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conversation F.M.O. officials made it clear that from the beginning they had consciously been combating the pariah status of the Shui-sheung-yan, or "Tanka" as they had been called by ordinary Cantonese. The word “Tanka” is an opprobrious term, with rather ambiguous and shifting ethnic and occupational connotations, like "nigger", or "tinker".
The first schools for the children of fishermen were established by the F.M.O. in 1947 and 1948, two in villages on Hong Kong Island, and two in the New Territories. By 1968 there were thirteen primary schools, and one secondary school with a primary department, at Aberdeen on Hong Kong Island. In 1980 this primary department was given a separate school building on the island of Apleichau, which is joined to Aberdeen by a new road bridge. Education in these schools has always been free.
During the early years of the scheme ordinary primary education in Hong Kong was neither free, nor sufficient. In 1956, however, the Education Department began to subsidise the F.M.O. schools, and since then there has been general progress towards free compulsory education in Hong Kong. In 1978, the first three years of secondary education were also made free. Where there are no F.M.O. schools, and inadequate Education Department provision also, the F.M.O. sometimes pays the fees of fishermen's children at privately run schools, like the Po Kwong school, which is actually located on a boat in Yaumatei typhoon shelter. The Po Kwong boat school is run by an evangelical Christian group called International Missions Inc. It was known as the “Jesus boat” to boat-people activists struggling for re-housing; although they were working with Roman Catholic social workers, they firmly declined to take me to it. F.M.O. scholarships are also available for higher studies.
It is not entirely true that no fishing community children were educated before the F.M.O. schools began. Some parents did send their children to school at great sacrifice to themselves, sometimes to traditional Chinese schools, such as that run in the temple on the island of Kau Sai. This school, however, largely served the Hakka land-based population on the island, and when these Hakka were re-housed on the mainland, it was replaced by an F.M.O. school. Before the Second World War in Canton there were even Trade-Union-run Shui-sheung-yan schools. Conditions were, perhaps, however, more difficult for the sea-going fishermen's children of Hong Kong, away for days at a time from all land contact on occasion, than for the riverine salt-traders and transporters of Canton. Before mechanisation very few fishing parents could afford much by the way of school fees. Without the F.M.O. schools it is unlikely that the revolution in literacy would have
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