Students and teachers from secondary schools throughout Hong Kong waited nervously as famous author Pai Hsien-yung 'marked' their work in front of an audience at Lingnan University this week.
Professor Pai, 66, author of We Live In Taipei was invited to a series of writing workshops ending with a forum during which he judged a selection of short stories.
'The writing styles between Hong Kong and Taiwan are quite different. Hong Kong students tend to include dialects in Chinese writing and they have more problems with grammar and sentence structure,' Professor Pai said. 'It is probably because their native tongue is Cantonese, which is very different from written Chinese.'
He advised students to read more Chinese and foreign classic literature to learn different writing styles. But what made a good story, he said, depended on how genuine the author was in conveying his own emotions.
'The passion of writing, for me and most other writers, stems from the urge to express the unspoken pain of life through written words,' Professor Pai said. 'It is not the plot, but the genuine sympathy that touches your readers.'
Professor Pai attended La Salle College in Hong Kong, earning degrees in Taiwan and the US before teaching Chinese Language and Literature at the University of California. He has now retired. Lingnan conferred an honorary doctorate on Professor Pai on Thursday.
