Children Outside Society

Last night I shared a taxi from Tung Chung – oh how it pains me to spell it that way when it’s pronounced DUNG Chung – with a boy and his domestic helper. I noticed him at the taxi stand calling for a taxi in beautiful, cut-glass British English, and quickly wormed my way into that taxi deal. (I paid $50 though – hello!)

We got chatting and he told me he was 11, spent four hours going to school and back every day, had been born in Hong Kong and, of course I have to say, didn’t speak a single word of Cantonese.

Where else can children be born somewhere and not know a word of the local language? Mainland China, that’s where; not speaking to your children in your own language is the latest craze there. If that language isn’t imperialist Mandarin, naturally.

Which, in fact, my taxi gentleman was also learning. As are tens or hundreds of thousands of other kids, expat and Chinese, in this town. Local language: Bad! A completely different language enforced by a communist dictatorship: Good! Power doesn’t come out of the barrel of a gun in China anymore, it comes out of the mouths of babes.

The boy had been learning Mandarin for five years. And I can’t be sure if he was particularly obtuse; he certainly seemed very bright, but I suspect this is symptomatic of language teaching in Hong Kong: After five years of training, according to him, he could say “ni hao” and count to ten, as well as some other words. But he couldn’t make up a sentence.

So that’s the way Hong Kong prepares children to live in a society. They have to learn fluently two sentences of the language of a country they may visit twice a year in some distant future and whose every inhabitant is studying English 24/7 with the purpose of actually learning it. But make them able to talk to a taxi driver or a taxi central, perhaps even go shopping in the market, in the place they live? No no no.

香港 (Heung Gong – Incense Harbour/Hong Kong)
國語 (Gok yu – Mandarin)
的士司機 (Dek si si gei – taxi driver)