On 'Gran Duty' in Hong Kong

My expatriate daughter has lived on Hong Kong Island for the last 7½ years, but has recently returned with her two sets of twins, born 14 months apart, to live in the country of her birth. Her life will change radically after spending 17 years overseas.

My life will change radically too: since early 2007 I’ve made 16 separate trips to Hong Kong, spending a total of 70 weeks helping her through various life events.

Way back I made two other trips. The first was as a tourist in the early 1970s, when the old Kai Tak Airport provided a sensational arrival experience, rickshaws plied their trade and the Star Ferry was how one crossed Victoria Harbour. The Star Ferry continues, and I took this photo from its decks, but Kai Tak Airport is a distant memory. The construction of the new Hong Kong International Airport, its approach by road, the Airport Express train line and the bridges required is a massive credit to the planners, engineers and workforce of Hong Kong.

My second experience of Hong Kong was a business trip in the mid 1980s, when my purpose was to raise mega-millions in the interbank capital market. The Harbour Tunnel already was heavily congested and the night-time view from Victoria Peak across to Kowloon and its millions of lights cemented my understanding of Hong Kong’s insane population density. Since then, the population has doubled and Hong Kong is a vastly different place. The view is frequently obscured by today's heavy pollution (mostly blown across from China). There are now three cross-Harbour tunnels and so much land reclamation has taken place that locals joke you will soon be able to walk across Victoria Harbour.

Having collected memories galore, it seems like the right time to record a few brief impressions of the Hong Kong Island I’ve known since 2007.

Hong Kong is a startlingly beautiful place, scenery-wise, but is most famous as a uniquely high-rise city. My granddaughter tells me that her new home town of Sydney has 20 high-rise buildings, New York has 600 and Hong Kong has 1200. True, the city is very crowded along the water-lines but it’s surprisingly roomy along the green-clad hilltops where one must beware of snakes. This bus negotiating the narrow road towards Stanley travels through lots of snake territory.

Hong Kong has fantastic public transport and fantastic infrastructure. The taxi service in Hong Kong is also amazing, and cheap, but I don’t know how the drivers survive after paying for their fuel and running costs. Beware – some of the drivers are pretty dodgy (unsafe) and many of the ‘not for service’ taxis pulling up outside bars and restaurants are actually delivering drugs such as cocaine, ordered from suppliers by customers on their smart phones. For most trips, I much preferred the double-decker buses, whose drivers are excellent.

In such a high-rise environment, the mind boggles that owning a dog (or two or three or more, often quite large breeds) is a status symbol. My grandchildren have commented on the lack of dogs being 'walked' along the pavements of their new home patch in Sydney.

Hong Kong is exciting, energetic and vibrant, yet one feels physically ‘safe’. It’s a very busy, industrious place, operating as a full-service economy. My grandchildren have been startled to discover that in Australia, you put your own petrol in the car and pump up your own tyres.

Hong Kong also has a vibrant intellectual and cultural life. With four babies in the house it was a big ‘ask’ to sample it, but I did accompany my daughter to a few very well-attended meetings of the Royal Geographic Society.

Hong Kong has distinct seasons, with surprisingly cold winter weather at times, but summers are unpleasant, with temperatures around 35 degrees Celsius and humidity above 90%. The city frequently experiences heavy rainfall (categorised as Yellow, Red and torrential Black Rain events) and Typhoons, the most severe being categorised as T10. My daughter has experienced the latter, in which this tree just missed her bedroom window, but I never got past T8.

Hong Kong generally, but especially Hong Kong Island, is being inundated by rich Mainlanders who are crowding the expats out of all the good areas and good schools. Extremes of wealth and poverty are obvious as soon as you step off the typical tourist trail of night life and shopping.

The life of an expat family in Hong Kong appears seductively irresistible, until you realise that what appears to be an excessively generous expat salary will be quickly soaked up by exorbitant ‘expat prices’ for accommodation, education and health care, plus the lifestyle costs of frequent and luxurious patronage of bars and restaurants, long summer holidays and air travel. Electricity is expensive too.

Expat families on the Island generally live in air-conditioned high-rise apartments, as my daughter did for 5 years, but for her last few years she was lucky to live in a ground floor apartment fronting on to a private garden.

There are a number of public play areas for children, such as this equipment on the beachfront at Repulse Bay, and the ‘Pirate Ship’ at Stanley Plaza, but many activities outside home are conducted in high-rise venues. I remember small children kicking balls at Soccer Tots around an empty floor in a multi-storey building.

Expat family life revolves around schools, kids’ birthday parties, playdates, pricey clubs like the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, Aberdeen Marina Club, the Cricket Club and the American Club, and theme parks such as Ocean Park (on the Island) and Disneyland (miles away, near the airport).

There are some free public outdoor activities for children, such as at ‘Inspiration Lake’ near Disneyland (pictured) where the kids can go crazy on their bikes and scooters, and many walks, such as the circuit at ‘The Peak’ and the numerous, more adventurous, hiking trails.

All activities for expats in Hong Kong are facilitated by the presence of live-in domestic workers known as ‘helpers’ or ‘aunties’, usually long-suffering Philippinos, who do most of the hard household yakka, watch over the kids and take them places in taxis. In the picture, the lovely ladies in blue and green tops are mother and daughter, Mina and Janice, and both worked for my daughter for some years.

It’s almost impossible to operate as a family in Hong Kong without a helper or two - or three. Many activities for young children require that each participating child be accompanied by an adult. When my daughter lived in one building subject to frequent fire alarms, attended by the fire brigade, and she had four babies not yet walking properly, for a time she needed three helpers plus herself to help carry the children down the fire escape. I carried a baby down twenty floors on one occasion. Helpers deal with the washing and drying of clothes, a daily grind in small apartments in humid Hong Kong.

Supermarket shopping for expat supplies is another burden. Most expats avoid like the plague any foodstuffs grown in Mainland China, and pay premium prices for imported packaged and canned food, plus fresh fruit and vegetables air-freighted daily from Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand. My daughter has four children and each 2 litre carton of Australian milk cost her approximately $A10. Each supermarket stocks different items, and one has to go here, there and everywhere by car to different ‘suburbs’ to find what we would normally load into one trolley on a quick whip around our local supermarket in Australia. It’s an unhealthy place, pollution-wise, humidity-wise and germ-wise, but pharmacies with dispensing chemists as we know them in Australia don’t seem to exist either. My daughter obtained medicinal supplies for herself and her four children either on regular visits to the doctor or, out of hours, at hospital pharmacies.

Education is taken very seriously in Hong Kong. Australia should sit up and take note. We are being left behind in Asia’s belief in, hunger for, and race towards, high-grade education. I’m not sure what happens in the public system for Cantonese families, but the private education system sees children in Hong Kong generally starting pre-school around 18 months of age. They attend for a few hours a day on a few days per week, accompanied by an adult. As children get older, hours are built up progressively and escorts are relinquished. My four grandchildren (they're all in this school group of five and six year olds)  have always attended schools with bilingual classes in English and Mandarin and now the older twins, aged just eight, can follow much of the coverage on the Mandarin-speaking TV channels.

The school bus service, complete with ‘bus mother’ to manage behaviour, such as the lady shown, is astonishing. Early on, I wondered why some buses appeared to be empty, until I realised the children on board were so young that their heads were below the bus window sills.

My four grandchildren, then aged only 7 and 6, were on the school bus at 6.45am.  It took a logistical master plan to get them all dressed and breakfasted in time. In the first picture, the clock above the driver reads 6.54 and the journey was already well underway. The children were delivered home again around 4pm, making it a very long day for them.

The expat lifestyle everywhere is very ‘high-risk’ for marriages and family life, especially in Hong Kong, as my daughter unfortunately discovered. There’s no pressure to visit ‘the rels’ on the weekends and uphold family values. There’s no pressure to fix taps and mow lawns on the weekend – in rented high-rise apartments, someone else is the handyman and gardens are virtually non-existent. If present, gardens come equipped with a gardener. With a ‘helper’ in the house, there’s no pressure for men to rush home from work to lend their wives a hand with ‘dinner, bath and bed’ for the children. Hong Kong husbands (and some of their wives) have lots of ‘spare time’ and feel free to stray – as they do, in large numbers.

All in all, Hong Kong is a competitive place to be, a place of excesses, and a survival-of-the-emotionally-fittest kind of place. I’m glad I've had the opportunity to get to know this 'world city' so well, but I’m glad I don’t have to live there.

Hong Kong Book Fair, 2013

It was a very brave person who dared ask a question at the annual Hong Kong Book Fair last Friday night.

Sir David Tang proved to be a very confronting Chairman of the Open Forum session entitled How and What and Why do Writers Write?

There's nothing politically correct about Tang! Personal remarks about the appearance of anyone who dared raise their hand were de rigeur – ‘yes, you with that shock of hair’, or ‘that Indian-looking person over there – or are you Pakistani?’ And Tang made instant judgments on the quality of questions – ‘what a stupid question, not worth answering. Next?’ A distinctive accent prompted Tang to ask the final questioner of the evening whether he was an Australian, and an affirmative answer led to a Tang slur on all Australians.

For the first time, the panel included a female author (two, in fact – ‘Fear of Flying’ author Erica Jong and ‘Wild Swans’ author Jung Wang)) and one man, William Shawcross, official biographer of Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. When the issue of feminism in China was described as more akin to ‘wifeism’, our charming Chairman referred to both of his wives as ‘parasites’, a comment which generated a suppressed hiss from the large multinational audience.

I was thrilled to have the unexpected opportunity to attend this very professionally-mounted talk-fest, thanks to my daughter, who lives in Hong Kong. While we waited for the event to commence, we were treated to a series of Tang’s previously televised interviews with the three guest authors, providing excellent background information for the forum. The actual length of the session was refreshing too – well over two hours – overcoming the superficiality of the more usual one-hour sessions of most Writers’ Festivals.

The panelists commented that participating in this particular forum was certainly not boring, but I found the Chairman’s intellectual snobbery to be affected and boorish. I’m not keen, either, on people who think it’s funny to make fun of others but who lack the ability to laugh at themselves, as per Tang’s response to a question about his business affairs. Judge for yourself - the forum can be viewed on a webcast.

More Maths, Anyone?

Wake up, Australia, we’re being left behind in the education stakes.

My long-ago jobs as a high school maths teacher and country risk analyst in a major bank have sensitised me to the issues raised in yesterday’s report by the Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA). ACOLA says that Australia lacks a sense of national urgency around science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) performance, in contrast to some of our closest competitors. The ACOLA findings were taken up by Julie Hare’s article in today’s Australian newspaper – Make Kids Study Maths, Science – and by today's broadcast on the ABC's 'The World Today' - Academics call for urgent improvements to maths and science education.

It’s not just maths and science where we are falling short of our Asian neighbours and where we have a very long performance tail. In Hong Kong, my four young Anglo-Australian grandchildren (two sets of twins) have been receiving a very impressive education from the age of 18 months. Yes, 18 months. I've observed their classes during my many visits to Hong Kong. For sure, as small toddlers they joined a glorified playgroup, but it provided formal tuition, with weekly hours of attendance increasing as age milestones were reached.

It's taken for granted that children in Hong Kong should be able to write their own given name by the age of three years. Based solely on classroom experiences, with no extra tuition at home, here's my granddaughter's efforts with writing - a letter she sent me just before her fourth birthday.

Here's her younger, slightly-dyslexic brother's efforts with writing a sequence of numbers just before he turned five.

Right from the start, all their classes have been taught by two teachers, one speaking English and the other speaking Mandarin, and the older twins, just turned seven, can now read and write many characters and follow Mandarin-language children’s programmes on TV with ease.

So, 'go Gonski', and any & every other form of support for education. It's the key to our nation’s productivity and future prosperity.

Education has always been dear to my heart. I was once a high school mathematics teacher at South Dubbo and Barrenjoey High Schools in NSW and ever since I’ve maintained a strong interest, mostly voluntary, in community education. As a volunteer I helped establish the Cameragal Montessori School at North Sydney and ran the Scecgs Redlands Adult Education Centre at Cremorne; I was a long term volunteer with the Australian Institute of Export’s training programmes and then Executive Director of the College of International Business in Melbourne. In the mid 1990s I worked as a consultant to the Chancellor of Swinburne University of Technology and was a member of Swinburne's Board of TAFE. My community education focus resulted in several publications, including a story on Ockham's Razor (ABC) in 1991 and the book 'Brainboxes' in 1994.

It goes without saying that my five family history books continue that decades-long interest in community education. And in a writing genre full of boring 'output', I like to think (kid myself?) that my family histories are all the better for my early mathematical training in structure, reasoning and logic. That rigorous thinking style helps me to cull extraneous detail and pare down to the essential information and storyline needed by readers.

So, 'go maths', it's never wasted.