Miss M | Guarding the City We Call Home
Miss M grew up in Canada and returned to Hong Kong in 2008. She has since taught English at four different schools, witnessing the change of the education sector in Hong Kong from the Umbrella Movement[*1] to the Anti-Extradition Movement[*2]. Hong Kong is full of the CCP’s lackeys, but the seemingly-peaceful Vancouver is also in turmoil. Between Hong Kong and Canada, where does she belong?
“We are in the age of White Terror. With the education system that praises obedience and neglects critical thinking, it is even harder to find people with a clear mind in this society.
As for us teachers, it is also getting harder. ”
Journalist: Fiona Forrester
Translator: Chelsea
Illustrator: Orange Peel
I am coming back to Hong Kong with the identity and perspective of a foreigner.
I don’t have a strong connection with this city after living in the free world for so long. Although I don’t have much expectation for this place, under the rote-memorisation-oriented, model-answer-centric education system, I always feel like a misfit.
The Longman and Oxford textbooks full of hard and fast grammar rules and the exam papers full of fill-in-the-blanks questions have trained our students into obedient exam-taking robots. Such an education system does not seek critical thinking nor personal opinion, only asking for a regurgitation of model answers. I, on the other hand, like to design games for my students such as irregular verb crosswords which are far more engaging. The students are just kids. They hate boring memorisation tasks and would rather do something hands-on.
Hong Kong feels foreign to me even outside the classroom. I used to live in Shatin as a child. When I emigrated back to Hong Kong in 2008, the monthly rent of a 300 sq. ft. flat in City One was merely HKD$7000. It has now skyrocketed to HKD$14,000. New Town Plaza has become a hub for Mainlanders buying milk powder and luxury products. Shatin is a reflection of Hong Kong; that luxurious and vain exterior has wiped out all the simplicity and happiness of the past.
My home has lost its shape, yet I stayed.
School campuses post-Umbrella Movement
In ten years, I’ve witnessed the “mainlandisation” of society in general as well as the quick deterioration of freedom in the education sector.
In 2014, the school I was working at invited Carrie Lam (the then Chief Secretary for Administration) as a forum guest. The school closed early that day and they asked unrelated students and staff to leave. The forum questions were carefully pre-selected. Despite all this, I was still able to have a bit of freedom and taught my students some English vocabulary about Hong Kong politics in the classroom.
I later transferred to a more liberal school where they had something akin to a Democracy Wall, an “Opinion Wall”, although distributing pamphlets was still prohibited. I then taught at a Band 1 secondary school after that. I had more freedom there, but the kids there were also more ‘obedient’.
I am currently at a school in the Northern District. At first, I thought it would be bad, but fortunately almost all of my English-teaching colleagues are ‘yellow’[*3]. The principal is quite open-minded and Pepe the Frog posters[*4] are everywhere on campus. When I asked for an hour off to calm my emotions after particularly bad clashes between demonstrators and police the night before, the principal was understanding.
The education sector of Hong Kong has always been a top-down authoritarian system where teachers have always had their ways to cope, but after the Anti-Extradition Movement, things accelerated and became much worse. We not only have to dodge surveillance from the authorities, but also have to avoid being reported by our students. On 1 October 2019, the day when a cop shot an unarmed student, some Mainland Chinese students openly exclaimed in a colleague’s classroom that a mere bullet is not enough to punish the pro-democracy protesters. The opinion was met with eager concurrence from other students. This kind of Cultural Revolution-like snitching culture is toxic, and deters us teachers from talking to our students heart-to-heart.
Some of my coworkers, due to privacy concerns, have four Facebook accounts. Before all of this happened, teachers would often have two Facebook accounts: a private one and one exclusively for students. Now, they need two more: one for receiving and sharing pro-democracy information, and the other to pretend to be pro-government and pro-CCP to prevent accusations and being reported to authorities for being pro-democracy.
All this dodging and hiding is but for a slight likelihood of survival.
CCP and it’s global colonisation
Like many of our forefathers, Mainland Chinese flee to Hong Kong and even overseas for obvious reasons.
Among the younger students in my school, 80% have Mainland Chinese backgrounds (they are either from China or they speak Mandarin at home). Many treat learning English with disdain and fantasise that China will rule the world in the near future and foreigners will have to learn Mandarin to please the Chinese. This is a tragedy. Their parents send them to Hong Kong to study despite all the hardship, but the kids fail to forego their conservative Chinese mindset.
This happens not only in Hong Kong, but also in Canada. The CCP have already gotten their hands on Chinese language newspapers such as Mingpao and Sing Tao Daily. Lennon Walls in Canadian universities are destroyed within days by Mainland Chinese students and their physical attacks on Hong Kong students are common. Some Hongkongers in Vancouver have organised peaceful rallies to show solidarity with the Hong Kong democracy movement to have some NMSLese[*5] come and make a scene.
I join pro-democracy rallies and marches in Hong Kong whenever they are held. The more people there are, the stronger the solidarity and strength of the people. However, I feel embarrassed and guilty walking with these people as I always have the option of returning to Canada if things get worse when most do not have this privilege. On the contrary, my friends back in Canada are mostly apathetic towards politics, and only care to live in their comfort zone, mostly staying out of touch with the world. It’s difficult to find ‘awakened’ Hongkongers in Canada, and those that are stay silent as they are the minority.
When the CCP and its influence are literally everywhere on this planet, where can we actually go?
Home Kong
But life goes on.
We are in an era of White Terror. During the Umbrella Movement, all I needed was a face mask, but now I need to add at least some sunglasses and a hoodie. Lately due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all my classes are on Zoom. We are worried that softwares like this could contain spyware or surveillance programmes.
As a teacher, one thing that scares me the most is that all the frontline Hong Kong students of this generation will go to jail, and the university places and civil servant jobs will go to obedient Mainland Chinese students. Some think that education is merely a job while others view it as a calling. Without a doubt, I am the latter. Every time I have my students write and speak, I ask them to elaborate on their points. I’m very frustrated when they give me vague and rigid answers. They kept questioning why they need to give so many reasons and evidence to support their points? With an education system that praises obedience and neglects critical thinking, it is getting harder to find people with rational minds. Standing in front of the chalkboard, we teachers have an increasingly difficult job, but because of this, I have to persevere. This is why I coach the debate team, and insist that students write up organised rational arguments. This is meant to train them to become logical people.
As one of the peaceful, rational, non-violent (PRN) pro-democracy supporters and as a teacher, I am like many in Hong Kong. Although we have never experienced the warzone-like protest frontlines, we have our own battles to fight. We stand in solidarity and support the protest in our own ways.
Our home has changed, therefore we should guard and rebuild it. Though we still have a long way to go, we are never alone.
We will take things one step at a time.
“I am Miss M, I am a HKer.”
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[*1] Umbrella Movement: From September to December 2014, there was a civil movement pursuing the direct election of the Chief Executive of Hong Kong by citizens and the elimination of the functional constituencies.
[*2] Anti-Extradition Movement: Protests which began in June 2019 against a bill that would extradite Hongkongers to China for trial.
[*3] ‘Yellow’: People in Hong Kong typically use colours to divide among people with different political stances. ‘Yellow ribbons’ are people who are pro-democracy and would criticise the government.
[*4] Pepe the Frog: Despite being a symbol of white supremacy and hate in the US, Pepe has become a symbol of solidarity for the pro-democracy Anti-Extradition Movement in Hong Kong.
[*5] NMSLese: Delusional Mainland Chinese who blindly support the CCP. Some Chinese netizens, when facing opposing opinions online, would say the slang NMSL (the abbreviation of ‘Ni Ma Si Le’, which means ‘your mom is dead’). It is often used when they cannot win the argument logically. These overly sensitive Chinese people are then mocked as NMSLese.
This article was featured on Apply Daily English Version. See the article @ https://hk.appledaily.com/feature/20200801/ANLVMOB7SRZP3HECAZQFSIE6QQ/