Beggar on the Flyover

This afternoon, a friend and I were walking across the pedestrian flyover from the Central ferry pier to the Landmark this afternoon after church. We came across this beggar begging on the flyover. His left arm was missing -- either from an amputation or inborn. He looked like he was in his 20s. He was wearing only a singlet and was shivering visibly from the cold.

Part of my heart went out to him and wanted to give him some money -- money that I could definitely spare. The logical part of my heart told me that it was not possible that somebody that young could have been born in Hong Kong without the government taking care of him somehow, which meant that he was one of those unfortunates who are somehow "imported" from China, and left to beg on the street to make money for their gang leaders. Which is human trafficking, albeit in a more benign way.

I am ashamed to say that I walked past without giving him money. The logical part of my brain won out this time. Nobody else stopped to give him money, either, during the few minutes that I could see.

I could not help feeling guilty.

Race Day

This photo was taken during Race Day in Shatin. Horse Racing is a big thing in Hong Kong, with prize purses per race coming in at easily over a million HKD. One of our family friends happens to be a trustee of the Jockey Club, and he invited us to spend the afternoon at the races with his family.

It was an interesting afternoon spent in the luxurious private boxes above the grandstand, and listening to people talking about the races, and about their horses: bloodlines, races won and lost, etc etc. As somebody who has been an avid cat fancier in the past and who owns a could-have-been champion cat (he got first best kitten once, and then I decided to retire him because he clearly wasn't enjoying it), I can understand that enthusiasm -- the act of refining nature to get the "perfect" animal. It's a passion and a hobby, albeit a very expensive one!

I also enjoyed spending the day outside the city for once. Okay, the racecourse is artificial, but look at the green hill behind the course. Hong Kong is covered in vast swathes of these green areas. I just wish that the urban and rural areas were more evenly distributed -- methinks there would be a lot less stress living here if that were the case!

Academics

In several of his blog posts recently (1, 2, 3), StephenC lamented the declining proficiency of academic skills in Hong Kong students, especially in the languages. Actually, if one takes a sampling of local students and tests their language skills, I suspect (no hard stats to back it up) that you will find that the situation is very, very polarized. The good students have excellent English skills -- much better than I would have had at the same age myself. The bad ones... sometimes I wonder if they know what they're trying to express themselves!

Many people might attribute this to the growing prosperity gap in Hong Kong. And certainly this is very true: the rich get richer, and the poor have been getting poorer. Take into account the numerous tutorial schools, after-school activities, etc etc that are available to the children of those who can pay, and you can see why the rich get a leg-up on their academics.

However, there is another factor. Today, we hosted a Hong Kong-wide robot contest for primary and secondary school students. I went walking around the pit area where all the teams were doing their preparation, and I was astonished to see students from some of the teams with their homework and revision materials spread out on the table, trying to get in some test prep in between contest rounds. It was not a surprise to find out that those students were from the elite schools.

What were the other teams doing? Most of them were just hanging out, some were playing computer games, some were even playing card games. The more serious were actually trying to make some final modifications to their robots or programs. I did not see anybody reading any books, either Chinese or English.

Is it a surprise, then, that students from the elite schools keep on sweeping all the best places, all the prizes? Then the question is: who's to blame?

The world is not fair (enough)

The New York Times had an interesting article today about how children in a rural Wisconsin community commute to school. This community is on an island that doesn't have a bridge to the mainland, where the school is. The water around the island is frozen for part of the year. When it is not frozen, the children commute by ferry; when it is frozen and solid enough, the children commute by school bus across an ice road. However, the problem happens when the ice is only partially frozen -- too much ice for a ferry, but not enough for a boat.

The ingenious device that they came up with is called a windsled, and is essentially a hovercraft, redesigned to float across partially-frozen ice. It runs at about 19 miles an hour, and has interior heating and seats about 20 (Slide show here). It is a marvel of engineering -- in order to stay light enough to float on top of the ice and not break it to pieces, it uses some sort of forward-backward motion to disperse its weight evenly across the base.

The cost of running this, per year, tops USD20k. The article also gave the cost of running the ferry that replaces it when the water is relatively more ice-free, USD30k. The number of children who are served: 20.

Not to begrudge those children their education, but it's clear that the world doesn't lack in resources. The lack is in equitable distribution of resources. Simply put, the world is not fair enough.

But that shouldn't be a surprise, I suppose.

Pets and Children

I have been going in and out of the vet's office these couple of days (just in case this raises alarms, everything seems to be okay so far). Aside from worrying about my cat, it has been fascinating to watch other people with their pets.

It seems that keeping pets has become much more popular in Hong Kong in recent years. People are more well off and can afford luxuries, I suppose. And from my understanding, many couples are forgoing having children, but, still needing something to love, are turning to cats and dogs instead. Certainly the amount of money spent on some of these animals (pet MRI, anyone?) exceeds what is spent on some human children!

While some people don't understand this (it's just an animal, after all!), I think that I kind of do understand this mentality. When my kitten was diagnosed with a heart defect, it did not make any sense for me, then a struggling grad student on a meager stipend, to opt for expensive ECGs and ultrasounds to pinpoint the source of the problem, and later, for expensive medications that the cat would be taking for the rest of his life. It doesn't make any sense. But somehow, we are programmed to do such things.

When I was in Gansu, we worked with children who were orphans. Sometimes, it was really true that both their parents had passed away. Other times, however, one parent (or both) had just simply disappeared, leaving their children behind with grandparents or relatives. I recently spoke with a friend who works with asylum seekers; many of them, in their flight to safety, have left behind children whom they have not heard anything about for years.

I do not believe that those parents are any less caring than we are. I cannot imagine the level of hardship that they must have gone through to push them to this point.

Globalization

It's been a whirlwind tour through 3 countries and 6 cities on the cruise, and I think the thing that has left the deepest impression for me on this cruise is the issue of globalization. The countries that we visited on the cruise were very different culturally from what I have been exposed to for most of my life. And yet, I was continually struck by how similar the shops were, the brands they had, even the fashions they were carrying. About the only concession that the shops were making to being in the Middle East were that the skirts carried in them tended to be long, but that was about it.

One of the most vivid illustrations of this growing globalization came to me while seated in a Starbucks in Abu Dhabi. Sitting across the aisle from us was this Arab man, dressed in full Arab headdress, wearing dark sunglasses, reading an English newspaper and sipping a latte. As if that wasn't enough of an illustration of how the world is intermingling and growing smaller, when we got up to leave, I found a coin on the couch that I had been sitting on. Expecting it to be either a HK coin that had somehow slipped out of my pocket, or an UAE coin that somebody else had dropped, I picked it up and was astonished to see... a 5p UK coin.

Now *that*'s globalization for you.

Unhappiness

Coming back from church today, CP chanced to mention to me an item of news that was both shocking and saddening. I checked the news channel when I got home and got some more details:

A lady in Hong Kong, in her late 30s, committed suicide this morning by jumping from a height. Before she killed herself, however, she allegedly first bound the hands and feet of her 12-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son, and then threw them from the apartment, killing them as well.

This scene is horrific, but I have to admit, we are probably shocked only because of how the lady killed her children. If she had burned charcoal or something like that and asphyxiated them instead, I think we would have just thought, "Oh, another one."

I remember seeing a commercial on the TV recently. I don't remember the entire commercial, but I do remember the tag line: "You have no right to determine whether other people will live." In the US, this might have been a pro-choice commercial. No, here in Hong Kong, it was a public service announcement, pleading with parents who feel that suicide is the only way out, not to kill their loved ones as well.

It's sad enough when people start thinking of suicide, and every time I see one of those PSAs from the Samaritans Society, telling people who feel trapped to call their hotline, I can't help thinking that this must be a failure of society. Now have we progressed to the point of having to tell people, "Okay, go kill yourself, but at least, please don't..."

What does it mean when society has reached this point? And how much lower can we go?

Isolationist Tribes

The BBC news had a video showing some footage of a nomadic tribe in the Amazon jungle who haven't been seen for 30 years. The video was shot by a team of researchers who were out looking for illegal loggers. They came across a primitive village of about 5 huts and 21 people, and they swooped in to take a closer look. The inhabitants were identified later by anthropologists who recognized the style of huts from photos taken in the 70s. The people from this tribe resist all outside contact, which is why nothing has been heard or seen of them since then.

Amazing as it may seem, there are indigenous tribes living in remote areas of the world, and who fiercely resist all contact from the outside world. The Sentinelese of the Andaman Islands, in the Indian Ocean, are among them. Their instinct to isolate themselves is so strong that after the 2006 tsunami -- which presumably caused destruction to their land and villages as well -- even then, they shot arrows at an army helicopter which was trying to investigate to see how much damage and casualties the tribes had sustained.

Reading articles like this make me wonder: how do the people in those tribes perceive us, who are supposedly more "modern" and "civilized" than they are? I would imagine that they do know about the outside world, and they certainly have seen the helicopters and planes that fly overhead, or the ships on the horizon. I doubt that they are so ignorant as to believe that these are gods. However, even knowing that there is a whole other world out there, they choose to ignore it and continue to live according to the way that their ancestors had lived for centuries.

Why is this, I wonder? Do they just simply lack the imagination and sense of adventure or curiosity? Or do they know something that we don't?

Sabbath Year... what a pain. How do we get around it?

This BBC News article talks about an interesting dilemma for Israeli Jews this year. This is the Sabbath year, in which the land is supposed to lie fallow to give the earth a rest. I see it as an amazing test of faith -- you trust the Lord for His providence during that year -- as well as good environmental practice.

However, people have managed to find ways around the Sabbath year, as expected. During this year, many farmers sign their land over to rabbis, who then proceed to "sell" the land at really cheap prices to non-Jews. This apparently allows the farmers to still grow crops on the land, and observe the Sabbath year. (How the non-Jews come into this and lets this work out, I don't understand. I just take the article at face value.)

Interesting what sort of loopholes people can come up with, when there's money to be made!

Technology for Real Life

Check out this heartwarming article from CNN.com today. It's about how technology can literally save the lives of people.

The background of the article is this: in the refugee camps in Chad, Darfurian refugees who reach the safety of these camps must still leave the camp and forage far and wide for firewood, thus incurring the risk of running into Janjaweed fighters and getting raped or killed or kidnapped.

An NGO heard about their plight and thought up this idea of using solar power to cook food, thus saving on the need for firewood. They made up a design for a cooker that is easily and cheaply constructed, and convinced an NGO who was doing actual groundwork in the camps to give the idea a trial. They have now successfully taught the women in two camps to use solar power to cook, and this project will likely be extended to a third camp in the future.

This is the sort of thing which I think really puts technology to good use. It is like D-Lab project at MIT, which seeks to develop cheap technologies to make life better for impoverished people. Examples are things like a plastic backpack, so that women in Africa can bring home water more comfortably and easily, or a bicycle-powered generator for electricity. The focus isn't on cutting-edge tech, but rather on workable tech -- things that could really change the lives of people, rather than simply making it better -- things that people really need, rather than things that people simply want but don't need.

I wish we could have a course or something like that here. Some sort of a project-based elective, maybe. Something that would *really* open the eyes of our students and give them more exposure, as well as truly benefiting others.

Are we too conservative?

This BBC article caught my eye. It talks about a school on a quiet little island off the coast of Scotland which decided to go all-digital. ICT (Internet and Computer Technology) was introduced into the curriculum at all levels and all subjects, and UMPCs and laptops were issued to all students and teachers.

This is a little like a project that we have been involved in here in Hong Kong, with one of the local schools. The school board and funders were very supportive, but the teachers and principals were much more conservative. And I regret to say that our team, when asked for our opinions, also tended to be more conservative, recommending a very gradual digitalization rather than the full-blown approach that has been taken in Scotland.

Now, reading these articles, I wonder: are we being too conservative and cautious? I know that we have to be good stewards of our resources and not be wasteful, but sometimes, I do wonder whether this "look-for-blame" and "accountable" culture in Hong Kong has changed us all into fraidy-cats, contented with incremental, baby steps, and afraid to dream big and think about the impossible?

It's a sobering thought.

College Rankings

There has been quite a lot of discussion around campus recently about college rankings, and now that our school has decided to get itself involved, there will be even more pressure to "play the game" and toe the line on research and publications.

Interestingly, the New York Times reported that a number of US liberal arts colleges have declined to be ranked. I wonder if this is just a small, quickly contained "rebellion" of a few, or the start of a larger trend? If it is the latter, then HK will be picking up on something just as people in the US are starting to find problems with it... which wouldn't surprise me.

Still proud to be Chinese?

StephenC asked in his blog post about whether people are truly more proud to be Chinese nowadays, or whether that's just a byproduct of the booming economy.

I think we all know that there's a good part of that economy that's built on some pretty sinister stuff, like fake (and unsafe) food and medical products, and gooodness knows what else.

Another scary part came to light today in the New York Times: forced child labor. Now this is a little different from other countries, like India, where children pretty much have to work alongside their parents and help out with family finances. Since children are a pretty scarce resource in China, I think most parents would try to ensure as good a future for their kids if they could. No, these are kidnapped children who are then put to work in harsh, dangerous jobs.

Now I know that there's an exploited class in any country or society, and even the US has its share of teen prostitutes who are runaways from home, and then tricked into the flesh trade by pimps who "befriend" them.

But somehow, this business of China's seems much more horrifying.

Retake, then tritake, then quadtake, then...

CNN.com reported this story of a man in India who has failed his 10th grade high school exams 39 times, but is hoping that the 40th time around will be a charm.

The man concerned is 73 years old, has had no formal education, and he claims that his not having passed these exams has hampered him throughout life, including his career prospects, and also his chances of getting a decent wife.

Would that our students had half the tenacity of this guy!

Girlfriend ban

CNN.com reported this news article about a Canadian man who's banned from being in a relationship for the next three years.

Basically, this guy stabbed his girlfriend when she tried to break up with him. Doctors say that he has "a dependent personality disorder" and "finds it hard to deal with rejection". The judge sentenced him to jail time served (150 days) and no girlfriend till 2010.

Interesting punishment. Some guys I know probably deserve that, too.

Stoning in Iraq

The following CNN video is pretty graphic. It depicts a young woman in Iraq being stoned to death for falling in love with a boy.




The amazing thing is that this was done in a very public scene. The film shows the young woman being dragged out from her home, into a public area where lots of men then take part in stoning her to death. Nobody ventures to help, but apparently lots of people are happy to film this on their cell phone cameras. The youtube film itself was filmed on one of these cameras and is therefore (thankfully!) very shaky and of very poor quality.

On the same day that I saw this video, one of our students came by my office to whine about how bad her life was, because of exams and projects. And how she was "almost dying" (in her words).

I didn't slap her or snap at her, but it took an effort.

Achievement... for what?

I read this article in the New York Times the other day titled For girls, it's be yourself, and be perfect, too, about a group of overachieving girls in the US. These girls were successful in everything -- in academics, in community service, in creativity -- literally everything. They got perfect scores in their SATs, and perfect GPAs.

And yet, a bunch of them did not make it into their first-choice colleges.

Reading this, I wonder what the world is going to be like for the next generation. Remembering my own portfolio when I went to college, I would seriously doubt if I could get into the same schools today, with the same achievements. I hear stories from friends with young children -- toddlers, even -- who are already going to after-school tutoring classes five, seven times a week. I see my friends and colleagues, who are already stressed out beyond belief from work. And then I see some of those people who are less successful and achieved, and are having difficulty making ends meet.

Is this what the coming world is going to be like? That if you aren't in first place, a superachiever, you can't survive? And if that's the case... many of my friends keep themselves going with a cocktail of vitamins and supplements. That's keeping them going now, but how much abuse can the body take before it collapses? And what does that mean for our children and their generation?

It's a sobering thought.

Inhumanity?

This NYTimes.com article sent shivers up my spine today. In case you don't have time to read it, here's the gist: a car with two children in the back seat, drove up to an American checkpoint in Iraq. The Americans let it through without a thorough check, I suppose because children don't quite fit the profile of insurgents or suicide bombers. The car went through the checkpoint, parked outside a school, and then the adults got out of the car and ran off, then detonated the bomb with the children still inside the car. The bomb killed the children and some other civilians and wounded a bunch of others.

Since part of my background can be described as hyper-liberal and anti-establishment, let me state here that I am aware that the US superbombs have killed tons more kids and maimed thousands others, so in the big picture, the insurgents are actually more merciful. I do understand and sympathize with that point of view. However, I can't help wondering: I assume that since the children were inside the car, the insurgents either knew them personally, or somehow tricked them into taking a ride. In any case, they must have had some interaction with the kids.

What drives people to the point where they could interact with another human being -- at close range, too! -- only to dehumanize them mentally to the point where they could simply be used as pawns to be killed?

No wonder why David said, "Let us fall into the hand of the LORD, for his mercy is great; but let me not fall into the hand of man." (2 Samuel 24:14, ESV)

Amen!

Do unto others...

There was an article in NYTimes.com today about refugees from the Sudan who have found refuge in Israel. Apparently, Israel, born out of the ashes of war and genocide, feels an obligation to take in refugees, for example the Vietnamese boat people; and also, I suppose that they would feel an affinity with the victims of genocide from Darfur.

What touched me the most was that many of the Sudanese refugees that have been taken in by Israel are Muslim. Given the historic animosity between Israel and its neighbors -- now that truly is commendable.

The article included a couple of stories from refugees that left me moist-eyed (okay, I am in an emotional mood today). Check it out, it's worth a read.

Married, Divorced, Single

At lunch today, one of my colleagues brought up this story about a female convict, who fell in love with a male convict, and after she was released, applied and was granted permission to go and marry him in prison. The male convict is serving a long-term sentence, and it will be years before he's even eligible for parole. So for a number of years, the woman will be married to somebody whom she can't see or touch, except on supervised prison visitations.

My colleagues were quite puzzled as to why any woman would choose to put herself into this situation. A few years ago, I would have felt the same way. However, surprisingly, I felt that I understood how the woman must have felt. Having a criminal record, she must have been thinking that her chances at marriage were slim. Faced with the possible alternative of a life as a single woman, she chose to at least be married, even if she had to be telling people that her husband was a criminal serving a prison sentence.

It reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend some time ago. This friend, who is by *any* standards a well-educated, logical person, told me that he/she "would rather have been married and divorced, rather than still a single". The reason being that divorced meant that one had made a mistake, while being single implied that one was weird.

The sad thing is that, even though I have very strong views against divorce and, compared with many of my peers, I feel less pressure to get married, I actually can empathize with that view!. How terrible it must be for some other people, I can only imagine.