by John Hammond

THE DRILLING OF the cicadas and the drilling of Hong Kong’s construction sites all blend into one outside the classroom, muffled only by the din of the air-conditioning and the swish of the ceiling fans that the students like to have on full blast. The sight of the day’s worksheets flying all over the classroom provides a useful source of entertainment amidst the tedium of the Hong Kong education system. All these sounds, of course, are drowned by the din of a class impatient for the end of the lesson.

Outside the window is a solid concrete wall of public housing tenements, drab green and grey mosaic tiles around barred windows, the contents of each room half hidden by a variety of curtains, and washing hanging out to dry on lines hung from the bars, dripping on unsuspecting passers-by many floors below. Only on one side of the estate school where I work can I see anything comfortingly natural, but on that side of the school I could easily imagine myself to be in the middle of a jungle--a thick tangle of trees climbing the steep hillside into the low hanging mist that drifts across the mountain-tops--forest that looks as if it has never been penetrated by any humans, let alone any of the people who live on its very edge. Air-conditioned shopping malls are the playground of bored teenagers, not tropical rainforest. This is definitely the side of the school that I prefer.

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