The Widening Gulf
The HK$3,000 would better be spent on sponsoring poor families to subscribe to i-Cable or Now TV for six months, through which they could watch National Geographic or the Discovery Channel, or Fox News if they want to polish their English by listening to Donald Trump or Sarah Palin.
Another HK$3,000 is going to be handed out by the SAR government via the controversial “Community Care Fund” to help children from poor families go on “study tours,” in the view that it is fast going out of fashion for Chinese schoolchildren to be restricted to merely reciting English irregular verbs like “go, went, gone” from their textbooks.
Cantonese English teachers in the classrooms of Sham Shui Po and Tuen Mun can use this fund to help students “widen their vision scope” as European schoolchildren do, when they go on field trips to Rome to test out their Latin, or visit foreign countries to gain a practical taste of knowledge.
The benefit has become a matter of emergency, as children from rich families with parents who are solicitors, doctors or CEOs living above the heaven-and-hell borderline of Caine Road on Hong Kong Island have, according to a survey, already been sunbathing on Sentosa and Phuket at least half a dozen times, and have also grown bored with Tokyo Disneyland and learned basic skiing in Colorado after spending a few Christmases in Las Vegas before the age of seven. This yawning chasm must be dealt with before a social uprising breaks out. Rich children look forward to another summer school course in Harrow, London, this coming July while their parents are already busily working out their shopping plans for Harrods; meanwhile, schoolchildren in Tin Shui Wai find their parents worried about rice and cooking oil prices at the local Park’N’Shop.
But with HK$3,000, where can they go? As most poor children in Tin Shui Wai are from mainland Chinese immigrant families, this frugal budget is just enough to send them on a weekend study trip back as far as Shenzhen or Dongguang, where their families originally come from. There is hardly any cultural knowledge across the border like there would be in Florence or Paris, except for the fact that many new villas are built in replicas of the Roman style. Although a study tour to the Pearl River Delta could bring about knowledge of statistics and some sociology—if a diligent student is smart enough to examine the average prices of body massages, or analyze the social status of young women working at nightclubs and karaoke bars—it could equally make a 12-year-old schoolchild more thoughtful or, hopefully under the guidance of a Marxist teacher (if there are any in Hong Kong), even prematurely philosophical.
But this handout will make the community more divided than ever. The haves-children enjoy direct access to western civilization and come back with greater self-confidence, while their have-not peers act by the “beggars-can’t-be-choosers” principle and could end up going around in a circle after a study tour to the Pearl River Delta. The HK$3,000 would better be spent on sponsoring poor families to subscribe to i-Cable or Now TV for six months, through which they could watch National Geographic or the Discovery Channel, or Fox News if they want to polish their English by listening to Donald Trump or Sarah Palin.