It’s been quite a while since I last blogged. I guess my only excuse is one I’ve tried before; life in Hong Kong is now so normal that it no longer seems extraordinary. Where I once couldn’t walk down a street without taking a picture, I now have become accustomed to quotidian life here. “Quotidian,” meaning every day, is my attempt to insert the copious amounts of new vocabulary that I have been learning in order to take the Graduate Record Examination in June. With three months to go, there is beginning to be a hint that life after Fulbright does exist, though whether that will be in Hong Kong, working as an English Teacher as a different Hong Kong University, attempting to find a job in DC, or trying my luck in Shanghai or Beijing remains to be seen.
Though Hong Kong life is my new norm, there are still some moments, and conversations that I have with students when I realize that I am very far from the United States.
As an example, I recently went to dinner with Susie, one of my best friends and an exchange student from Guangzhou China. She told me that she has an older sister- whereby I hesitantly questioned whether that was legal. Her response: a vehement “No!” Since Susie was an illegal second child, her parents first hid her by having her stay with her grandparents in a neighboring city, she only began living with her parents when she was age three. Throughout her childhood Susie also had to hide in a back bedroom whenever her parents had visitors, in order to evade detection. Her mother would slip her food when the guests weren’t paying attention.
Avoiding detection was especially important for Susie because her Mom worked as a government nurse; flouting the government’s one child policy would have resulted in her losing her job and pension. Thus throughout Susie’s childhood only her parent’s closest friends and neighbors knew of her existence. Susie attributes her current shyness to years of hiding and keeping silent, and being cared for by her older sister. While her parents are less fearful of the government learning about her existence now, since her mother is already retired, Susie attends college in a different city, in order to continue to protect her family.
In one of my recent English help desk sessions I had a very interesting conversation with a doctoral student at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. This man actually wanted to discuss with me how students in France learn English. His thesis examines how to encourage active language learning among Hong Kong youth, or language learning which occurs outside of the classroom. His question of how French students learn English, was thus an attempt to compare French teaching methods with those in Hong Kong. The problem, in both France and Hong Kong, is that while students are drilled endlessly in English grammar and pronunciation, they receive little real world conversation practice. Thus, a Hong Kong student may have studied English for ten years and not be able to answer this basic question: “What did you eat for breakfast today?”
The problem, or rather the difficult issue of foreign language learning, in Hong Kong as in France is ultimately one of national pride. While most French people understand English, in Paris if you speak to someone in English they will speak back to you in French, as this doctoral student wryly noted. How does a culture manage to effectively teach its children a second language, most usually English, without losing part of their own culture? And in truth English is not usually studied because people want to access to American culture or literature, but because they want access to American capital. This is especially apparent in Hong Kong, where business largely predominates and where even culture must be profitable through the creation of what the government terms “creative industries!”
