Bulletin No. 2, 2020

Coming Closer at a Distance: Snapshots of CUHK in the pandemic 27 Photo by Eric Sin F or Irene Ng and her team at I·CARE, 2020 felt like a lost year. Their Floral Festival, which was to herald the coming of spring to campus, was cancelled, leaving Lake Ad Excellentiam just short of excellence with no one there to marvel at its blooms. Their plan to have Joseph Sung , former Vice-Chancellor and President and one of I·CARE’s architects, to bid CUHK farewell before he sets out for his new position in Singapore also took a hit with the strict disease control measures in place. Approval for his lecture at Sir Run Run Shaw Hall was sought back in September, and yet it kept being postponed. Not ready to give up, Irene kept following up and making her case, and finally it was given the green light—only that the event, bound to take place in January 2021, was postponed again, this time sine die . But 2020 only felt like a lost year after all. ‘We don’t want to be cut off and lose contact with our students, so we carried on with our interviews and training in the first half of the year, only they now took place on the Internet,’ said Irene. The team had in fact been thinking of migrating to the cloud for some time as the pandemic broke out: the idea was conceived when the first term of the 2019–20 academic year was cut short amid the social unrest. Thankfully, the enthusiasm for I·CARE events among those within and outside the University had not abated. Invitations to speakers for their six Secret Talks were readily accepted. There was even a guest for one of their trainings, who, diagnosed with cancer, stuck with the programme and only broke the news upon its completion. ‘I feel so blessed for all the support I·CARE gets,’ said Irene. Currently, the Centre offers online training for the Community Research Scheme (CRS) and the Social Enterprise Startup Scheme (SESS) in the first term and