XN000022-1979-06-14 — Page 9

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Hong Kong needs, and deserves, a new generation of concerned,

committed young people who will ask not what can we make out of

Hong Kong, but what can we do to help make Hong Kong a cleaner and

better place in which to live: a community which cares.

SOLA NOBILITAS VIRTUS are the words written on your school

crest: Virtue Alone Ennobles. A truly high and splendid aim. Virtue

embraces many qualities excellence, courage, goodness, probity,

-

compassion. And talking of compassion, I am sharply reminded of a

story which I heard just yesterday of one of the many Vietnamese

refugees who have escaped from the misery, the horror and the brutality

of life in Vietnam.

A Vietnamese Chinese girl, aged 14, left Vung Tau in mid-April,

with her mother and father, and a brother aged 4. This is her story:

All

"I used to go to school but then the school was closed.

Chinese schools were closed and ... because we were Chinese we couldn't

and helped

go to school with Vietnamese children. I stayed at home

my mother

and I used to play with my friends but my friends all

went away

[

"My teacher used to come to visit my father in the evenings.

He used to come to the house after dark and they would talk for a long

time ... and then there was a 'curfew for Chinese and it was difficult

for him to come. Nobody came then nobody came to see na ... my

father went out sometimes, in the daytime, but my mother stayed at

and with my brother.

home with me

--

"It was lonely.

morning and

"Two men came one afternoon and told us to be ready the next

after they had left my mother was crying. She sat on

the stairs, holding my brother in her lap, and she cried and I couldn't

comfort her. And my father was putting things in a suitcase and was

cross with us because we weren't helping him. It was very late before

I went to bed.

"And we were