The Importance of the Arts. Discuss.

Recently I set a student an essay on 'The Importance of the Arts.' What can I say: it was the 60th minute, I needed to finish and start my next class, she was desperate for homework. "I'm Chinese, come on!" she joked coyly. We'd just finished reviewing an essay she'd written on the stereotype of the straight-A* maths/music genius Chinese student in which she'd argued for its unfairness: "we are hard-working because of that image; we are not all natural geniuses." And I must say, from my experience with a particularly dim-witted 13 year old boy, I had to agree with her; and on the basis of a few 16 year old boys currently established in some of our top English schools, I'd go so far as to say that you are not even all hard-working. While many are both diligent and bright, the majority of my students are simply hard-worked; a concept that is, I think, alien to children in most English schools. I certainly do not remember staying up til 4am to finish an assignment or prepare for a test. In fact, if the homework was 'revise' then this seemed - as the audible sigh that went out from the class suggested - a licence to do nothing at all. But mine is not an example I encourage my students to follow. So in that spirit I'd come up - off the top of my head (of which Freud would probably have a lot to say) - with the homework essay in question. And quickly forgot all about it.

Well, as my mum would say, what you give out only returns to you, as was witnessed when my student returned to class on Saturday bearing the essay. I read it. It was sensible, predictable. It wasn't wrong but yet it managed to stir me out of my "I've only one week left in this job" ennui to come out fighting against the idea that the importance of the arts is that they are educational, instructive, edifying; that music and literature has lessons to teach us and the power to change the world. Is this so very bad, you might ask? Is this a terrible ambition to have as a poet, painter, dancer or musician? That something you might do, say or create should make a difference to the way people and society live their lives? No, I would answer. Not at all. I was once that a young person with ideals and ethics, who would nurse a dormouse back to health or adopt a killer whale to keep it off the streets, to save it from a life prostituting itself in front of crowds at SeaWorld. So demeaning! Once upon a time I would have stridently boycotted Gap because I’d read they used sweatshops and would have forgone buying Shreddies because they are made by Nestle. I used to endure 24 hour famines to raise money for World Vision, lying delirious on the floor at 8pm staring up at the ceiling, trying to resist the urge to break fast on the entire contents of the bread bin. Oh, yes, I once wanted to change the world, make it a better place... But did I ever think that writing a book would do it? No. Gullible as I was, I believed my uncle - not unknown for his jests and pranks but in fact infamous in those there parts for goth-rock and magic tricks - when he told me I'd have to become Supreme Grand Ruler of the Universe (with him as my assistant, of course, in charge of some satellite orbiting my own administrative - not imperial, you understand - planet) if we were to sufficiently change reality to reflect our own childish ideals. That is, if we really wanted a world in which muesli just came with the right quantities of raisins, summer the right amount of sun and water for hosepipes and bees (but no wasps), and Christmas Eve the best falling snow; a world in which you wouldn't be made to eat all your greens before being allowed dessert for the seemingly illogical and insensitive reason that there were children starving in Africa - the image of which is enough to put most sensitive children off their dinner, and perhaps in more wayward young minds to encourage xenophobia and racial hatred; and in which at the back of everyone's wardrobe is a little fawn who'd take you for tea and crumpets when you just needed Out. 

Well, as I was saying, I was once this moralistic, idealistic girl. But now? Well, I still don’t shop at Gap but for the less altruistic and more practical reasons that a) size zero's been eliminated, either out of concern or jealousy I'm not sure, but I don't think making us naked from the waist down is going to help, and b) there are none in Hong Kong despite my now aged blue sweater assuring me – or mocking me, more like – that it was “Made in Macau.” (Is b) because of a)??) My killer whale though is, I believe, still at large out there somewhere, freely swimming the oceans and living off my mum's credit card (I send her a cheque once every now and again to keep things sweet), but as you can see mine is a long-distance style of parenting. I've never visited her straits and she's unlikely to enter mine. And while I would still love to find a forest of magical creatures at the back of my wardrobe, I am less enamoured with the ones I actually find there, fluttering around and eating what is left of my prized, now almost vintage, Topshop clothes (that shop too is not to be found in HK), and install anti-moth devices to try and chase them away, back out into the world where in my view they belong. When the change occurred, I am not certain, but I guess it was quite some time ago and perhaps around the same time that I realized I would not become Supreme Grand Ruler of the Modern Universe. And yes, before you say anything, it was before I entered an Oxford college reknowned for churning out almost as many Prime Ministers as underpaid English teachers.  But – as I say – it was even longer ago than that that I knew I would not change the world by writing a book about it. In fact, honestly, I don’t think the idea ever would have occurred to me even in those terms. It would’ve seemed ridiculous. The point of literature, for my younger self, was not to learn how to bring about existential, physical or societal transformation. I was not reading Einstein, Engels or Oprah after all. It was simply to forget the world, leave it behind. Even reading Little Women, the point had never been educational. As far as my sisters and I were concerned, Meg, Jo/Beth (for we could never agree which one I was - Beth dies after all, so that was hardly fair or nice) and Amy had stolen from us, not visa versa. No, to read a book was precisely and purposefully to have nothing to do reality.

“What are you doing?” was an ordinary and not infrequent question at home as I was growing up, usually shouted from one end of the house to the other. We did have stairs in our house, don’t get me wrong, but the problem was rather that there were too many and we resented having to use them, feeling that the power of our lungs should be better exhausted in shouting. “Where are you and what are you doing?” And the answer might well be: “I’m reading.” That was a permissible answer and it could, sometimes (at least, with more authority than TV), get you off the hook of having to do anything else. Reading, from an early age I realized, was then a thing in itself and not just a means to an end. What was more it was an activity that you engaged in while at the same time being completely inactive and in which you could be both there and not there all at the same time. To me it seemed ideal, the lazy person’s dream, to go somewhere – anywhere you wanted – without actually having to move! And if I was reading I wasn’t obliged to do anything else, be it help tidy the house or change the world, and this only got better as I got older. The bigger the book, the more archaic the language (“Are you sure you’re supposed to read that?” I will forever remember my dear mother saying as she looked in dismay at a book of Middle English verse, “It’s not just a test, you know, to see how stupid you are?” Oh, it was a test alright, but one I would pass by learning to read it, not by concluding it was illegible, not proper English and so nothing to do with me, thank you very much!) and abstruse the content, the more I could be sure I’d be left alone to read it. “Yes, you read your book dear. [Aside] Just don’t make me read it when you’re finished. Please dear god, no.” For it - whether To the Lighthouse or The Faerie Queene -clearly had nothing to do with the world whatsoever, but it seemed to keep me occupied - albeit ungainfully employed - and it didn’t make any noise or mess so I was left to get on with it.

This, however, brings me to the second objection I had to my student’s thesis that literature and the arts are important because they help to change the world. What do we think books are? Shoemaker’s elves and fairy godmothers? The paperback equivalents to the invention of the wheel or the discovery of penicillin? My books seemed to everyone around me to be keeping me engaged in relatively good, safe practices. I may not have been exactly contributing to society by working on a cure for cancer, but I had potential: “Ah, so…you’re gonna be an English teacher?” they would suggest hopefully, to which I would turn a withering look of disdain upon them and reply with the single word “No.” Oh the irony! But I can’t really blame them for getting this idea. To look at me you would not really think me capable of causing much trouble by my sedentary pursuits: so studious, so… specky. Well, while I maintain that the books at least that I read never changed the world – never single-handedly abolished slavery or emancipated women, brought about civil liberties for gays or ended totalitarianism – they did bring about a change in the way I saw the world. I may have been putting my eyes out reading into the wee hours of the morning, but I was having my eyes opened to the personal experiences, visions and language of characters and writers beyond the scope and comprehension of my bedroom window. Can I say that I have learnt about the world from the books I’ve read? Or about human nature? Umm, only that it’s varied. Can I say that I’ve read books that’ve changed the world? 1984, my student suggested. No, are you kidding?! If the literature – which still speaks ‘volumes’ (though in characters that seem like a sick joke to most sensible people) across 700 plus years – is anything to go by, the world seems to continue more or less as it always has. Great works have been written, of course they have, but would the world be any different had they not? Apples and angels fell to earth before Newton figured out why and seem determined to continue to do so now (though if I were them I'd be tempted not to out of spite). But if the world hasn't been changed, can I at least say that literature has changed or shaped my "little world of man": the way that I see, experience and interact with it? Is that a rhetorical question?! As I said to my student, in what I hope was a heart-raising moment of astounding oratorical fireworks and not just literary nihilism: I have learnt little of use about the world from my years of reading. (Or when I did, witness A Journal of the Plague Years - thank you Mr Defoe - it was most disheartening.) I have, however, experienced other worlds, lived through many fictional lives and been audience to, as Austen says, "the greatest powers of the mind... the liveliest effusions of wit and humour," all written in the richest medium, the best chosen language. 

And, if that is not enough, perhaps I have learnt something after all: not to try and write a book that’d change the world. The world, flaws and all, is fine as it is: it necessitates all the other, unreal ones we choose to escape into - gives meaning to the fawn in the wardrobe.

A cold foretold and a humbug for Christmas

You may be forgiven for thinking that this English girl has fallen of the face of the Net and died. The truth is not too far from that.

On Monday last I was struck down in 24* broad sunshine with a cold virus the likes of which only Hong Kong, it seems, can foster. Now, I do not wish to name names, but... I blame Erin. A chatty Common Entrance 13+  who arrived at our 11 o’clock lesson the Saturday before chatting less than usual from behind a green surgical mask. And I tried to keep my distance, but it appears the damage had already been done - had perhaps been written in the stars. For, waking up several hours earlier with nausea-inducing shock at the alarm, I had been fighting the desire to sleep my way through the morning when Erin arrived. The promise of coffee hovered before me like a mirage, seemingly moving ever further away the closer I came to it, until finally 1pm and salvation in a Pret coffee that, mainlined, saw me safely through the afternoon and to the point at which I could crawl back under the duvet, from which slumberous grave I have surfaced only occasionally since and then in fittingly zombie-like mode. Diagnosis: the real-life equivalent of Man Flu; a particularly virulent strain of common cold which mixed in the right doses with panadol, Diet Coke, near fatal quantities of grapes and Stieg Larsson, has seen me day-dreaming deliriously through teaching all week. Oh yes. For, somewhere between Heathrow and HK - at some indeterminate point, possibly while drifting finally into dreamy unconsciousness over Kazakhstan - tolerance to Sick Days is hijacked and every incoming expat is issued with ineffectual prescriptions for over the counter drugs, made to don surgical face masks that leave you resembling an extra from 28 Days Later and told to carry on about your business regardless of wishing just to be left to sleep and sneeze and blow your nose in private instead of, like my student when she returned yesterday (minus the mask) being obliged to excuse yourself, cough up phlegm into the nearest obliging receptacle, while thoughtfully suggesting that "you might not want to look in there." Aiya! So, from behind my own regulation green face mask - which let me tell you does nothing to prevent the spread of germs, rather force you to hyperventilate over your own, but which does act as a very good sign for “Don’t F*ck With Me, I’m Sick” and, adequately pepped up on meds, gives one delusions of ER grandeur – I have spent the week being subjected to interminably long, dark hours creatively writing students' coursework (which I understand is most immoral and which, certainly in this case, may have serious repercussions - namely along the lines of "What on earth were you smoking when you wrote this?!"), tutored on the illusory nature of love and the delusions inspired by literature (subjects that in my drugged up state I felt somehow over-qualified to lecture on) and tried to explain to one charming student why swearing in school entrance exams is inadvisable: "Jonathan, you cannot use 'bull.' It's an abbreviated swear word." "Bullsh*t." "That's right, but don't swear." 

All in a week's malingering work.

It was in among these dreams of walking to and from work, through IFC mall and past the large shining skyscraper housing innumerable offices and my local Pacific Coffee [pron. par-sif-ic Ca-fay] that I noticed the arrival of Christmas. A thousand beautiful white lights adorning the trees and public space in front of The Centre: lights hanging above the entry way and from the vast ceiling, garish poinsettias lining the escalators and, slowly coming into sight like a heaven-sent revelation, a fibre-optic tree the size and scale of which designed to make your heart skip a beat. (Oh, and an enormous plastic replica of a Victorian toy rocking horse which was attracting rather puzzled looks from passers by.) Well, seeing all this my heart certainly did miss a beat, but whether out of pleasure or panic is unclear. As I drifted in a daze through IFC I felt the need to reach out, stop someone and ask "What day is this?" Had I done a Scrooge and missed five whole weeks - the end of November and majority of December - to wake up to find that it was Christmas Day already? This magical wonderland of ....well, no, not quite snow. This is Hong Kong after all and it might be mid November but the sun is still shining, only with (contrary to the wishes of the director in Lost in Translation) a little less intensity than before. I may have been wrapped up like an Eskimo (sorry, Inuit), but this was more in protest to the air conditioning than the outside temperature, which was in fact serving as a pleasant reminder of why, even in my current state, I was glad that I chose - back in those first freezing months of the year amid scenes of snowy chaos - to return to more tropical climes. What was a cold compared to the raging cold of an English bleak midwinter? But herein lies the puzzle. Why does HK seem to 'do' Christmas with more intensity than England where it is a much more important - nay, necessary - and even for some religious, holiday? Is it that the traditions of their some-time colonisers have lived on after they/we did? Is it out of exuberance to embrace all Western holidays that HK welcomes Christmas with the same gusto that it does Halloween and with the same terrifying effect? Or is it more sinister than that? Many have considered the over commericialisation of the holidays to be mere opiates for an over-worked masses. Those eggnog lattes, the intoxicating scent of so many fir-trees (shipped only Mao knows how many miles!) and the mind-numbing holiday muzak that is, as I write, being piped through the palaces and arcades of consumer worship are then purely state-sponsored economic rituals designed to keep businesses booming and the proletariat spending, and then working to pay off their spending. But if this is true, shouldn't we all practise a bit of the old "Bah Humbug" Scrooge? Should we not rise up in political counter point to precisely those values that Scrooge himself stood for - money-making and greed - and say "No, I shall not give in; I shall not spend; I shall not sup at thy red latte cup!"? For if not that, then what does that old tale teach us? Where is the real heart of the holidays?

Well, I grant you, the lights are twinkly, the festive red cups adorned with white snowflakes and filled with hot nutmeg and cinnamon milk do make a welcome change to anything iced, and Christmas stockings walking the streets with true Hong Kong sartorial panache are a glad sight. So I guess I don't make a very natural Scrooge, but the music? To encourage children to sing Christmas carols in mid-November: is not this a form of abuse - if not of them then of us who must endure it, must quell our inner grump and put on a smiling face and tell them "very nice" in the dear hope that they will stop? So, Scrooge, yes. A Christmas carol? Please, not yet, no.

But in all seriousness, apart from the off-key singing of precocious lil Britney wannabes, perhaps what saddens me in all this preparatory festivity the most is that - aged and cynical as I am - I know that with such build up to the time of great excitement and unthinkable happiness and joy, the holiday will be over too soon. Those thousands of poinsettias will be taken away and the decorations down, the red cups will gradually fade away and the reindeer jumper pass out of circulation because Christmas has, very distinctly, a sell by date. It is one day, or three days off work (if you are lucky). In taking Christmas out of storage so early, are we not tempting it to go off long before we are? Will not that the excitement - for, yes, I think it was childish excitement that I felt at seeing those first lights - have already dwindled and faded, and will I not wish I was home in England far from the glitzy/kitschy lights of the city? Will not I long simply for real cold weather, snowflakes that actually fall from the sky and the necessity of warming one's hands by an open fire or around a cup stove-mulled wine? Snowed in with nothing but UHT milk and last year's leftover Christmas pudding (the question of who ate the centre of the Terry's Chocolate Orange but a distant memory), wrapped up in one of my mother's hand-knitted scarves and playing scrabble; my dyslexic-poetic family and I? Perhaps this is why Christmas in Hong Kong can have the effect of feeling more hollow than a plastic replica Victorian tin rocking horse. Not simply is there not the bitter, icy cold and long dark days of England, but there lacks the warmth and solidity for me of hearth and home - the reassurance of a tradition that if it saw a life-size horse it'd know what was meant by it.

I say this not to moan or lament though; only to answer those people who ask "Are you going home for the holidays?" that, no, I will be here, wearing my Christmas cardi with a due sense of irony, fondly listening in to King's College carols and sipping my latte in the sun while a Chinese santa and his obscenely dressed tai-tai (the one day of the year she works, apparently) hand out presents to the kids on the beach. And I will think warmly of you all back home unwrapping with delight your tin rocking horses and soldiers, sitting round the fire, chestnuts roasting as you listen to the Queen's speech on the wireless, sip at your sherry and remark on how fast the snow comes down roundabout -

"So deep!"

"So crisp!"

"And even."

And I will be glad that you at least have escaped the hackneyed cliches and tired epithets and can enjoy a very Merry Christmas. Because the rest of it is quite possibly, as Jonathan would say, all a load of bull.

Not always easy (un)being an English teacher

It was a few moments before I noticed today that one of my students was nodding off in class. The reason? I had clearly nearly fallen asleep myself. Not because the reading wasn't good. In fact, it was wonderfully lyrical and magically funny; chosen especially for 'Rainbow,' my bright and sunny sweet sixteen year old student.  No. Rather, it was 3:30pm, the hour at which, after lunch, eyelids frequently nod and blink and the phrase (called up from my own childhood schooling) comes to mind: "Okay, now children, heads on desks." But, alas, no such luck. I dismissed Rainbow - much to her relief - and settled down to the next student: a laconic twelve year old boy who's seen about as much of me as he wishes and no longer feels the imperative to work hard, and who - as I pop a sour cola candy in, in an effort to wake the hell up - I too am losing the energy to motivate.

For, on Tuesday I handed in my notice: the final countdown has begun. Three weeks and three days of work to go.

But this is not all happy making. As I said goodbye to The Boy this afternoon, I welcomed in a favourite thirteen year old - very much this teacher's pet, and in this case a pet chipmunk, named as she is after a famous cartoon one, the only mercy being that her parents deigned to change the ending to feminine: Alvina. So, as I welcomed in the Chipmunk - cheeky, sardonic, dreadfully intelligent but rather bored and weary with the world already - I finally woke up as the memories returned to answer my own questions of "did I give you any homework? to read more of Northanger Abbey? how wonderful! How did you like it? how far did you get? Tilney? really..." and so on. There is nothing like a good ironist - and who better than Austen? - to brighten up ones day, and the Chipmunk enjoying and coming alive at all her jokes... "Novels? Novels! Who reads novels?!" We, darling Chipmunk, do and this is why, because the novel is not only the work of the greatest mind demonstrating the deepest knowledge of human nature, but it is done so with wit and humour and in that shining medium, the English language! No? Yes. Ta da! (Rabbit out of hat moment)

Yep, and now I'm tired again, and hungry and you may go. "Just be sure to do your homework!" as she dawdles out, enthusiasm once again spent for the week; back to being the sardonic chipmunk she is most familiar with. But don't worry my little chipmunk, I won't tell your secret; not if you don't tell mine: I'm leaving teaching. Leaving Austen, Northanger Abbey, Orwell and 1984. Leaving you, and the Rainbow; the boys that say nothing, and the boys that stare blankly as you attempt to penetrate the stoney wall of their passivity or indifference (to poetry?! to literature?!). Leaving the girls that gossip and giggle, and the girls that roll in, roll up their sleeves and bare their hearts and souls on the page and poem. And the little boy who once a week for an hour understands nothing but says "Ok" regardless.

And I am glad to be going, yea glad to leave you all...except you, and you, and possibly you. Because while my bosses may make me miserable, you (and usually a Pacific Coffee flat white) redeem the day with your impromptu swear words ("crap!") - Jonathan!  ("oh, crap!"), and your cheeky grin, and the way you apologise profusely for being late while lamenting that your life is over at the tender age of 9, which if I was really as hard on you as your grammar warranted it would be, but alas...


So, while I am leaving and while, no, (I think to myself) I will not be seeing you at Christmas when you come home from Winchester, Wycombe or Westminster, I hope your next English teacher isn't too hard on you and doesn't berate you too much, or curse me for never giving you quite enough homework but for making you read books and stories and poems instead; to know personification from polysemy, anaphora from asyndeton, and for teaching you the importance of rhyme over rules and the imagination over the imperative. Yes, I hope they are kind on you, that they nod and smile secretly to themselves and acknowledge that you are just children: wonderfully, miraculously "of the Devil's party" without always knowing it.