Eileen Chang and the University of Hong Kong

Unlike Sun Yat-sen, Eileen Chang was not a graduate of the University of Hong Kong, not even a holder of wartime degree like Rayson Huang and Patrick Yu. Chang was one of the many alumni at best who, like many others, briefly studied in HKU before 1942 and was unfortunately interrupted by the Japanese occupation.

Chang came to Hong Kong in 1939 and was admitted to HKU in August of the same year. What led her to HKU is well-known, but her university life and learning experiences are only limited to her own narratives in creative writing. Her two-year-and-a-half university life (seven terms in total) in Hong Kong, however solitary, is least known and like an intellectual game of fill-in-the-blank. I venture to fill in the blanks.

Back in the pre-war era, HKU was a posh British university, being blamed for its high fees and draining almost every fortune of prospective students coming from the North and South, and the West (e.g. Russia). Chang frequently mentioned, and intermittently re-emphasized by researchers, her outstanding academic result and being awarded Ho Fook Prize (Ho Fook being the younger brother of Eurasian tycoon Ho Tung), the only prize for year two Arts students on the base of annual examination at the end of the second year, £25 in value, approximately to $400 at the time; and Nemazee Donor Scholarship (founded in 1921 by a wealthy Persi merchant in HK, Mr. Nemazee, who was also a Life Member of the Court of the University).

In other words, Chang was a self-financed student in year one. How did Chang finance her first year fees and expenses? It seems that she was exempted from the Matriculation Examination set by HKU due to her admission to the University of London. Hence, she was not entitled to the eminent Sir Paul Chater Memorial Scholarship, which carried $800 a year and tenable for four years, to a student with the best matriculation examination result. How much she and her family should have paid for the various fees to the British univeristy has not drawn the curious eyes of scholars of literature and historians.

To be continued...

Big Brother is around

While the HK Customs and Excise Dept. has been using the Lineament Monitoring System to snoop (rather than monitor) our internet activities and recently, again, arrested a suspect of infringing copyright by using BT, Big Brother is in the air. We all live in a surveillance society. To quote from Gavin John Douglas Smith's column, the following description of an ordinary day in our life is not uncommon: 

"The mobile phone awakening you from your slumber transmits a signal identifying your current location; the roadside cameras monitor your speed, while also scanning your number plate against a database of suspicious vehicles. On reaching work, you swipe your ID card to gain access and log in to your computer which subtly records arrival time, the various websites you visit and emails you receive/send, while simultaneously counting the keystrokes you make during the course of a day. A lunchtime trip to acquire a bank loan involves the clerk checking and exchanging your personal information with a plethora of organisations to ensure that you are who you say you are and that your credit history is risk averse. As you leave, a photograph of you embracing an old friend is captured by the camera of a tourist, soon to appear on a publicly accessible website. On returning home from work, you are caught on the high street, gym, petrol station and then supermarket CCTV systems, your every purchase in the latter space being logged for marketing imperatives on your company-engineered "loyalty card". Even when you get into the commonly perceived "privacy" of your own home, each website you visit assigns you a unique code which helps monitor your web browsing activities."

陳君葆遇上梅蘭芳

不日預告：將寫一段陳君葆遇上梅蘭芳的文字。

Column bites about American education

1. Women's studies in the U.S.

Alice E. Ginsberg said: "The whoe idea of women's studies is to make visible what has been invisible and to make conscious what has been overlooked or silenced.

Ginsberg quoted the civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois: "If our work is not in some way threatening to the established order, we're on the wrong track."

2. American uni. students learning experiences

Promoting Engagement for All Students: The Imperative to Look Within—2008 Results, an annual report providing comparative data on student experiences at four-year institutions in the U.S., conducted by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) revealed a number of promising and disapointing findings (almost 380,000 students in 722 institutions), some of which are particularly worth further explanation and investigation.

a. Nearly two-thirds of first-year students and three-fourths of seniors at least sometimes discussed ideas from their readings or classes with faculty members outside of class. (what about the rest of them?)

b. One out of five first-year students and seniors reported that they frequently came to class without completing readings or assignments. (emphasis mine. Is it not quite serious?)

Do you cook?

For men, the higher education level, the more frequent cook.

I have been reading a book Eating out: social differentiation, consumption, and pleasure by Alan Warde and Lydia Martens (CUP, 2000). No ground-breaking or strikingly original at all. One thing I have found particuarly intereting and worth notice is that men with degrees are more likely to cook meals whilst those without any qualifications much less. Highly-educated men are more interested in cooking. (p. 99)

Why is that? Cooking is more than food and cook. It reveals tastes, leisure, lifestyle, distinction, and appreciation.

Almost all of my male friends and colleagues rarely cook or barely able to cook. They are good instant noodles cook though. Eating out in HK could be very very cheap. If you don't fancy a feast, local restaurants could feed you and your partner up for as much as $100. Food are from Mainland. They are damn cheap so long as you don't care much about its taste and texture.

Opportunity cost of cooking is comparatively high here. Sacrifice an hour or two to cook and clean up does not seems to be efficient. Or let the job done by a maid (do remember that they are also an expat, nothing essentially different with an expat banker). Why the hell bother to cook?

Do I cook? I am a weekend chef.

No amuse: abuse of teachers by parents

A bunch of my friends are school teachers, a few in primary and mostly in secondary. Over the past few years, three quitted all of them having received rigourous teacher training. They all said that return is never an option. Enough is enough, I learned from them.

Paper work and extra-curricular activities are part of teaching compoents but it is much more than that. Teaching pupils is both physically demanding and mentally challenging. It pushes ones' mental potential to the brink of collapse.

School kids are home princes and princesses. What's more to deal with nowadays is to serve their parents, Kings and Queens. A few months ago, I met an old friend of mine in our common umate's wedding reception, who teaches in a so-called band-1 secondary school. As a fashionable rule, I asked how band-1 pupils excelled and behaved. No surprise his answer was overwhelmingly negative.

The most telling part of the story was that a father of a pupil, who worked in a managerial level, behaved liked a gangster violently roaring at my friend over his son's irresponsble wrongdoing outside staff room.

This situation seems to be universal and is completely unacceptable. BBC reported today that "four in ten teachers have faced verbal or physical aggression from a pupil's parent or guardian". No wonder a British friend of mine vowed that he will never be a school teacher. 

Having been shocked by my friend's miserable episode, I immediately wondered whether teacher training includes handling verbal violence and potential physical threat, or even self-defence technique. It reminds me of the ubiquitous welcoming notice at airline and immigration counter in England: "verbal violence is NOT TOLERATED!"

The NRS Social Grade (Class) for GB

Britain is a nation riven by and obsessed with class. Developed by The National Readership Survey for Great Britain, the social grade are divided into six grades:

A: Upper Middle Class, Higher managerial, administrative or professional

B: Middle Class, Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional

C1: Lower Middle Class, Supervisory or clerical and junior managerial, administrative or professional

C2: Skilled Working Class, Skilled manual workers

D: Working Class, Semi and unskilled manual workers

E: Those at the lowest levels of subsistence, Casual or lowest grade workers, pensioners and others who depend on the state for their income

To further divide them into middle class and and working class, let alone upper class, ABC1 are the former and C2DE the latter.

舊文重刊：荃灣

五年多前寫下感懷昔日荃灣國貨公司的blog文

今天是月圓佳節。從前每逢中秋，第一時間想到和去做的是煲臘；燈籠嘛，不過是孩提時的玩意，或是在沙灘漫步時的配角。現在，金華火腿月餅已經成為了首席，就是在國貨公司專賣的雲腿月餅（有一年吃了三盒，也不管是否合乎衛生標準，反正眼不見為乾淨就是了）。
現在似乎也沒有所謂國貨公司了，反正所有百貨公司售賣的都不過是貨真價實、MADE IN CHINA的國貨。中國國貨公司結業標誌著國貨公司的式微，中聯由二變一，奄奄一息。還記得兒時經常光顧新中聯，手執一支十字牌牛奶，就在冰箱前飲個清光，連按樽錢也不用找贖了。這兩間國貨公司都座落在人傑地靈的荃灣，眼看國貨公司的末日，不禁憂心忡忡，是退守了嘛？還是另覓發展？
尚幸近日多次到中聯遊覽，看看十年如一日的陳設，個性自我的聯員，貨架上的醃製食品（我最愛的螺仔和蜆仔），好像是時光倒流。怎麼已經由南豐紗廠脫變成翠豐臺，連大帽山都被大財團攻陷的荃灣．．．還可以保留著一點點七、八十年代的味道？想不通。

裕華和華潤都換了新裝，八樓的樂園消失了。那一點未泯的童心都被埋沒了，就只有中聯還有點古蹟的感覺。三棟屋嘛，雖然在那裏還有點青澀回憶，但也不過是沒有生氣的博物館，遠不及中聯簡陋的陳列架，加上最疏離也最親切的老職員，實在是荃灣之寶。越扯越遠了．．．主題不得不改，免得文不對題之嘲。

沒有香港文學

沒有香港文學。

沒有是因為不能發生，不曾確立，也不會完成，更不會因文學「馳名」（註一）。

香港是一個城市/地區（territory），一個小城。一個人口超過芬蘭、挪威或瑞典的小城，比愛爾蘭（加上北愛爾蘭）還要多，不過這裏沒有James Joyce, 也沒有W. B. Yeats。

沒有東京文學，東京只有日本文學；沒有紐約文學，紐約只有美國文學；沒有倫敦文學，倫敦只有英國文學；沒有加爾各答文學，加爾各答只有印度文學。川端康成、Toni Morrison、Rudyard Kipling和রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর (Rabindranath Tagore)代表的是孕育於國家的文學。

說香港有香港文學就正如以為T. S. Eliot會自稱是倫敦詩人而不是英國詩人一樣可笑。說香港沒有文學就好像Parisians謔笑Londoners沒有情趣只顧金錢般乏善足陳。各說各話，互爭領土，就像兩條平行線永遠不會相交，難免淪落成自報政治文化立場的平台。（註二）

要怪香港沒有香港文學，只怪論者眼高手低，誤把我城作我國。

香港沒有香港文學，只有中國文學和英國文學。

註一：王德威指「香港從不以文學馳名」。倫敦是以文學馳名嗎？紐約又是嗎？這幾乎是一個不能引人發笑，卻又會難禁引用的虛話。

註二：也斯說「香港的故事？每個人都在說，說一個不同的故事，到頭來我們唯一可以肯定的，是那些不同的故事，不一定告訴我們關於香港的事，而是告訴我們那個說故事的人，告訴了我們他站在甚麼位置說話。」

數月前，為了準備「香港文學」中的城市景觀的講座，讀了點中英文學作品和文章，頓開茅塞。近讀王德威的〈香港－－一座城市的故事〉，頗有感興。（原文見氏著：《如何現代，怎樣文學？－－十九、二十世紀中文小說新論》（台北：麥田出版，1998），今據氏著：《如此繁華：王德威自選集》（香港：天地圖書有限公司，2005），頁2-30。）

Post-modern Cities in Global Perspective

Guided by Austin Kilroy's "What and how can urban sociology contribute to understanding the interaction of urban growth and public insecurtiy in developing-world cities?" (May 2007), which could be downloaded from MIT's opencourse, I hastened to examineUN-HABITAT's Global Reports on Human Settlements, in particular two issues: Cities in A Globalizing World in 2001 and The Challenge of Slums in 2003. What attracted me most was a six-tiered stratification of post-modern cities (from 2003: 22-23):

1. The luxury city and the controlling city, involving the groups for whom the city is a locus of power and profit, as well as consumption and relaxation.

2. The gentrified city and the city of advanced services, involving income-earning professionals and those involved in the ‘knowledge economy’.

3. The suburban city and the city of direct production of the better paid blue-collar and white-collar nonprofessional workers and their factories and offices.

4. The tenement city and the city of unskilled workers, including the immigrant enclaves, the lower paid wage workers and the ‘respectable poor’.

5. The abandoned city and the residual city, for the very poor and the permanently unemployed ‘underclass’ or ‘ghetto poor’, with income based on marginal or illegal activity, direct street-level exploitation, and denial of the public and private services of other parts of the city.

6. The informal city and the city of illegality, which comprises the slums of the developing megacities and where the informal sector has its base; where services are poor or non-existent; where residents are invisible to legal status systems; and where harassment by authorities is commonplace.

More explanation could be found in 2001: 32-38.

BTW, I have always been curious why the bloody hell environmentalists relentlessly accuse HK of being one of the top waste-producing / polluted cities in the world, and, thus, HKers are being environmental killers. I could never stand by them. First, HK is not an industrial city, not even light industry at best. Second, given vehicle being heavy waste and pollution source, HK's vehicle-ownership rate is far below developed countries/cities. Many more counter examples fill the list endless but most importantly, is it fair to compare a 100% urbanized and densely populated city/territory to a hugh country where rural areas are massive? That's non-sense! What about London? New York? Paris? Tokyo? We HKers waste far too less than them. HK may not be an ideal city, but definitely not a messy one.