ON A busy street in Mongkok at night time, we boarded a taxi to go home after a nice dinner. My husband immediately called the other taxi driver not to come–before I started to get into this taxi, he’s used his cell phone app to call for a taxi, though I didn’t realize it until we got onto the taxi.

This current taxi driver whose car we have boarded was moaning and mumbling that if we have already called a taxi, we shouldn’t have boarded his. We have assured him that the other taxi driver has just responded to our call–thus, he called my husband to accept the order. So, we immediately told him that we didn’t need his service anymore. So, he hasn’t accepted the order and hasn’t started coming yet.

I asked him, “You have experienced a client dumping your service after you have responded to his call?”

Sounding helpless, he admitted it.

I probed, “Then, he must have been a young fellow who did that. We, in our generation, would never do this. If we have called and made a commitment to a driver that we have needed his service, we would wait for the driver to come. We would never hop onto another taxi even as it’d be available. It would be a waste of the other driver’s gas to come to our site and then such a letdown if we’d change our mind and forgo our commitment.”

The taxi driver sighed. Indeed, he said that the young people in our Hong Kong society have grown up to become so ruthless and inconsiderate that “they don’t even know what respect and perseverance is.” He blamed this phenomenon all on the former Leader of the Hong Kong Education Bureau.

Looking like he’s an older but wise man, he must have had enough experience to say this, having observed people for decades as a taxi driver in this local Hong Kong metropolitan city, who has undergone the turnover of governance to become as a Special Administrative Region of China for the past 20 years since 1997.

He said, “I have seen people … it’s not that I am a parent, or anybody like that to say this, but it is the last 10 years that I have seen the quality of Hong Kong’s young people to have gone outrageous. These past 10 years, when so and so was in the office!”

It was apparent that he disliked this former government high official quite a bit.

I exchanged a few notes about what I have heard from friends about that former government official in education. Indeed, he hasn’t gotten much good impression from most people.

I further probed, “What were wrong with the education in Hong Kong?”

The taxi driver said, “Young people don’t know how to respect others! For one thing, the famous Chinese essay entitled ‘Arrogance and Prejudice’ has been taken away from the Primary One curriculum! When we were a Primary One student, the first things that we had to learn in the Chinese language lessons were ‘Good Morning! Good Afternoon! How Are You?’ Nowadays, kids don’t learn that!”

He furthered, “Learning Chinese is not just learning Chinese words, it is learning about our Chinese culture and relationships, how to live in harmonious relationships with others, treating others with respect.”

I could not agree with him more. “As a parent of a Grade 3-4 kid, I certainly know.

“In their Chinese textbooks, there are often too many new Chinese vocabularies to learn at each lesson. But their teachers could not have had time to teach the meaning of each and every single unfamiliar Chinese idioms to the students in class. Thus, the students could only skim as many words as they could, but they were not able to understand deeply what each idiom means, because they were not given enough time to learn each one, the teachers had no time to teach each one.

(to be continued)