MICHAEL DEGOLYER is director of the Hong Kong Transition Project and even if you think you've never heard of him, you probably have: he reckons he has given at least 1,600 interviews in the past decade to journalists, businessmen, government officials and schools. When I rang him and began to explain why I wanted to add to that tally (slightly hesitating to say that curiosity compelled me to put a face to a voice often heard on RTHK), he finished the sentence 'because I'm a talking head'. And he does not exaggerate: we talked for four enjoyable hours. He is fantastically articulate. Amid the flow of stimulating, well-honed sentences, even his pauses were pregnant with intellectual meaning; the crackle of his brain synapses firing was practically audible.
We met in his office at Baptist University, where he is attached to the Government and International Studies Department. For a project primarily concerned with observing people it is, perhaps, odd that this room is windowless. But as DeGolyer said, he is often in the outside world and when he is cocooned within, he is analysing data, marking students' work and devouring piles of books.
He is an omnivorous reader. Later we relocated to his house, halfway up a mountain in the astounding wilds of the Sha Tin pass, where he has a further 3,000 volumes on everything from feminism to murder mysteries to science fiction, of which he is a particular fan. When he married Deborah, 26 years ago (they have a teenage son, Jonathan), they didn't have a television for 14 years and only bought one when Star Trek: The Next Generation was broadcast. So is he a Trekkie? 'Oh yes. And definitely a Star Wars fan. Definitely.' (Curiously enough, several nagging days after this interview I finally worked out who DeGolyer reminded me of: Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.) As he moved past his books, he touched them with an affectionate possessiveness. Occasionally, he plucked one from the shelf, briefly handled it and replaced it, rather in the way you often see worshippers in Catholic churches touch the limbs of statues as a tangible affirmation of belief. He loves learning and, as academics often do, he constantly talks about the importance of education. But DeGolyer has a particular reason for his faith. It started with one publication which he handed me, saying, 'This is the book which changed my life.' DeGolyer's grandfather was one of three brothers. One of them went to Texas, became involved in oil, helped found Texas Instruments and has a library named after him. Another went to live in New York state and also became very wealthy. DeGolyer's grandfather went off to fight in the Philippines, returned to the US, married a 14-year-old, had 11 children and died poor in Florida. DeGolyer's grandmother was illiterate. His father left school at 10.
DeGolyer finished high school, a family first, and became a journeyman carpenter. (When he reached this part in the story, he lifted up his hands: they have a pale skein of scars embossed on them 'and you don't get those from wielding a pen'. One of the reasons he wanted me to see his home, he said, was to show me the work he'd carried out on it himself.) Then, in the early 1970s, someone gave his father a book - the life-changing book - about the Texan DeGolyers. 'I knew none of this, nothing about the other branches of the family and what they'd done.' In a crucial way, reading it seems to have transformed the way he saw himself and his life's possibilities. Much of what he told me about his early childhood suggested he was extremely bright - he was so fascinated by politics, for instance, that when he was 11 he endlessly tinkered (a very DeGolyer word) with the family's intermittent television set in order to watch the 1964 Democratic and Republican conventions - but it took the realisation that other DeGolyers had achieved success to trigger a radical urge to fulfil himself. In 1975, he became a university student, ravenous to learn everything. When he graduated summa cum laude, one of his professors said to him, 'Michael, you want to major in the universe.' He didn't get the universe (well, not yet) but he's certainly majoring in Hong Kong. He arrived here in September 1988 and, with Donald McMillen (who became the project's first director and now lives in Australia) and two other colleagues, he proposed a survey of the then-colony's politicisation, with particular reference to the working-class and to students, 'the canary birds in the mine'. The group asked Baptist University for initial funds of $120,000, and a hearing to consider that request was held on May 5, 1989. It so happened that the day before thousands of students had converged on Chater Garden in support of their peers in Tiananmen Square. The Transition Project got its funding. 'They effectively said to us, 'Hurry up, because we need to know what's happening now.' ' And what is happening now? DeGolyer has been much quoted in the international press recently for describing the Government's hair-raising figures about the possible arrival of 1.67 million mainlanders as 'the grossest misuse of statistics by any government'. One might say he vented his spleen, except that was removed when he was in his teens, so let's call it strong indignation. Didn't he cross the line between observing and commenting? 'If someone asks me, what else can you call it? As an academic what are you committed to except the facts? Being a politician almost requires that you lie, that's why I wouldn't go into politics. I've been mistaken, but I don't make a mistake and distort it and try to cover it up and lie. To me, it's appalling and disgusting to contemplate.' But what if no one listens (and one could note here that Chris Patten twice requested an interview with DeGolyer but no such invitation has come from Tung Chee-hwa)? 'That's not the point.' What is? 'I guess that in the long term the facts will out. If you keep hammering at them.' I liked this image - the exact point where the journeyman carpenter and academic collide, the essence of DeGolyer.
Later, he said, 'I always ask my students if they've ever taken a watch apart. I've yet to find one who has. You haven't lived if you haven't done that.' He held up his own watch. 'It's just a matter of tinkering. Finding out what works. It's the same as societies, they're very complex, intricate mechanisms. It's fascinating to study these complex, interactive dynamic systems.' And, maybe, depressing? 'It's hard to say that I'm a dispassionate observer. It's like being a physician, a physician who doesn't care is not a goddam good doctor. And you are looking at the health of a society.' So what's the current diagnosis? DeGolyer, who had spent the previous hour discussing the gradual erosion of the Rule of Law, replied: 'We've gone from a head cold, through sinusitis to, perhaps, walking pneumonia. So, yes, I'm worried.' fionnuala mchugh