Newsletter No. 455

455 • 4.4.2015 7 饒宗頤教授百歲華誕 Prof. Jao Tsung-I’s 100th Birthday Celebration 大學於3月17日為國學泰斗饒宗頤 教授舉行百歲華誕祝壽晚宴，逾 一百二十名大學成員及饒教授的 友好出席。 沈祖堯校長席間代表大學向饒教 授送上繡有中大校徽的頸巾，中 大博文講座教授丘成桐教授特作 賀壽對聯一副，由沈校長親書並 代為題贈。中國文化研究所當天 還舉行了饒宗頤訪問學人講座，由 饒教授的學生、法國著名漢學家 汪德邁教授以「我與我的老師饒 宗頤」為題主講，分享他與恩師的 故事。 旭日集團有限公司董事長及旭日慈善基金有限公司主席楊釗博士慨允捐贈一千萬港元，支 持大學的「饒宗頤訪問學人計劃」及其他文化講座與活動，支票送贈儀式亦於是日舉行。 The Chinese University hosted a banquet on 17 March to celebrate the 100th birthday of Prof. Jao Tsung-I, a world-renowned sinologist. Around 120 guests attended the banquet. On behalf of the University, Prof. Joseph J.Y. Sung, CUHK Vice-Chancellor, presented a scarf embroidered with the CUHK emblem and a piece of calligraphy of a couplet composed by Prof. Yau Shing-tung, Distinguished Professor-at-Large, and calligraphy written by Professor Sung himself to Professor Jao as birthday presents. The Institute of Chinese Studies held an open lecture on ‘Memories of My Relations with My Laoshi Jao Tsung-I’ by Prof. Léon Vandermeersch, French sinologist renowned, on the afternoon of the same day. Dr. Charles Yeung, chairman of Glorious Sun Holdings and GS Charity Foundation, generously donated HK$10 million to support the Jao Tsung-I Visiting Professorship Scheme and related cultural activities for promoting Chinese history and culture. The cheque presentation ceremony was held on the same day. 一封家書 Letters to a Young Executive Letter 8: The File Cabinet Vanishes 26 March 2015 Dear K., Thank you for sending over the copy of a letter you chanced upon in the storeroom of your office. A delightful relic from my days of service at the University. I must have signed hundreds of these. No doubt the signature on it is mine. When I looked at my own signature of yore, I was a little surprised that it seemed to have changed so little with time. As a personal identifier, a signature may be more reliable than fingerprints. Well, identifiers like that have given way to more impersonal ones like PINs, passwords and digital certificates. If you send a postcard or a letter, as I'm so grateful you keep doing, you end it by signing your name. No physical signing with e-mails. But even if an electronic signature is appended, it wouldn't be as warm, intimate and ready to conjure up your interlocutor as a signature would. Talking about changed appellation and identity, Philip Larkin's short poem 'Maiden Name' comes to mind: Marrying left your maiden name disused. Its five light sounds no longer mean your face, Your voice, and all your variants of grace; For since you were so thankfully confused By law with someone else, you cannot be Semantically the same as that young beauty: It was of her that these two words were used. Gone are the forms, letters, papers...which used to transact our business. PowerPoint rules our days. Where have all the papers gone? Where is their destination and destiny? If they are now given an ephemeral form of existence and made to traverse the path of electrons at the speed of light, where is the virtual catacomb where they can come to rest after serving their ends? It’s always a puzzlement to me how the know-how associated with a job gets passed on without some scrappy old files. Physical files, paper documents and the file cabinet have largely disappeared from the modern office. How on earth can a new recruit know what’s gone on before him, let alone learn his trade? Gone with the file cabinet are the tidbits of queries, deliberations and decisions deposited by a lifetime's tilling of a particular acre of soil. Portfolio is an abstract and often vacuous concept. Dossier has assumed a suspect aura and may connote negatively. Some names, numbers and remarks have been fashionably re-labelled personal data and fenced in by a legal regime often beyond the comprehension of the uninitiated. Gone are some of the devices with which executives like us ply our trade. I began my career when the world was ruled by the Underwoods and the Olympias, dexterously poked and swiped by women with the gracious title of secretary. A few of those ladies remain today, but the machines have become history. The file cabinet, like the typewriter and the payphone, has joined the tyrannosaurus and the pterodactyls in the historical museum. One day a quarter of a century ago, Jenny, my secretary, and I watched with hardly concealed excitement when the first facsimile machine, fax for short, arrived and was being installed in our office. A wax statue for it, too? Please forgive this absolutely unwarranted pathos. The image of the old letter probably precipitated a cathartic attack. Was it me? Could it be someone else? No, it means you. Or, since you're past and gone, It means what we feel now about you then: How beautiful you were, and near, and young, So vivid, you might still be there... Yours sincerely, H. 校長訪美巡迴講學 Vice-Chancellor Makes Fulbright Tour in the US 沈祖堯校長去年獲頒富布賴特香港傑出學者獎，獲邀在2015年1月20至23日出訪美國高等 學府巡迴講學。沈校長於史丹福大學、加州大學柏克萊分校、華盛頓大學及加州大學洛杉 磯分校主持一系列講座，題為「Plague, SARS, Avian Flu and Ebola, Have We Learned Anything Yet? 」，吸引一眾著名公共衞生和全球衞生學者及學生出席。 沈校長並率領代表團與四所大學的管理層及研究學者會晤，探討共同興趣的領域及未來的 合作機會，包括：中西醫結合醫學、全球衞生、腦部定位研究、腸道微生物研究、人口遷移、 中國糧食安全，以及環境及能源。 Prof. Joseph J.Y. Sung, CUHK Vice-Chancellor, was presented the Fulbright Hong Kong Distinguished Scholar Award last year, and did a lecture tour of the US from 20 to 23 January 2015. He delivered a lecture titled ‘Plague, SARS, Avian Flu and Ebola, Have We Learned Anything Yet?’ at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, the University of Washington, and UCLA, which attracted an audience that ranged from eminent scholars to medical students in the fields of public health and global health. While at the four universities, Professor Sung and the CUHK delegation took the opportunity to meet with senior administrators and researchers to explore areas of common interest for future collaboration, including integrative medicine, global health, brain mapping research, gut microbiota research, migration studies, food security in China, and energy and environment. Hank Walker/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images