She heard about the history and the riots from her family several years later. And she always did for many years at least once annually. When her family gathered around every year to celebrate her birthday, someone would always mention the riots of 1967. Sometimes the story gets mentioned nowadays too, as I recall I first heard the story during a family dinner when I was younger. Chan Kit Mei complained jokingly that it was quite annoying how everyone would always remember the year she was born in as no one could forget it since it fell fatefully on the same year as the riots, and so she joked that it was impossible to keep her age a secret.
This beginning of Chan Kit Mei’s life and how she grew up being reminded of the 1967 riots was more than just a light hearted joke shared by her family and herself. It displayed to me a much more significant matter; most people born after the riots, especially the current generation, have no idea such an event even occurred. They only learn about it when they study history at school or when they hear about it from their families. To the younger generation, this is just a part of Hong Kong’s history and nothing more. While they may understand that it was a major event in Hong Kong and it helped shape the type of Hong Kong people that exists nowadays, the significance to them is not as deep and memorable as those who lived through it and experienced it themselves. This detachment from the younger generation is natural since they obviously were not alive to have experienced it first hand, but it also means that will naturally undermine the poverty and instability Hong Kong once experienced.
The story of Chan Kit Mei born in 1967 was not the only thing discussed during the family gatherings, as there was a bigger story attached to it. One of my older uncles, Lai Tin Tse was in his teens that year and he had the experience of his life time. It was one month after Chan Kit Mei’s birth and relatives had gathered together at my grandparents’ house to celebrate the ceremony of one month after the birth of a child. My grandparents could not afford to celebrate this at a restaurant since it was too expensive at the time and so some restaurant chefs were invited to come to my grandparents’ flat to cook dinner. This was quite customary as many people could not afford a luxury such as a banquet and invited chefs into their homes to cook instead as it was much cheaper. One of the dishes included the winter melon soup. After the meal was consumed and it was time to clean up, my grandfather asked my uncle to throw out the large melons out to the rubbish dump across the street. It was dark as there were no street lights and my uncle was alone, walking quietly along the street carrying what was left of a large hollow melon. Before he realized it, he was grabbed by two strangers who were shouting in his ear profusely, ordering him to stop moving. My uncle was shocked, confused and most of all frightened. He was following his father’s instructions of disposing the remains of their dinner, but all of a sudden he was being treated like a criminal for no reason. It took a while to clarify the situation with the police, but he was eventually let go. The police apologized for the rough treatment and explained they were just taking precautions and thought he was carrying a homemade bomb. The shape of the melon did mirror the look of the homemade bombs in the dark and because of the increasing detonation around the city lately, the police thought they had caught one of the rebellious teenagers in the act.
My uncle admitted that he felt the police were out of line, suspecting all teenagers and just generalized all children were rebelling and causing turmoil. While he did not do anything outrageous like joining in with the riots, he remember feeling that he sympathized with them since he felt unnerved to do something drastic after his intervention with the police. When he grew up and reflected upon that incident, he understood that the police were just being cautious and doing their job and he longer blamed them. However, what this shows is that many of the youth back in the 1960’s may had also felt a similar way. They might not have been crazily rebellious to begin with, but felt pressured and pushed to do something drastic since the government, the authority figures, “the media and the general public had already labeled” (Lui, 44) and stereotyped them as trouble makers and the ‘bad guys’, and in retaliation, they acted and caused chaos to our city. Perhaps the vicious cycle could have been avoided if more attention and understanding were given to the youngsters, but ultimately, the stereotyping prevailed and triumphed.
One of my older aunts, Chan Kit Lin, also was a young teen during that time. She vaguely remembers the riots as my grandparents talked negatively about them around my aunts and uncles, probably to discourage them from doing anything dangerous. My grandfather would then turn the pep talk on studying hard and her responsibility and how my aunt being the oldest child had to look after her six younger siblings. So my aunt’s childhood memories revolved more around the harsh lives her family grew up in and how this was a similar case to most families at that time. She played the motherly role for most of her life as my grandfather was often out working to earn money and my grandmother was also rarely at home as she would be playing mahjong and cards with other housewives. Hearing her talk about her bleak upbringing made me wonder if many other children growing up in similar conditions took the easier path and neglected their responsibilities since it was too much for them to handle at that young age and so decided to deviate and become a nuisance. It is a plausible cause as to why things escalated out of control during those years and sadly those same problems seem to still exist in some of the poorer districts of Hong Kong. With the little attention paid on youngsters by their pressured and stressful parents from poverty, it was inevitable that children would stray and the media play on this fault to the point that it sensationalized some of the nuisances, and eventually causing moral panic over the years.
In 1983, Chan Kit Lin became a high school teacher at a band three school and she remembers the struggle she and other teachers faced trying to tame the students especially with the outburst of the infamous Yes! magazine. The students loved it as it was their defying bible whereas the teachers felt that it tore down every rule in the book. My aunt explained how she felt her students grew attached to the magazine as if it was their morale, their shield from adulthood and their only defense. With this frustration, she felt that the publication did not help her troubled students but worse, she felt hopeless since the students themselves appeared to give up hope in themselves from changing and feeling more positive about themselves. When she talked about the problem of her students, it was difficult at first to tell whether she meant her students from the 1980s or her students nowadays, but as she went on, it became clear that both groups of students faced the same problems and so from her perspective as a teacher coming into contact with a few decades of youngsters, there was no real improvement with the youth culture.
What it seems like is just that the focus of the problem has shifted but not actually solved, displaying the concept of a band-aid solution, meaning a proposal aiming to solve a problem does not actually solve the problem, but makes it seem like the problem is solved because it has been covered by another problem. The case here is that Hong Kong used to have a problem with teenager rebellion terrifying citizens out on the streets and starting riots and the government saw the root of this problem being that teenagers have nothing else better to do and do not know how to utilize their time. As a result, the government deployed these teenagers into the walls of a school and enacted compulsory education for nine years in 1979, believing if they were in school learning, they would be out of trouble. However, the “extension of compulsory education into the junior forms of secondary education was itself a major factor in the spectacular rise of truancy, disrespect for teachers and vandalism among certain secondary school pupils” (Chow, 131). So what we see is that teenagers are still rebellious but they have an extra authority figure imposed on them now, who are teachers and principals, alongside with another set of regulations to restrict their frustrated expressions. “Teachers as authority figures surpassed other authority figures in the ability to win the favour of the younger generation as other leaders were perceived to be the least capable of understanding the needs of the adolescents” (Shae, 33) yet the most promising authority figure still struggles to monitor teenagers. Hence the government’s solution of compulsory education only shifted the problem from the streets to inside a school environment, but the crux of the youth problem is still left unattended.
At the end of the day, this calls into question of how effective the government’s policy is on compulsory education to rectify the youth culture in Hong Kong. Recently the government announced that “compulsory education should be changed to 12 years” (South China Morning Post) but I question how successful this plan is. Perhaps it will mean more youngsters will get at least 12 years of education and it may be easier to obtain a job when these troubled teens move into adulthood, but as shown from the past three decades, simply forcing these teens to stay in school won’t solve the prevailing youth culture in Hong Kong.
Bibliography
Chow, N. (1980) ‘Why the Upsurge in Juvenile Delinquency’ The Seventies, 131, Dec
Lui Chi Wai (1994) Youth, Metaphor and Governmentality in Hong Kong. M.A. thesis.
School of Professional and Continuing Education. Ch. 7-9
Shae W. C. (1994) A Sociological Study of Authority in Two Secondary Schools in Hong Kong. Ph.D. thesis, Department of Sociology. University of Hong Kong
Youngsters more pushy than polite. (2007, January 6). South China Morning Post,p. 14.
Retrieved December 9, 2007, from International Newsstand database.
