Long-time Hong Kong teacher helps deprived pupils overcome life's challenges

There was a time when triad gangsters used to congregate outside a school in Tuen Mun or loiter in the nearby shopping complex at lunchtime, looking for easy pickings from the schoolchildren, many of whom came from single-parent families or had behavioural problems.

Ko Cheung-chuen, who was "discipline master" and science teacher at Ho Ngai College for more than 20 years, would see them off.

"I just told them we didn't want them there and they should leave our students alone," he says. "That's a number of years ago now. Also in the evening when I was out having dinner with my wife I would go up to triads and tell them to go away, but my wife didn't like me doing that when I was off-duty."

Ko, 65, officially retired in December but still comes in as a supply teacher. He tried the retirement lifestyle for a couple of months, but he still prefers to mix with the students and act as a role model for them, something which, he says, they often lack in their own lives. Many of the children have only one parent or come from new immigrant families, which often have insufficient parental input.

"I think anyone wanting to become a teacher has to see it as a total vocation," says Ko. "You have to be a kind of parent to these children, so that they see you as someone to emulate."

Ko regularly keeps up with some of his alumni, including four young women who used to be into drugs and were so badly behaved if they were not playing truant that they would have been expelled if they had been at any other school in Tuen Mun, he says. "But what's the point in that? There would still have been the threat of drugs and they would have been vulnerable on the streets."

Instead he grins as he recounts the good news. One is getting married in December, another has recently become a mother, one is a social worker and the fourth is on a working holiday in Australia.