Putonghua – a better way to learn?

March 20, 2012

As more and more schools teach Chinese in Putonghua, teachers, parents and students tell us whether they think it’s a better way to learn

Reporters: Lindy Wong and Ben Lam

It is recess time and the students bow and greet their teacher respectfully in the corridor. “Ni hao [hello],” the teacher says, and the students reply: “Laoshi zao [good morning teacher].” They are speaking in Putonghua but none of them are native Putonghua speakers. Scenes like this take place in hundreds of Hong Kong schools every day.

They are so-called Putonghua as Medium of Instruction, or PMI, schools that conduct Chinese lessons in Putonghua. Since 2001, Hong Kong has been pursuing a policy of “bi-literacy and trilingualism”, highlighting the equal importance of Cantonese, English and Putonghua in education, the workplace and public life. In response, more schools have since become PMI schools, hoping to enhance their students’ Putonghua proficiency.

According to Lam Kin-ping, associate director of the Centre for Research and Development of Putonghua Education, the numbers of PMI primary and secondary schools have increased three times and two times respectively since 2007.

Today, there are more than 350 PMI primary schools and 200 PMI secondary schools in Hong Kong. However, those figures need to be taken with a grain of salt as the extent to which Putonghua is used as a medium of instruction varies from school to school. While some schools may use Putonghua to teach Chinese to all classes in one form, some may use it in just one or two classes.

Teacher Ting, who preferred not to give his full name, teaches Chinese at a PMI secondary school in Tai Wai. He believes there are several reasons why PMI teaching is so popular today. “Hong Kong and Macau are the only regions where it is still Cantonese dominant. Shifting to PMI enhances emotional ties between people in Hong Kong and their motherland,” says Ting. “PMI schools meet the market demand. Many parents today want their children to speak Putonghua more fluently.”

A Wordy Debate

March 20, 2012

Purists fear simplified Chinese characters will replace traditional characters in Hong Kong

Reporters: Rene Lam, Natalie Cheng

Graduate student Wang Tiexin uses traditional Chinese characters in his reply to Varsity’s interview request through text message. He also uses traditional script in many of his posts on social networking sites, yet in person, his soft Mandarin accent hints he may be from Taiwan.

In fact, Wang, who is studying at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), is from Chengdu in Sichuan province and learned to write traditional Chinese by reading subtitles and lyrics from popular songs sung by Hong Kong and Taiwanese artists.

Although simplified Chinese is the official script in Wang’s homeland, he prefers traditional Chinese and believes that the traditional form “makes more sense”.

“The simplified form of ‘love’, is without ‘heart’,” says Wang enthusiastically while writing the Chinese character “ai” in the air with his finger. “In traditional Chinese, there is a ‘heart’ in the middle of the character and it means something.”

Wang believes traditional Chinese characters are not only structurally beautiful, but educational as well because of their intrinsic meaning. And since he regards learning traditional Chinese an “acculturation”, an integral part of Chinese culture, he is appalled that some of his Chinese friends cannot read traditional characters at all.

He was even more dismayed when he heard that Hong Kong had started using simplified Chinese characters for official notices. Wang believes different regions of China should have their own culture and retain features unique to their region. He fears the use of simplified characters is a sign that Hong Kong is becoming more like the mainland.

Reports in December last year about an official sign written in simplified Chinese in the New Territories sparked anger and fear in the Hong Kong community and beyond. Online groups and forums supporting the traditional Chinese writing system sprang up, igniting debate over the official language of Hong Kong.

Differing Fortunes Await Young Politicians Across Political Divide

March 20, 2012

Resources to nurture new politicians favour the pro-establishment camp

Reporter: Caleb Ho and Nicole Chan

Roy Kwong Chun-yu sits in a small cramped office that he shares with his two assistants on the ground floor of a residential block in a public housing estate in Yuen Long. There is nothing fancy about his surroundings, but Kwong is happy to be serving in his second term as a Democratic Party district councillor.

Kwong hit the headlines in 2007 as a 24-year-old who beat the incumbent from the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB) in the safe DAB seat of Pek Long. It was a David and Goliath story; the hip-hop dancing kid from the block versus the old-timer with the vast party machinery behind him.

Now as then, Kwong says he does not receive much assistance from his party. For instance, he writes and designs a local newspaper for his constituents which he then prints and delivers himself. But he insists the lack of resources should not be an obstacle.

“You can only sigh that you don’t have a rich father,” says Kwong. “But I believe many great people in the world were born in grass-roots families. I feel that the more grass-roots a place is, the more likely it is to produce a new leader.”

The pro-business Liberal Party once offered Kwong a higher salary to work for them but he turned it down.

“It’s easy to tell whether you are working for a belief or for money. A politician needs to have backbone. You can’t switch sides for money. I would rather strive harder, have a smaller office, be poorer than give up on my aspirations,” Kwong says.

For the boy who grew up on the estate he now serves, Kwong’s story has been a successful one so far.

But pursuing politics as a career remains an uncertain and risky prospect for young people. Compared with established democracies, elected career politicians is a relatively new phenomenon in Hong Kong.

Doulas in Demand

March 20, 2012

Dragon year baby boom leads to spike in demand for professional helpers for new mums

Reporter: Nectar Gan

As Hong Kong braces for a Dragon year baby boom, private hospitals reported in February that they were already fully booked until October.

The dragon is an auspicious creature in Chinese culture and the symbol of the emperor. So the Year of the Dragon is considered a lucky year to give birth, as those born in dragon years are believed to enjoy good fortune.

The boom in births has not just created a high demand for maternity beds, it has also led to expectant parents scrambling for the services of specialist post-partum helpers, or doulas.

Postnatal care has long been emphasised in Chinese families. In the first month after giving birth, new mothers are considered to require special care. That is where peiyue (literally month companions) or doulas come in. These were traditionally women in the family but increasingly, Hong Kong families are hiring professional doulas.

Today, it costs between $7,300 and $10,500 to hire a doula for a month, depending on the hours worked which can be up to a maximum of six days a week and eight hours a day.

Traditional doulas’ duties include basic postnatal care, feeding and bathing newborns, changing nappies, washing babies’ clothes, as well as preparing special meals, soups and tonics for the new mothers to help them recover.

Nowadays, doulas are also expected to provide emotional support, and more importantly, teach the mothers how to take care of their infants.

Rainbow Tang Choi-hung, social enterprise project coordinator of the Kwun Tong Methodist Social Service, introduced the first doulas training course in Hong Kong in 1999. Tang says she first thought of training doulas after the financial crisis of 1997 when many men lost their jobs and women who had been homemakers started to look for work. Tang noticed that as many families now lived as nuclear family units, young parents did not have as much support from their families as before. She thought they could benefit from the help of trained doulas.

Rocking On

March 20, 2012

Age no barrier to playing music

Reporter: Derek Li

Sitting against the backdrop of Central’s skyscrapers, in his dark business suit, crisp shirt and tie, 51-year-old Steve Bernstein looks every inch the banker that he is.

By day he moves funds but in the evenings, the tie comes off, he picks up his mandolin and has audiences moving to his music.

Currently, Bernstein performs acoustic sessions with the Joven Goce band three to four times a month. Prior to this, he had his own band playing improvisational rock with other finance professionals.

The media have come up with the term “dad bands” to describe groupings of amateur middle-aged and senior rockers living out the musical dreams of their youth.

Bernstein grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and has been a big music fan since he was young. He recalls one of his older brothers bringing music albums home and how much he enjoyed listening to them.

But merely listening to music was never satisfying enough for Bernstein. “My personality is really more do it than watch it,” he says.

He picked up a mandolin at the age of 16 and has been

playing it ever since. His musical influences include Bob Dylan and Grateful Dead. He started playing gigs more than a decade ago and at one point he quit finance to run a record label in New York.

Moving back into finance and to Hong Kong in 2000 did nothing to dampen his passion for music. Instead, he noted the music scene was a lot less vibrant here than in New York, and was motivated to form a band.

Bernstein says he found Hong Kong a small community with only a handful of live music venues where bands perform. “When you walk in, you will see either fans or musicians,” Bernstein says.

Read All About Me!

March 20, 2012

Lenders check out living books at the Human Library

Reporter: Viola Yeh

In January this year, more than a hundred people gathered at West Kowloon Waterfront Promenade to meet people they had never met before and listen to first-hand stories they could never have imagined. And, while they were listening, sitting or recliningon colourful mats, they also gazed out to sea and breathed in the scent of fresh grass.

Those doing the listening were “readers” and those telling the stories were human “books” at the fourth Human Library event to be held in Hong Kong.

The Human Library is a platform for communication rather than a physical collection housed in a particular space.

The concept originated in Denmark in 2000. Its purpose was to raise awareness of minorities and to mobilize people against violence. Slogans like “Don’t judge a book by its cover” were used to encourage readers to get away from stereotypes and look into people’s stories.

After the first Human Library in the Danish capital, Copenhagen, the concept spread around the world, including to the United States, Japan, and China.

The first Human Library in Hong Kong was held in August last year. It was co-organised by youth magazine Breakazine! and A Generation, a Christian organisation involved in youth and theatre work. The event was held at a youth camp near Sha Tin. Since then there have been other venues and other organisers.

The Human Library aims to break stereotypes by offering a platform for people to communicate directly with one another. Readers are free to ask questions in order to enhance their understanding of the books. Mutual respect is the key to creating in-depth dialogues.

The collection in Hong Kong now consists of 50 human books, but they can only be read when there is a library event. These living books come from all walks of life.
There are people from minority groups, people outside of the mainstream, including sex workers, transsexuals and former convicts. Many have been marginalized due to their occupation, race or beliefs.

Anyone over 15 can apply to borrow a book. To do so, you browse the catalogue of books on the official Human Library website, choose the ones you are interested in and register them. You will then be able to read them on the day of the event. Each reader gets 45-minutes at most to communicate with each living book.

Reader Phoebe Ng Yuk-ying, a 19-year-old university student, says she often used to question the way certain groups were portrayed on television programmes but had never looked into the issues seriously.

The first living book she read was a sex worker. Before chatting with her “book”, Ng had thought that sex workers were forced to take up their jobs. She was surprised to learn the living book was happy with her job and was willing to share her interesting work experiences.

“We usually judge others subjectively and imagine they view things in a certain a way, but in fact they may not,” says Ng. She thinks the Human Library has offered a channel for people to meet others they would not otherwise come into contact with.

The Animated Storyteller

March 20, 2012

John Chan Yu-fung creates tales to warm Hong Kong hearts

Reporter: Vivian Ng

A slim, bespectacled young man carefully arranges a display featuring soft toys and other products based on cartoon characters at the Design Gallery at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. What shoppers do not know is the man is actually an acclaimed animator and the creator of the Din-Dong character that the products are based on.

The attention to detail which he shows in arranging the products for a photo-shoot provide a clue to his training as an illustrator.

John Chan Yu-fung has won numerous local animation awards and is the first Chinese to win the grand prize in the TBS DigiCon6 Awards. But the 34-year-old prefers to call himself a “storyteller” rather than an animator.

Chan’s twin passions for storytelling and animation were planted in childhood when his parents took him to the cinema to watch an animated feature film, Laputa: Castle in the Sky.

The film, by prominent Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, tells the story of a boy who helps a girl with a flying gem from Laputa, a castle in the sky, to save the world.

Chan was hooked. “I realised that the scenes in a cartoon could also touch some of the audience members,” says Chan. “Then I started to think if I could do something similar in the future.”

After that, Chan’s enthusiasm for drawing blossomed. He excitedly recalls how he drew different cartoon characters in his primary school textbooks. This interest in drawing continued into his teenage years.

Chan learnt the basic skills of drawing in secondary school and continued to sketch but these skills did not help in his ambition to be a storyteller.

The turning point arrived when Chan’s secondary school art teacher told him a story about a colour-blind artist. The teacher inspired Chan by telling him how the artist used colours differently because of his disability, but created artworks with a strong personality.

The story gave Chan an insight into the process of creation. It helped him to think creatively and independently. “Those of us engaged in creation, we sometimes need to use things outside the normal confines, we have to use things other people haven’t thought of before,” Chan says.

After graduation, Chan worked as an illustrator at a company where he drew very detailed sketches. However, he soon left this job and, persuaded by a friend, he travelled to Australia in 1995.

Chan spent two years Down Under, taking drawing and language courses and travelling around the country. However, he learned most from his daily experience of life in Australia rather than the classes.

Chan found mixing with other international students an interesting experience. “You could see everyone had a distinct personality!” he says.

He particularly appreciated the humility the Japanese students showed towards learning. At the time, Chan had sometimes thought he was superior to others as a Hongkonger. He soon realised he was wrong.

“I discovered that if I continued with such an attitude, I would never learn anything,” says Chan. “But the Japanese could because they were humble enough to learn.”

One-man Crusade

March 20, 2012

Activist Pong Yat-ming takes on the developers and conglomerates

Reporter: Thee Lui

TEDxYouthHK2011_Edit — Pong talks about his action - “A Year without Patronising the Business of the Conglomerates” for TED.

A 38-year-old man with a shaved head walks onto the stage with a guitar and a bicycle. He opens his talk by strumming and singing lines from John Lennon’s Imagine,

“Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world.”

In December, the freelance teacher, veteran activist and now “local hero”, was invited to give a talk by Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED), the American non-profit group that organises talks by inspirational people around the world under the slogan “ideas worth spreading”.

The invitation was just one manifestation of the recognition Pong Yat-ming has received since he launched his civic action, “A Year without Patronising the Business of the Conglomerates.”

Pong began his campaign in October 2010, seeking to show it is possible to break the domination of Hong Kong’s developer conglomerates. Since then he has boycotted chain-stores and transport companies run by property developers and stopped using products and services owned or operated by big corporations.

Pong’s home is a unit in an industrial building in Fo Tan. A big curtain divides a large open space. On one side of the curtain, Pong has a compact living space that he shares with his two cats. On the other side there is a work and exhibition space Pong shares with a friend. The walls are lined with paintings and foreign handicrafts. His bicycle, which he rides to jobs and to visit the small shops and restaurants in his local community, is parked outside.

Pong’s independent personality was shaped early in his childhood. His parents divorced when Pong was young and the boy was sent to live with his grandparents. The young Pong learnt to make his own decisions and be responsible for his own life from an early age.

There were never any discussions about what kinds of extra-curricular activities he should join and he did not have to ask permission before going out. He remembers when he was in Primary Three, he informed his grandparents he was going camping just the day before he went. When it was time to go to secondary school, he applied for the schools he wanted on his own and without his parents’ input.

Pong sees positives in how he was raised. He says he was allowed to follow his heart, rather than his parents’ expectations. He believes every person’s life story is written through the individual decisions they make. “Otherwise, everyone would just look the same, our faces would be blurred. So I strongly think we should follow our own desires.”

In Pong’s case, the great passion has been for education. He began tutoring younger children when he was still a secondary student himself. In one case, a parent asked him to teach her child how to be a good person rather than any particular academic subject. So Pong took the child on local visits and to join community activities.

Since graduating in cinema and television studies at Hong Kong Baptist University, Pong has had a succession of freelance teaching jobs. He has taught classes in every district in Hong Kong in everything from painting to drama, to English and general education in schools, community centres and churches. He refuses to be tied down to a full-time job.

Back in the 1990s, Pong started helping new immigrants from the mainland. He has also worked with various non-profit organisations, such as Breakthrough, which mainly focuses on youth services, and joined local civic movements.

He has taken part in protests against the demolition of the Star Ferry Pier in Central and the campaign to save Choi Yuen Chuen, the village that was demolished to make way for the Hong Kong Express Rail Link to the mainland.

The Taste of Childhood

March 20, 2012

Reporters: Ian Cheng, Matthew Leung, Sabrina Poh

Cabs to Bags

March 20, 2012

Local company gives new lease of life to old taxi seats

Reporter: Matthew Leung

It is black, it feels like leather and it has a distinctive smell. You have seen it somewhere before, and more than once. It may have taken you a minute or so, but eventually the penny will drop. You will recognize the materials of these bags are sourced from local taxis.

Founded in 2010, Handsome Co. designs bags and accessories that are made of useable parts of discarded taxis such as vinyl seat covers and seat belts.

It all started when co-founder Billy Potts was walking around Tai Hang one day and noticed there were lots of garages fixing taxis, leaving behind many spare parts. He saw some upholsterers changing seat covers that still looked useable, so he bought two seats from an upholsterer and experimented with them.

Potts, a lawyer, teamed with his friend architect Joseph Ng Sheung-yi, and scavenged for suitable discarded taxi materials after work. They decided to do something for the environment and the community.