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"I'm really the end, the last generation of people who can reach through because the elders are still there, but they are getting very rare now. They are getting fewer."
Dealing with the elders is difficult in many ways. There are areas that cannot be addressed, such as women's issues, and often the older generation will fall into their own native dialects, such as Wai Do, Yuen Long Wah or Hakka.
Hase started telling me a joke about the differences in the dialects and how a sentence in Cantonese can be made to sound completely different, and not very pleasant, in another dialect. I didn't get it, but I enjoyed listening to the historian tell it.
Hase worked for many years in Shatin as district officer, which made getting interviews with the elders a lot easier. When Hase retired from the civil service, he was deputy director of the Urban Services Department. He is currently running his own consultancy firm and most recently testified in the capacity of Fung Shui specialist in the Spur Line case,
the controversy over the building of a railway through Long Valley, a bird haven that supports more than 200 species.
Hase took over the RAS presidency in March and has agreed to serve for three to four years.
"We are a middle-aged gweilo society, but I'd like to see us a little bit less," said Hase. "We're always going to be a middle-aged gweilo society but I'd like to have a lot, a much higher percentage of young Chinese members even if it was always to remain a minority. But how to do this? We've been thinking for 20 years and not been able to come up with any solution."
Membership as of March 12, 2001 stood at 477, which includes 391 local and 86 overseas members. A hundred new members had been recruited between the end of January 2000 to March 13, 2001.
Instead of trying to recruit from the public, the society hopes to get new members with the potential to best serve the society. These include graduate students in anthropology, archaeology, history and sociology.