The Kowloon Diaries

Poisonous milk

There was an excellent letter in the SCMP today about the baby milk scandal in China. I'm posting it here because it bears repeating. The facts about breastfeeding are widely available and supported by the WHO, and yet there is still so much ignorance about, it's frightening.

Tunnelling to the beginning of time

I'm strangely excited and slightly worried about the The Large Hadron Collider project. It would be nice to solve the mysteries of the universe, but suppose they create a black hole and suck us out of existence. Not so good. The really interesting question, as I understand it, is finding out whether the universe has mass or not. I'm betting it doesn't. God isn't a particle, like something you find floating in your soup. You keep on smashing down atoms into smaller and smaller pieces and eventually all you'll find is philosophy.

Doesn't look like much from here

The International Commerce Centre: soon to be the tallest skyscraper in Hong Kong. Click to enlarge, and for more discussion see LottieP's blog Fragments.

Writers visible and invisible

Writers are hidden beings - you have never met one – or, if you should ever believe you are seeing a writer, or having an argument with a writer, or listening to a talk by a writer, then you can be sure it is all a mistake, says Cynthia Ozick in Standpoint.

School daze

We're trying to find a P1 place for S, a process somewhat like trying to swim across Victoria Harbour blindfolded and with your hands tied behind your back. The choices we have are:

International Schools - expensive, snobby, good facilities but teachers not obviously any better than ESF schools. Most don't do much Chinese. Most are not convenient for us.

English Schools Foundation - private, but much cheaper than International, good value for money and generally well regarded, but they don't offer Chinese (other than as a second language).

Local private schoools - fairly expensive, very, very tough academically. English as medium of education but not taught by native speakers, so it's really Chinglish. Substantial Chinese on top of the English.

'Good' local govt schools - tough and traditional teaching, Chinese medium with some English. Free or very cheap.

Not 'good' govt schools - not so tough, not much English, not well regarded by anyone I've ever met. Free.

In other words, I'm not crazy about any of our choices. At this stage it looks like it will be a 'good' local school. I know they're tough but not as tough as local private schools, and going to a 'good' school seems preferable to going to a 'not good' school. Another advantage is that we happen to live directly across the road from one, and both my kids are already going to the kindergarten there. At least he won't have to take a bus, which typically adds an extra hour on to a school day, which IMO is already too long.

Two quotes about writing, and one update on milk teeth

Two quotes about writing:

'Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.' John Berger

I take it that he means that most of the representations of life in the media, in education, in the culture even, bear little or no resemblance to life as it is actually experienced. When someone does scale the gap and say or do something real I think this is what you call art.

And the other one:

'The world is not to be put in order, the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with that order.' Henry Miller

In my novel (maybe in all novels) my heroine tries to find order in the chaos of her life. She fails (maybe they all fail) and resolves to go with the flow instead.

In separate news: S has a wobbly tooth. This is his first wobbler ever - he knocked it loose when he fell over playing basketball yesterday. By Bedtime this evening it was so wobbly that we concluded that it probably wouldn't last the night. I'm actually quite afraid that he may swallow it in his sleep, but I didn't share this with him.