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Letter from London|Frank Wilson

蘋果日報 2020/10/24 10:53


Siu Wing
Having lived in Hong Kong for over twenty years there’s much that I miss about the city and its people, having now returned to London for some years. There is, of course, the industriousness, the entrepreneurship, the positivity and the food -- the things everyone quotes when Hong Kong is mentioned.
Take Siu Wing for example. A skinny 14-year-old, wearing round-lensed spectacles, he was a pupil of mine, during my first months as a teacher in Hong Kong. He was part of a class of 40 very well-behaved boys who mercilessly made fun of me in Cantonese without me understanding a single word. For some months, until severely reprimanded by a passing Chinese colleague, they greeted me every morning with a deferential “Jo saan, lo su”. Unfortunately, that phrase means “Good morning Rat”, when they should have recited “Jo saanlo si”, meaning “Good morning Sir or Teacher”.
Back to Siu Wing. I remember him out of the class of forty for several reasons. First, he wrote what appeared to me to be very strange essay. The predictable homework topic was (what an unimaginative teacher!) “My Journey to School”. Siu Wing wrote two A4 sides entirely about his bus trip,culminating in the climactic success of the day -- being able to secure a seat by an open bus window for the journey home.
It was well written. Punctuation and spelling accurate. Use of tenses adequate. Vocabulary relevant. But I felt it was too limited and unimaginative. After all, we had discussed manypossible themes in class. The sights and sounds of the city. Mental preparation for school. The people we encountered. But no, Siu Wing stuck rigidly to his theme. How to queue most effectively, push in if necessary, and have the luck, to secure an upstairs seat – by an open window in a KMB bus. So, I gave him a modest rather than a top grade.
Not to be daunted by his new, rather strange long-haired foreign teacher, Siu Wing politely questioned me. When I explained my rationale he patiently and coherently explained that my viewpoint was flawed because of my lack of familiarity with life in Hong Kong. I couldn’t understand that living conditions for him and most others were very crowded, noisy and challenging. That you had to fight to get onto the bus every day, let alone get a seat or window seat. And if you did manage to win a window seat you could enjoy enough breeze to counter the suffocating heat and humidity generated by the clapped out, old unairconditioned KMB vehicle.
As a newcomer to Hong Kong, he politely pointed out, I couldn’t be expected to appreciate this. He then went on to query my marking of his use of the future perfect continuous tense in his essay. You know the one -- “Auntie Ma will have been going to the same wet market for 80 years next month”. This was always the most impossible tense to explain to a 14-year-old Cantonese speaker, for whom tenses in a pure sense don’t exist. Although I could use this tense faultlessly in speech, I hardly understood the grammatical logic behind it. Anyway, I gave my eloquent pupil a face-saving notch of a grade higher, while steadfastly holding my ground on the future perfect continuous, without really understanding my own explanation.
But as well as in this classroom conversation Siu Wing was to cross my path again shortly after. I had valiantly volunteered to play for the staff football team against the boys. This was playground football, played in confined space with a small plastic ball. It was very competitive, fast paced and furious. As I played football regularly though, I managed to show off a few skills to the passionate crowd of spectators. Unfortunately, disaster struck when I scored an own goal, which resulted in hilarious jubilation from the crowd.
Matters deteriorated later when, on lunging for the ball, I heard a loud ripping sound. Universal spectator hilarity. I had barely time to know what had passed before Siu Wing rushed onto the field, ignoring all the rules of the game, to tell me quietly: “Sir, your shorts have broken.” Yes, my shorts had been a little tight, and I was grateful for Siu Wing’s intervention before my embarrassment and public exposure had escalated any further. I was handed a new pair. More crowd ecstasy and whistles as I hurriedly changed on the spot.
Almost twenty years later, after several jobs outside of teaching, I waited expectantly in my office for a lawyer. He was appointed by a company interested in buying my small operation, which I wanted to wind up (profitably if possible) before returning to the UK.
In walked Siu Wing. Tall, suave and already a partner in his practice, he was naturally unrecognisable to me. With a broad smile he asked me whether I had been a teacher years before, citing his school. On confirming the basis of our former relationship, I asked him if my English teaching had been useful. Future perfect continuous for example? “Oh, I don’t remember much about that, but I do remember your long hair and you were such fun, and we had such fun at your expense. The nicknames! And we all remember the time your shorts split playing football….” The moral of this story is not about my failed legacy, nor really about traditional Hong Kong virtues that Siu Wing certainly represented, but about Hong Kongers' lack of deference and sense of humour he symbolised. I wish I had learnt more Cantonese. All I can say is woe betide any authority aiming to subdue the irrepressible resilience of these people. They will suffer being the target of a special kind of iconoclastic, salacious and totally unruly sense of street humour. Siu Wing was an excellent lawyer by the way. Commanded perfect English.
Frank Wilson
The writer lived in Hong Kong for more than twenty years, arriving soon after the death of Mao and leaving after the handover of the territory to China. He experienced the seismic transformation of Hong Kong on its journey from plastic flowers and T-shirts to global front runner in trade and high finance.
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