Tribes and languages

Orientation week takes on a different feel in Hong Kong, writes Simon Haines. An annual ritual is taking place on our campus just now, as the new academic year approaches. It’s called orientation camp. You can’t miss it; there are long crocodiles of students in brightly coloured t-shirts snaking all over the roads, often oblivious to traffic in their group solidarity, 50 or 60 orange ones, 30 or 40 blues, a big team of purples, sometimes one group following hard on the heels of another, sometimes a group by itself, marching from one of the four residential colleges to some mysterious destination, probably to a barbecue or party where they chant camp songs or play slightly goofy games. If you’re the prof, you have to address your subject camp. All the students from all the colleges, wearing the colour of the subject camp (ours is the blue one), troop into the lecture theatre, full of banners and camp handbooks (the theme this year was “Aloha”; “ha” turns out to mean in Hawaiian roughly what “ch’i” or life energy does in Chinese). You tell them what a good choice they’ve made in coming to this university and studying this subject. We have an English-type system where students don’t major but instead pretty much just read English or history or Chinese as a cohort, for three years; though this is changing soon to allow a little more subject choice. Actually, I think they have made a good choice: some are going to be in the Hong Kong government and business elite eventually and all will benefit from their improved bilinguality. They laugh uproariously at your feeble jokes which makes you feel quite good (they aren’t laughing at you, surely); the mood is festive, almost adolescent at times, but endearingly and infectiously enthusiastic. And it’s a tribal mood. The camps are inductions into, for example, the tribe of English students at Chinese University of Hong Kong, with its sub-tribes of English students at United College or New Asia College, and its overlapping sub-tribes of (say) history students at the same college, or sports and societies. Right now the campus can look like St Mark’s Square when all the American tour buses disgorge their contents and they unite behind the guide with her flag. O-weeks at Australian universities also produce groups, maybe from the same school or college, or joining some society, but they tend to look sheepish or temporary, as if they can’t wait to disintegrate into their individualised components. Most of them would be mortally embarrassed to parade around in groups of 50 with identical t-shirts all week, unless there were a competition of some sort going on. The important thing is not to allow yourself to be identified. I suspect this phenomenon is exaggerated in Hong Kong, even beyond what is customary for Chinese. Two generations ago these families were all Cantonese peasants (this may partly account for their almost total absence of road sense). The grandparents of these lines of young people were probably refugees from the mainland fields after 1949. The Cantonese of the Pearl Delta are now probably the largest and most potent non-Mandarin-speaking group in the country, and no matter how far the economic front-running shifts to Shanghai, South China will be an industrial powerhouse for a long time to come. And it’s aware and proud of its distinctive identity. Everyone learns Putonghua (the local word for Mandarin) at school now, as they also do English, but there’s no way Hong Kong is going to be anything other than a Cantonese town (same for the vast unlovely Shenzhen-Dongguan-Guangzhou agglomeration just over and running right up to the border). So all this orientation business turns out to be another identity-asserting exercise. CUHK is not just a university (whatever that means anywhere nowadays); it’s where the first full generation of Cantonese to receive a more or less Western-style tertiary education in their own region are gaining their sense of themselves as a generation. And they don’t want too much English, either, so let’s not be complacent about that. Just enough to mark themselves off from their parents, compete for those top local jobs and, maybe, stay on terms with the Beijing and Shanghai English-speaking elites. The truly wealthy and cosmopolitan local families send their sons and daughters to universities in the US and UK (not often Australia, at least yet, I’m sorry to report); but these cheerful middle class blue-and-orange crocodiles are Hong Kong’s own home-educated, service-industry workforce of the future. Simon Haines is professor of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.