For years, my wife, like many people, refused to eat at a cha chaan teng. I suspect it was because the food weren’t particularly attractive to them, the quality of the ingredients were not particularly high, the places were not particularly clean, etc..
But lately, we have been eating at some of them a lot, sometimes 2 or 3 times a week, for lunch. Why? It is because those are the “yellow” shops that support the protests. They provide water to the protesters, they post slogans in support of the protests, they donate funds and material, they sell cakes with the proceeds going to support the cause, …
My wife still does not particularly like the food. But she does find something she can eat. More importantly, she feels good eating there. She feels she is doing her part to keep them in business. She is expressing her dissatisfaction against the establishment by eating there. The food becomes less important in this light. The action of eating there itself provides its own satisfaction.
I have been a regular at cha chaan tengs since I was a kid. The clientele at some of the cha chaan tengs has certainly changed. There are customers there, like my wife, who have not been there before.
The political establishment may not realise it. But their intransigence has changed the behaviour of many of the people of Hong Kong. By suppressing the cry for freedom in more and more draconian ways, they have succeeded in mobilising a large segment of Hong Kong who has not been mobilised before. Eating at cha chaan teng is only one of the multiple facets of the mobilization. More is going to come.
In the face of the virus, many in Hong Kong ask for the border to be closed, at least to people coming from other places. The same is happening elsewhere.At first, the city of Wuhan was locked down.Then it was other cities, and while countries.Gatherings are banned. Bars, restaurants and shops are closed. People who are suspected of carrying the virus are quarantined.Those who go out in violation of the quarantine become public enemies.People demand that quarantine breakers be arrested and prosecuted. All these, and many other actions normally considered draconian are normally opposed strenuously. In these difficult times, however, they are tolerated, supported and even demanded. Many people become angry if their government does not take such action.
When the virus pandemic is finally over - hopefully, it will eventually blow over - hopefully, these authoritarian measures will be rolled back. But, will they? In some places, they probably will be. But in some places, they may not.
In difficult times, people welcome, even demand, strong measures, centralised powers and strong leaders. In France, Napoleon came to power in the carnage of the French Revolution. In Russia, the Communists came to power in the chaos resulting from the Russian defeat in the First World War and the collapse of the Russian Empire. In Germany, the Nazis came to power in the German humiliation following the First World War. In China, the Communist came to power in the chaotic aftermath of the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and the Second World War.
Power, once centralized and entrenched, have a habit of perpetuating itself. Whoever gives up power voluntarily?
What is going to happen in Hong Kong, and other places, when the virus blows over? Will the government roll back all those draconian measures voluntarily? Some, probably. Will they try to retain some of the additional powers and measures? Particularly those that make it easier for the establishment to crush their opponents and dissenters? You can bet on it. What can we do to ensure that those powers are rolled back? Do we, the people, have the will to make it happen?
Ultimately, what kind of world do we want to see post virus pandemic? Are we willing to work towards the kind of world that we like?
We are all scared of the virus.So we work at home, if at all.We take e-Learning classes from home.We shop online.We eat at home.We entertain ourselves at home.
For those of us who have a job and/or stable income, we are the privileged. It is inconvenient. It is boring. It is annoying. But we will survive.
Not so the many small businesses, their owners and employees.
Many small restaurants have closed. Even big restaurants have closed. The big corporations with deep pockets will survive, and may even find a way to prosper. Even when the big restaurants and businesses close, the bosses will survive. It is their employees who may not.
Assuming that we want our favourite small businesses to survive, and assuming that we wish to see the working class survive, what can we do?
I suppose that the least we can do is to keep on giving them our business.
As far as practicable, as far as they take the proper precautions, we can go and eat our favourite foods. At least order take-out.
The food actually tastes better when we feel we are doing good when we eat.
What sort of restaurants and businesses do we wish to see survive the virus? We do have some influence, as little as it may be.
What do you do with service-learning while the virus is rampaging? The knee-jerk reaction is perhaps to stop until the pandemic is over. Afterall, much service-learning require face-to-face human contact, in order to facilitate pertinent assistance, and the most effective learning.
Upon more rigorous thinking, however, stopping altogether is not really feasible, at least for us. Service-Learning for our university are credit-bearing subjects. Students need to successfully complete SL subjects in order to progress and to graduate. On the other hand, poor people do not stop being poor, people who need help do not stop needing help, under the threat of the virus. So we just have to find alternate, innovative ways to provide the service, and to facilitate the students’ learning.
It is for these reasons that our team has been as busy as usual during the past 2 months. We have been working with the teachers and NGO partners, win the beginning to try to reschedule and delay there service projects, in the hope that the virus will pass relatively quickly, so that we can resume the service projects later in the term. When it looks increasingly unlikely that we can conduct the projects in the foreseeable future, we are switching our focus to look for creative alternatives.
It was also for this reason that we met with the teachers again this morning, online, of course. One thing I noticed immediately was that the teachers are similar to students in at least one aspect - many prefer not to show their faces. I have heard from many many teachers, from secondary school to post-graduate courses, that the whole class would hide their faces. The teachers were forced to teach to a blank screen. It is a rare class where all the students show their faces. But they do exist - we have at least tow of those classes ourselves.
We were very happy to find that there are many creative practices. Some provide services online. Some services consists of teaching - languages, skills, etc. So it is similar to e-learning. It takes a lot of effort to organise, but it is feasible.
Some are asking the students to develop material, equipment, products, etc., that can be delivered to the partner NGOs, to be used by the NGOs themselves. One class develops assistive devices, such as tailor-made wheelchairs, which obviously require a lot of interactions with the client. In this case, they switch to developing small devices to be used by the NGO in house visits. Another class develops computer games and applications to be used by partner special-schools with their handicapped students.
One class usually work directly with children at community centers. This is practically impossible now. They are switching to work with the parents, online, to understand the needs of the children, to develop solutions for use by the parents with their children.
Some classes are turning to more indirectly modes of service-learning, including research of some sort.
What about those that are offshore? That's what we will tackle tomorrow.
Will these solutions work as well as what the classes were doing earlier? Maybe not. But it is better than not doing anything at all. And who knows? Some of the solutions might surprise us.
I thought about that massive e-learning that so many teachers, from primary to secondary to university to graduate school, are forced to do this semester. Most of us would not have done it willingly. But so many of us have become so much better in conducting e-learning. We are finding so many new, creative ways to teach, which would not have happened if not because of the virus. Some good is coming out of this mass movement to e-learning. The same, hopefully, will happen to being forced to find alternative means to deliver service-learning.
These are the days of the year when even the sun cannot drive away the heavy fog. It was already 9:40 AM on a weekend. The sun was fairly high in the sky, I was sweating from the running, yet the heavy fog covering most of the Hong Kong Island had still not yet lifted.
Somewhere on the West Kowloon Promenade, a cat was curled up, cleaning itself in the sun.
In many pharmacies (real and look-alikes), plenty of face masks were available now, from all over the world, in many different grades, at widely-ranged prices.
Practically everyone on the street was wearing a mask.
Another new restaurant is opening. One has to wonder whether this is a good time to open a new restaurant. So many are struggling, while many have actually closed down, temporally or even permanently.
On the other hand, a famous dish of 3-eyed cha-siu with rice (三眼仔叉燒飯) is available from one of the restaurants popular among the young. It was reasonably priced, and quite tasty. Business is brisk.
Out on Canton Road, there were few tourists. Looking down the road to the South, the Central Plaza looked not too far behind the Cultural Center. In reality, it was quite a long way on the other side of the harbour.
Looks can be deceiving, sometimes. Just like so many other things in Hong Kong.
618 Shanghai Street is an interesting place. It is a row of old terraced houses that have been renovated to house shops and restaurants. As opposed to being completely torn down to build faceless, tasteless, glass and concrete towers.
In particular, there is Dignity Kitchen, a Singaporean-style restaurant run as a social enterprise. The atmosphere is casual and warm.
The food is good and reasonably priced.
The servers are courteous, efficient and helpful.
The clients are mostly young, with many families. Polite.
They train disabled and disadvantaged people, give them jobs and dignity. A young man offered to clean our table as soon as my wife and I sat down. Only after he was finished then I noticed that his right hand was crooked. That did not hamper his work.
Come and support them. Note that they do not open on Sunday.
There are some other interesting shops there as well. Come and discover.
The story of Service-Learning at PolyU in its present form can be traced back to 2010, when Professor Walter Yuen was installed as our Vice President of Academic Development. It was barely 2 years before we had to change our undergraduate programs from 3 year programs to 4 years. Prof. Yuen set up a Task Force to study the feasibility of incorporating service-learning (SL) as a core General Education subject for all undergraduate programs. The Task Force drafted a policy paper which Prof. Yuen tabled at the Senate at the end of 2010. The Senate, chaired by the then President Prof. Timothy Tong, approved the proposal after a lengthy and intense debate.
The policy governs the offering of SL subjects at the university. Professors teach these subjects. Before they can teach, the professors have to send the proposals to be approved by a sub-committee in charge of vetting these SL subject proposals. This sub-committee effectively evolved from the original Task Force. All SL subjects have to be administered by the Academic Registrar, just like all other academic subjects. When the students are properly taught and prepared, they can go to the service site to carry out the projects, e.g., installing solar panels to generate electricity for developing countries, … These projects have to be facilitated by local NGO partners. Before the students can travel, they also have to be vaccinated against infectious diseases and take other precautions, with the help from the University Health Service.
Many of the projects involve travelling, equipment, materials, and other expenses. The university finances a large part of that. The rest are financed by donations from alumni, individuals with a good heart, corporate civic responsibility programs, and government initiatives. Our Alumni Office and some senior academics help a lot in soliciting these funds. The Finance Office is involved in all aspects of the financing.
Throughout this whole process, the Service-Learning and Leadership Office (formerly the Office of Service-Learning) is instrumental. The SLLO seeks out the professors who might be interested, advices the professor on writing the proposals, supports them in their teaching, develops e-learning material to facilitate teaching cultivates relations with NGO partners, ventures into foreign countries to seek opportunities for projects, trains the professors and students in designing projects, assists the professors in teaching and supervising the students, assists in soliciting funding, works with the doctors at the UHS in preparing the students, works with the AR in administering the subjects, collects data on the implementation, researches on suitable pedagogies, builds alliances with foreign universities, and creates new programs to take SL forwards.
Just like all the best models in science and engineering, this is just an abstraction which tries to capture the salient features, while leaving out other details.
Four years ago, I retired from the Department of Computing. Today, I retire as the Head of the Service-Learning and Leadership Office and become a half-time Consultant to the Office.
My colleagues made me a cake with models of some of my favourite things. There is this man in a Standard Chartered Marathon T-shirt - I did run in the full marathon in Hong Kong quite a few times, and partially all over Hong Kong. I once ran in the Kigali marathon in Rwanda but had to quit after completing only half of the marathon because of exhaustion. There is this Great White Shark - I like fish, particularly sharks, and among sharks, the Great White and the Whale Shark. I once made a shark with a piece of discarded wood for the kids in Kampong Speu, Cambodia. Then there is this monkey. I believe my colleagues actually asked for a gorilla - the national treasure of Rwanda. Then there are these miniature mottos for the office.
There is this real Service-Learning T-shirt signed by the staff in the office. I shall remember these folks fondly.
I love particularly the box with a string of photos from the past 10 years. The little girl that our Cambodian partners picked up from the street who would not speak. The primary school-orphanage in Cambodia that we served in. The Rwanda team at the Center for Champions - primary school for the youths, some already in the teens, who missed the chance to attend school. The first solar panels that we built for Cambodia that we subsequently introduced to Rwanda in a much bigger scale. The then President of Chinese University that we invited to speak at our conference. The University Grants Committee Teaching Award. The retreats where we had so much fun. The Teaching Training Course. My 25-year Long Service Award Ceremony where my colleagues made such a splash. The weddings of some of my colleagues. The kids of the colleagues. The transition to Service-Learning and Leadership in our mandate. There were so many momentous, exciting, and memorable moments. No one could have predicted these when we took on the challenge of credit-bearing Service-Learning 10 years ago.
The last 10 years have indeed been the most fulfilling of my career. I had the privilege of working with a wonderfully passionate and talented team. But all good things come to an end. Starting from today, I will no longer be the head. But I hope to remain part of the team for some time yet.
