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Chung Wai Ming Recalls His Primary School Days

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I entered primary one in 1936, as I recall. I remember the first day of school. It was very grand and solemn. At six in the morning, my mother took a servant and me along with presents–some food such as candies – to see Mr Mo Dunmei, the headmaster of Dun Mei School, at his home. The first thing I did was to bow before the portrait of Confucius, and then Mr. Mok performed the kaibi (the first use of the brush) ceremony on my behalf. I was wearing a “Mandarin robe” and “Mandarin cap”-- it was all very grand. After that, a teacher took me to the classroom opposite to wait for school to begin. The classroom was filled with students and I offered them the food I had bought. I wasn’t the only one offering food; on the first day of school, all the children brought food to share with each other.

I liked school a lot because the teacher told stories during class. In particular, I loved English classes. We also learned Putonghua, which we started by learning pinyin. When I was in primary five, we read “Aladdin’s Lamp” during English class, and I found it fascinating. We had to memorize certain texts and recite them every morning, such as Tang poems. Our homework consisted of calligraphy, essay writing, copying texts and so on, and when all that was done, I learned texts so that I could memorize them. The best pastime after school was football. When school was over, me and a group of classmates loved to play football with a small rubber ball in the nearby street where there wasn’t much traffic. Then, all sweating, I went home for a bath and dinner. Dinner time used to be earlier than it is now. After dinner and a short break, I started on my homework; I had to go to bed at nine, so if I had not completed my memorizing by then, I would do it the next morning. My memory was better in the morning.

I stayed in Dun Mei School till primary six, which would be equivalent to today’s second year of junior secondary school. At the time, there were four years’ of primary school and two years’ of junior secondary school. One morning, I remember, the teacher suddenly summoned the class prefect and me, the assistant prefect, to meet at the school office. The headmaster told us that there would be war, and that we all had to go home as quickly as possible; there would be further announcement as to when school would resume. So we ran back to the classroom and told everybody to go home immediately. My home was close to school and it took me less than five minutes on foot. The School was on Heard Street while my home at one end of Wanchai Road, number 257, near Tin Lok Lane. I never expected that after leaving school that day I would never be returning again. The Japanese invaded Hong Kong and Hong Kong went through three years and eight months of painful occupation.

There was a platform in the classroom and next to it were a number of canes, thick ones and thin ones. During class, the teacher would first choose a cane and wack it in the air, making a swishing sound in the air as if to show off its might to the students. In fact, all the children were very obedient; they were quiet during class and we were asked by the teachers to sit with our hands on our laps, back straight and looking straight at the teacher and not to let our eyes wonder about. If the teachers saw us moving, we would be made to stand as punishment until class was over. To be made to stand was very humiliating so no one dared to be naughty. The more usual punishment was being caned three times on the palm, or caned on the backside. Once, something really weird happened. One of the children had done something wrong and knew he would be punished, so he stuffed a lot of newspapers behind his backside, but when the teacher discovered that strange sounds were produced from his caning, he took all the newspapers out, and the kid had to take a few more canes.

One day, when I was still in a lower class, the school went on a picnic. Though I didn’t know where we were going, I was so excited I couldn’t sleep the night before. When the time came, we were led out of Heard Street along Wanchai Road, into Morrison Hill Road and then into the race course of the Jockey Club. This was an area open to the public for rest and exercise. It was busy with all kinds of activities.

There were forty of us in the class and six were girls. The teachers often taught us that boys and girls should not be familiar with each other, so we boys separated ourselves from the girls, all of whom sat in one corner. Our Chinese classes consisted of classical literature, the Analects, Tang poems, etc., like “Ode to the Lotus”; Tang poems are easy to memorize, and even a long poem like “The Song of Everlasting Regret” I can still remember eighty percent of it; with some prompting, I can recite the whole poem. I liked classes because of the way teachers taught them. Each subject, such as Chinese, Putonghua and English, was taught by a different teacher, each having a different specialty. The Chinese I know today was all learned from those five years of schooling. During class, teachers asked us to have with us one red pencil and one black pencil; whenever we came across a special word, such as one that can be pronounced in more than one way, he would tell us to draw a red symbol to indicate the different tones. The teachers were extremely careful when explaining the different tones to us, and paid a lot of attention to the way we pronounced the words. People of an earlier generation pronounced their words very clearly and accurately, and I can say that what I learned at Dun Mei helped me a lot with my broadcasting career. People working in broadcasting have to make sure that the audience hears every sentence and every word clearly, and should meet a high standard of pronunciation.

I hope that today’s broadcasters will pay more attention to fundamental techniques, and enunciate every word and sentence clearly. I suggest that they spend more time reciting poems, which is very useful when it comes to expressing the range of tones and emotions as they speak.





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