Shaw Prize winners say Hong Kong system to 'succeed' does not feel right

Professor Jane Luu's eyes widen as she leans back in her chair and raises her hands in protest. "That's crazy! So they can't just know piano, they have to learn the drums too?"

The Vietnamese-American astrophysicist, the first woman to win a Shaw Prize, is shocked to learn about the education of Hong Kong students.

The tests, the idea that children must learn two musical instruments to simply be able to attend a good school, the idea that children must follow a set path, do this or that to "succeed" in life, cause her to raise her voice a few decibels.

In town to collect the Shaw Prize, which awards US$1 million to "rare individuals who leave their mark on history", Luu is learning about the Hong Kong system and its "path to success". To her, it feels wrong.

"We still don't know what we want to do" Luu says emphatically. "You can change. The main thing is you find what you like to do.

"When you do, you're going to be good at it. You're going to think about it all the time. You'll be interested, you'll work hard and then you'll be good at it. That's the hard part. Finding what you want to do."

Her life, she says has been a constant evolution, from when she was a small child in Vietnam who knew nothing about science, who thought the best thing she could be when she grew up was a teacher, to the woman who helped discover the Kuiper Belt, a belt of debris from the start of the universe that sits on the edge of the solar system, and now a technical staff member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is researching lasers.