HKU Bulletin February 2004 (Vol. 5 No. 2)

37 36 PEOPLE I t should come as no surpr ise that Dist inguished Visi t ing Professor Michael Halliday, as a world-renowned linguist, should be a man of many words. But he has a story to tell. A British Intelligence Officer in World War II, Halliday went on to watch the Chinese revolution unfold in Beijing – and then to feel the chill of the Cold War back at home. What links the many lives that Halliday has lived has been a love of language – Chinese in particular – and the determination to help people understand the world they live in. Born in 1925 in the U.K., Halliday had quit school early in 1942 to take up intensive study of Chinese for the British armed services. By 1944 he was serving in Calcutta, India, working in Chinese intel l igence and helping to make sense out of the confused situation in wartime China. Released from the army in 1947 Halliday experienced China at first hand when he went to Peking University to continue his Chinese studies. He recalled: “The situation was chaotic, with fighting never far away. There was rampant inflation – I did some part-time teaching, and we were paid partly in kind and partly in stacks of currency note, which had been printed by an English playing-card company and were worth about the same as their other products! It was clear that the Chiang Kai-shek government was nearing its end.” The Allure of Language For the second half of his three-year stay in china, Halliday was present at the dawning of a new, Communist-run era. He was impressed by the initial achievements. He said: “The great thing was that right away the new government stabilized the currency, and in this way earned themselves a lot of merit. They brought order.” He was tempted back to Britain in 1950 with the offer of a scholarship at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. His return, however, was something of a shoc “ k E . ngland was very different from when I had left it”, Halliday said. "The country was in the grip of the Cold War. I lost my position at London because I refused to promise not to join the Communist Party. Instead I went to study in Cambridge, where the authorities did not join in the witch-hunt.” After studying Chinese dialects, and the early history of Mandarin, Halliday moved over into the comparatively new subject of linguistics. He said: “I wanted to help to give value to less recognized varieties of language, like children’s speech, informal talk, languages outside the standard western canon.” Halliday went on to Edinburgh, then to University College London, and finally in 1976 to the University of Sydney, from where he retired at the end of 1987. Since then he has been something of a roving academic. He has worked in Singapore, Birmingham and Tokyo, before coming to join our Faculty of Education in September of last year. Halliday started working with language educators in the early 1960s, and has maintained that commitment ever since. When he was approached by Amy Tsui, Professor: Chair of Curriculum Studies, who has known him for twenty years, he could not resist the challenge of one final year in that endeavour. He said: “I started my career in China, and this is where I shall be happy to end it.” F rom the top of a bank of filing cabinets containing 140,000 index cards, The Reverend Carl Smith pulls down a small wooden plaque that sums up his life’s work. “If I ever do get it all together,” it reads, “I doubt I will be able to figure out what it is.” The Rev. Smi th has spent four decades recording the minutiae of Hong Kong and Macau life onto those index cards, and the idea of trying to make sense of all of them makes him laugh. “I understand some of what that [plaque] means,” he says. At 85, The Rev. Smith is probably the oldest historical researcher in Hong Kong and certainly one of the more respected – he recent l y was honoured as a Distinguished Fellow by the Centre of Asian Studies. What started as a schoolboy curiosity about his family background has become his passion, which he still pursues despite failing eyesight. He has researched local history, especially genealogy, since high school days when he began investigating his ancestors’ lives. “I went to libraries and archives, and I became interested in the communi ty these people were in, what their l ives were like, what they did in it – the local history,” he said. “It became my hobby.” When he came to Hong Kong in 1961 with his church (later part of the Uni ted Church of Chr ist ) to teach theology to Chinese students, he brought his hobby with him. “I started out looking at Chinese Christians, but to do that I had to look at everything. I made cards for many things relating to the Hong Kong area and up to Shanghai – people, places, institutions, opium, prostitution, all sorts of things,” he said. The story he uncovered was largely one of upward mobility. Chinese Christians were taught English and used that skill to became compradores or businessmen or work for government, as The Rev. Smith reported in two volumes of essays written from 1965-1985, Chinese Christians: Elites, Middlemen and the Church of Hong Kong . But his insights into Chinese Christians are only part of the legacy of his efforts. The information he has collected about daily life in the region, recorded by hand or typewriter on his index cards, is useful to any local historian. Grand Old Man of Hong Kong History The Rev. Smith draws his material from birth and death notices, shipping and court news, church records, land deeds and wills, visits to cemeteries and any other records he can find. He is also able to read records in Chinese and Portuguese. A copy of his index cards is kept at the Public Records Office in Hong Kong and at Tokyo University, for any researcher to use. This lasting contribution to local and regional history led to the Distinguished Fellow honour for The Rev. Smith, who since 1971 has pursued his research while working odd jobs. The Centre of Asian Studies summed up his contributions: “We are indebted to him not only because we can use his data or read his writings. He has encouraged and advised scores of scholars, listening patiently to their ramblings and sharing his insights. To them, he has been a great source of inspiration through his tireless dedication to scholarship, his insatiable intellectual curiosity and great love of knowledge.” The Rev. Smith is slightly embarrassed by the accolade (“I don’t know why they gave it to me,” he mumbles) but does not have time to give it much thought. After a 40-minute interview, he is off to another appointment, before departing for Macau, where he is filling in the gaps of Macanese history for the Cultural Institute of Macau – and adding to his collection of cards.