Bulletin No. 1, 2024

against a lack of hostel places. Dr Choh-ming Li, the then Vice-Chancellor, decided to build a temporary hostel as a quick fix and appointed Professor Young as vice-chairman of the management committee for the new facility— which came in the form of four half-cylindrical metal huts (now still standing) at the fringe of the Sir Philip Haddon-Cave Sports Field. “The environment was terrible. The four huts accommodated 80 students each, with three huts for boys and one for girls. No air-conditioning was available, nor any warden to take charge of matters—who among the teachers would want to move in?” Nevertheless, what was planned to be a five-year provisional hostel ended up remaining until the early 1980s. Yet those were the days when the life of teaching was the most relaxing and enjoyable, he adds. This was so even though a teacher back then did not earn a handsome salary or receive large sums His first impression of CUHK was that it was really “out in the boonies”. “The atmosphere here was so different from the city centre,” he recalls. “The train came only once an hour and ran on diesel. The train station was called Ma Liu Shui, not University (Note: the station was renamed in 1967). It was still a one- track system. A station staff member would hand a big rattan ring to the train driver (who would pass it to the staff members of the next station), to ensure the single-track line had only one train at a time between two stations. This is something young people cannot imagine today.” At that time, CUHK was a fledgling institution with limited resources. For example, two or three offices shared a telephone number. “And when someone rang, all three offices would ring together.” The internet age was yet to come, and even fax machines were not easily available. “It was a big deal to make an international call—you needed to seek approval from the department chair. I think I made only two or three calls overseas in those days.” It was therefore very difficult to get the latest updates about the academic field. “What we could do was to invite international scholars to give a speech on our campus when they happened to visit Hong Kong, so we could get some trends and developments from them,” he says. Apart from teaching, Professor Young had early tastes of administrative tasks way before he was appointed Pro-Vice-Chancellor in 1994. In 1973, students went on a campus march to protest 1 2 When I spoke about the verse ‘Nothing left, in my hands’, I myself was touched, but their reaction was mild. 28   Chinese University Bulletin | Kenneth Young