Hong Kong philanthropist Eric Hotung has Clinton chuckling while making his alma mater US$5m better off
LIKE other top educational institutions in the United States, Washington's Georgetown University is sometimes a dour and earnest place. The heavy business of racking up qualifications and building career-enhancing networks dominates. Purer thoughts of classical education struggle beneath towering ambitions.
Happily, Hong Kong tycoon and philanthropist Eric Hotung gave Georgetown's inmates something else to think about last week as he recounted his youthful hedonism on and off campus. In a most unusual speech to cap his donation of US$5 million (about HK$39 million) to the university's International Law Centre, Mr Hotung reflected on his own student days in Washington in the late 1940s. He told of long afternoons of skipping class and drinking beer by the quart beside the Potomac River, of spending all his book allowance on food, and of the pleasant surprise - not least to his Jesuit masters - when he graduated with a barely passing C-minus grade-point average.
'As some of you may know, I had not wanted to come at all,' said Mr Hotung, the eldest grandson of Jardine Matheson comprador Sir Robert Hotung, one of Hong Kong's richest and most powerful figures. His father continued the family tradition of philanthropy as well as maintaining the family fortune as a banker and vice-chairman of the Hong Kong Gold and Silver Exchange.
'I was quite happy in Shanghai, carrying on the way I had through most of my adolescence. I was academically unambitious and spent most of my Shanghai nights in pursuit of worldly pleasures. Under Japanese occupation, that meant violating the curfew, as I regularly did.
'It was a perilous pastime,' he said, his address laced with his customary wry, often self-deprecating humour.
'My father, apprehending the danger, adroitly arranged for me to be 'Shanghaied' to Washington . . . 'Your mother advises me that you have a mind,' he wrote me. 'My advice to you is to find it and fill it. There is nothing for you at home'.'