Holding children

Hong Kong, born of English imported opium and disputed territories, is now a place where more than 7 million people strive for their livelihood. Shopping malls and fast foods abound, among the various shopfronts offering wonderful foods and street eating houses, where small owners show their varieties of fish, chicken, noodles, beef brisket, and other wonderful dishes.

Many elderly women sweep streets with large fan like brooms. Many elderly women collect cardboard and stack them high on small steel trolleys, making off with them for whatever reason. There are many people of middle and elderly age who are dependent on walking sticks and frames. It is not a society that admires prams, children are worn on the chest, or as a backpack, preferably by a mother or a grandmother. There is hardly a temper tantrum. The children in the university courtyard scream and chatter, play and bustle around. Busy in their rules of the games. Outside the Toy'r'us store, within the vast canyon of Festival Walk, there was a two year living up to western standards for a two-year-old, stamping his feet and bottom lip curled over upper lip.

Hong Kong is an island of people striving to get ahead of the other. Although in doing so they do not see that it is the social niceness and the offers of pleasantries that help to make a society and a culture lifted. A philosopher said that it is the kindness and warmheartedness of all millions of people that outweighs the outrageous acts of human unkindness such as that wrought by a Pol Pot, or a Mao.

An elderly man, in his 60s, sits in the BU fiesta canteen most morning reading his texts on Chinese medicine. He is Dao, or Tou, which means seed. Over a cup of Hong Kong style milk tea he asked me yesterday, "Will you teach me technology?'. I will, but how do I explain that we are technology and that technology helps define us. I learn about his early life, in Kowloon before the university, life under an airport, as an unemployed 60 year old, and Mandarin, from our morning talks. He sits outside and is outside the university, Hong Kong Baptist University. I bet Dao's mother bundled Dao on her chest, and Dao kept his son on his chest too.

That's me above in the green, amid a family in Hong Kong from early last century. The exhibition at the Hong Kong Museum in Tsim Sha Tsui. very interesting and worth the hours.