化目前已經太盛行的觀點：追求獲利是邪惡、缺德之事，必須以外力制止和控管。一旦這種觀點廣為採納，抑制市場的外力將不會是武斷的企業主管的社會良知（不論多麼成熟的社會良知），它將會是政府官僚體制的鐵拳」，「是企業家自殺衝動」。

費氏最後引用他的名著《資本主義與自由》：「企業唯一的社會責任是在遊戲規則範圍內使用其資源，從事提高獲利的活動，也就是說，從事公開且自由的競爭，不做虛偽或欺騙之事。」（粗體外加）

陳氏說：「企業的社會責任是什麼？第一就是賺錢。」他似乎把道理扭曲了。賺錢是其次，首先是納稅，假如企業是賺錢的話。賺錢與否根本與社會沒相干，也不是企業的責任。倒過來說，企業賺不到錢，也不能向社會討公道。換個角度，個人的社會責任是什麼，簡單來說，在奉公守法之外，只要賺到錢，就是納稅。奉公守法以外，加上還要「從事公開且自由的競爭，不做虛偽或欺騙之事（只要不犯法）」的話，或許很多人也做不到。那麼現在的企業又如何？公民社會是否還對個人／企業／企業家在社會責任上有什麼的期望？讓我再引用日前取自Michael Edwards的說話：It has always been civil society and government that have pressed businesses to do these things. (Small change: why business won't save the world (San Francisco : Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2010)).

Business and social change

From Donald Tsang's latest Policy Address,

"To encourage the business sector's participation in helping the poor, I have decided to set up a Community Care Fund, to which the Government and the business sector will each contribute $5 billion to support people in need in areas not covered by the Comprehensive Social Security Assistance Scheme."

$5 billion! Drawing alone from the above excerpts, the business sector seems to be gaining grounds for being generous to and caring for the community. Can the government together with the business sector bring about social change? It reminds me of not the so-to-speak anti-rich atmosphere but Michael Edwards's latest book on social change and business, in particular on the claim that business thinking can save the world is a convenient myth for the super-rich-and-powerful. (Small change: why business won't save the world (San Francisco : Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2010)).

The business-is-best philosophy has been prevalent and powerful in the society by applying the magic of the market to the challenges of social change. It provides a magic bullet that removes social inequality and "a route to doing good for others" while gaining good fame. Such ideas, Edwards contends, are "disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst"

I think it is worthy to quote the following excerpts from his preface:

"When business puts its own house in order in this this way [philanthropists' roles on social transformation], it can have an enormously positive impact by increasing the social and environmental value of the goods and services it produces, improving the quantity and quality of the jobs and incomes it creates, and acting as a good corporate citizen...That's a very important point: It has always been civil society and government that have pressed businesses to do these things." (p. x. emphasis mine)

To exercise their influence effectively, He adds, both government and civil society need to be strong and independent. Are we?

Lamenting well-educated life in HK

Living comfortably (or uncomfortably) in Hong Kong, one has to face certain cruel facts.

If a well-educated HKer fail to succeed in this gruelling metropolis, there is no way out. We all know the complex and domineering nitty-gritty of the financial city. You have to be very realistic about your dream, lifestyle and career. Unlike Londoners or New Yorkers, you are not expected to move out, say other cities in the north or inland. Let's face it. What would/could you do if you fail to succeed in HK? Is going somewhere else a realistic choice? Say the mainland China?

HK is packed with people, specially well-educated people. This is definitely a plus to any big cities. But if these people are restrained (or retarded) to live and work in this small market (city and market is two different concepts), competing mechanism would fail and the reward, i.e. salary and lifestyle, they deserve would be far lower than one would have ever expected.

As overpopulated as in HK, well-educated people live without dignity. Middle working-class people spend most of the time in their youth in the office and are compensated by sound reward while paying petty money on sucking rubbish food made out of poor quality from the north and very cheap labour every day without shame. Their tastes are not unlike any lower working-class people or from where they were born and bred. They take advantage of cheap immigrant labour and compete with lower working-class for twisted taste constructed by themselves by adding a sense of nostalgia.