Death of Kaka Kaka is gone. The life of a little dog unlike the moon does not interchange between full and new There is no brightness common to all only the days when we have played and lived together 2014.9.17

August 16 poem August 16 (lunar calendar) --Ben Tsui Our green youths have turned yellow whether it is August 15 or 16 it is definitely autumn But the indecisive days still lay in ambush ahead of us How many Moon Festivals we have to go through and how many lanterns we have to light or not be able to light will the long night be cleared up by a final stroke of luck Yet there are always unique contours of faces appearing in the flickering of flames If we call it beauty who can object ?

Mid-Autumn Festival poem Today is Mid-Autumn Festival in China, when the moon is brightest and fullest during the year and families have their reunion dinner, eat mooncakes, and children are allowed to play with various kinds of lanterns till late at night. For those who cannot reunite with their families, they can still watch the same full moon in different places and think of each other. Here is a poem I write in Chinese originally: <August 15> Day in and day out of this secular world however tired I may be on this prescribed night I have still to summon up my best strength to write a reunion chapter for all this is the glory of the moon or is it because behind my brightness hides the ever-encouraging sun? 2014.9.8

Changing the world with the children To a friend, I once had the same idea as yours: changing the world with the children. But around ten years ago, I had an experience of teaching to a young girl living opposite our flat. She was just a kid, indeed we saw her growing up since her birth. My parents even helped to raise her before and during he went to the kindergarten. It was then that I tried to teach her some easy short poems, thinking that it will do her good when she gets older. There was no difficulty for her, she just treated it as a game or a song. And she liked it very much, feeling happy when she could recite the whole piece. But the problem come with her parents. Her father insisted that she had to learn to write the characters at the same time (you know how difficult the Chinese characters are). And her mother always complained, saying that reciting poetry did not help the kid to get good marks in school, that it was a useless hobby wasting her time of study. After a few poems, she did not come to our house. I used to hear a lot of scolding and shouting, commanding the girl to do all the homework assigned by the school (in Hong Kong children are bombarded with homework very early in life). She obviously did not like it at all. I imagine if she could choose, she would rather come over our place to play, to eat, and to recite poetry. Now she is studying primary school, she often stays home surfing on the net, not as active as before. Those happy smiles in childhood are lost in her face. She gets fatter and doesn't like to say hello to you. I think she suffers from a bad image of her self. I don't know how to help her nor what to say to her. Teachers are very important, but parents are even more significant. My failure was that I could not change the child, without first changing the attitudes of her parents.