My Take | What’s in a song? Maybe a subtle protest
When some 1,000 people at Hong Kong University spontaneously burst into a patriotic ditty, they might just have been hitting back at the localists
You are what you listen to. Ask someone about his or her favourite song and the answer is likely to say something about that person.
So it’s instructive that pro-democracy barrister Alan Leong Ka-kit says the most inspiring song for him is Frank Sinatra’s kitschy My Way. Personally, I am more partial to Sid Vicious’ version, but that’s just me. Leong’s fellow University of Hong Kong alumnus Albert Chau Wai-lap, however, prefers My Motherland.
The occasion was a lecture by Lung Yingtai, a former Taiwanese cultural minister and now visiting scholar at HKU. Intriguingly enough, no one offered to sing the Sinatra hit. But about 1,000 teachers and students at the lecture broke out in a spontaneous rendition of the entire patriotic song after Lung asked Chau, who is a vice president at Baptist University, to hum a few notes.
The unplanned display of nationalism led to some controversy, including a commentary from the People’s Daily and heated discussions on the internet.
Post-colonial Hong Kong is funny that way. It’s more politically acceptable to sing God Save the Queen and wave the Union Jack on the HKU campus than to sing the national anthem. This is despite the substantial presence of mainland students there, who are presumably much more patriotic than their local counterparts.