HKU Bulletin June 2011 (Vol. 12 No. 2)

Politicians do it, military leaders do it, even actors and celebrities have been known to record their exploits in memoir form. But rarely are those exploits narrated by a toy poodle. But that is exactly what prize-winning dramatist and lyricist, Mr Rupert Chan, has done. Chocolate's Brown Study in the Bag , is a delightful memoir told from the point of view of his family's three-year-old toy poodle, Chocolate. Mr Chan, who also happens to be Deputy Registrar and former Faculty Secretary in the Faculty of Dentistry, clinched a publishing deal with Proverse after his book made the finals in their inaugural prize. The memoir, his second book in English, was prompted by the joy of owning his first dog. "I genuinely feel that it's a blessing that we have Chocolate in our family, so I wanted very much to write about him and this Proverse Prize provided a good incentive." "Toy poodles are the most intelligent small dogs and I am beginning to learn from him," he says. "I am fascinated by the fact that he's always so happy." A dog's life He takes inspiration from his friend Lydia Chan, a columnist for the Hong Kong Economic Journal . "She keeps a cat but as a pet owner she wrote once about how some people lament the short life of a dog. But, as she says, the dog is very happy, so it more than makes up for the relatively short life. They know how to keep themselves happy all their life while human beings spend much of their time trying to find happiness and more often than not failing." After agreeing to care for a friend's poodle while she was overseas he and his wife were hooked. "We fell in love with the dog. So our children made us a gift of a dog for our 30 th wedding anniversary. They were very thankful too because after we got the dog we stopped nagging them!" In his spare time, when he's not walking the dog, Mr Chan - Chairman of Directors of the Chung Ying Theatre Company - translates plays and operas. He began in the 1970s when he was asked by opera producer/director Lo King-man to write the Chinese subtitles for an Italian opera. "He said that without Chinese subtitles the local audience just wouldn't catch on. Then the expatriate audience protested that there were no English subtitles. So, in a way, I think Hong Kong took the lead in using sub-titles for opera." "There has been resistance to it in the west but I like to think that I made a contribution in popularizing opera in Hong Kong." A clutch of awards In 1990 he received the Hong Kong Artists' Guild Playwright of the Year Award. He wrote also the lyrics in Mandarin of Nine Regions Singing As One , for the 1997 Hong Kong Reunification with China, which won the Most Performed Original Local Serious Work Award from the Composers' and Authors' Society of Hong Kong. He has translated over 50 operas and over 50 plays for the Hong Kong stage and wrote the subtitles for the 1998 film City of Glass . But he considers the challenge of translation to be cultural rather than linguistic one. "It is not just moving from one language to another but from one culture to another. I once taught drama translation and the funniest thing I remember was a student translating an Australian play. It started with a stage direction 'the female lead is ironing clothes with her right hand and "The challenge is always to find the right Hong Kong setting to fit the story. I have adapted several of Shakespeare's plays into Chinese settings. In 1986 I translated Twelfth Night by moving it to the Tang Dynasty, which worked because it's such beautiful poetry. Using modern Chinese would have defeated the whole purpose." On June 30 Mr Chan retires after 23 years at HKU. Formerly Head of the then-External Relations Office he says, "I am proud to say that I was Head of a large office in those days and now it's broken up into three or four independent ones." "But what am I most proud of is my gift as a talent scout; I have selected staff at interviews and have always made the right choice. For example I picked Isabella Wong who is now Director of China Affairs, and Esther Kwok, her second-in-command. "I may not have done a lot but I have done this, and when I was head of External Relations I told the staff 'you are going to do all the work, I will do nothing because I am Head. When you have done the work well I will get the glory because I am the Head of the Department, and when you have done something wrong I will get the blame because that is only fair. I have tried to support my staff because they supported me. I give my staff a free hand and I trust them to do their work, I don't interfere. I think they appreciate that." with her left is brushing away flies'. It came out in the Chinese translation as 'she is brushing off the buttons from the trousers.' I asked why the student had complicated something so simple and she said 'I don't think there are flies in such an advanced and clean place as Australia. So I looked it up in the dictionary and found the slang word flies to mean the fastener on trousers so assumed it meant buttons.' That's because the girl had never been to Australia and wasn't aware that there were so many flies there." Finding the right setting Two of his translations - Tuesdays with Morrie and Steve Martin's The Underpants were staged in April. " The Underpants is a German play translated into English by Steve Martin. I've moved the whole thing to Hong Kong in the 1960s and turned the original Jewish character into a Communist. Mr Rupert Chan (middle of the second front row) and colleagues of the then External Relations Office in 2001. Mr Rupert Chan (right) as guest speaker of HKU Students' Union's English Society Academic Forum on March 15, 2011. Music and Chocolate HKU senior administrator and literary figure, Mr Rupert Chan, who retires this year, talks about his passions. People 45 The University of Hong Kong Bulletin June 2011