The reports are out – Hong Kong’s teens are officially apathetic. Brouhaha looks beyond the knee-jerk teen blame game to the bigger picture and finds the problem in the fabric of society.

‘TEENAGERS DO NOTHING’; the message glowers out at me from the thinly written report in the paper. ‘TEENAGERS HAVE NO GOALS’; a lefty feint. ‘TEENAGERS HAVE NO INTERESTS’; there’s the right hook square on the jaw.

Upon first reading it’s hard not to take aim at the apparently aimless. The recent survey organised by the Caritas Jockey Club Integrated Service for Young People (whew) suggested that teenagers in Hong Kong sport a hea attitude, a Cantonese slang term used by youths to describe an aimless outlook, meaningless meandering, laziness and apathy. The survey found that 7 percent of local teenagers spend, at minimum, six hours a day either doing nothing or doing something they’d classify as meaningless. The survey found that nearly half of teenagers rate themselves as more hea than not. It certainly is easy, when looking at the raw data, to get in a huff and a puff and blast the sorry suckers. But we all know there is much more to it than that.

Social workers suggested that this is down to teenagers either lacking specific goals or interests or having yet to discover them. When reading that, sometimes you can’t help but indulge in some quick-trigger agreement. We’ve all seen these groups of teenagers, secondary schoolers who wander around the street or sit in parks or at Internet cafes, whiling away the hours until it’s time to go home to dinner or bed. For most of my teenage life here in Hong Kong I did the same thing. But that did not mean I didn’t have interests or goals, even if they were submerged in my subconscious, just vague murmurings that would now and again surface when I was feeling particularly philosophical.

I don’t believe that today’s youth have no interests or goals either. It seems that the beast that is popular opinion in Hong Kong is always willing to throw young people under the bus, is always willing to wag its finger and say that young people don’t push themselves enough or exercise their imaginations. I say that isn’t the problem here, only a symptom.

Hong Kong has an abundance of creative, funny and imaginative youth – they’re all just hidden, peppered amidst the throngs of shuffling feet that garnish (or pollute) our pavements. The proliferation of this hea attitude, of this almost intense apathy and carelessness, has got to do with so much more than the average teenager’s mindset alone. Hong Kong has changed so rapidly for so long that those of the previous generation are never really in touch with those of the current. I’m in my early 20s and I’m already hopelessly lost as teenage fads come and go at speeds that would embarrass a photon.

When I read a report telling me that teenagers do nothing, that they lack interests or goals, I wonder at the ability of the city of Hong Kong to provide openings to those sedatedbut- definitely-present interests. There are the tired arguments like the rote-learning education system; the hovering parents who insist on piano, violin, and mathematics tutoring. Or what about the pseudo-latchkey kid who’s more in tune with his domestic helper than his mother? Labelling is a problem that forces teenagers to shy away from youth centres and other such agencies. These all contribute, to be sure, but isn’t there something else about the nature of the city? The nature of its people?

Hong Kong is densely packed. We’re all like sardines in a can most of the time. The live-and-let-live attitude which most seem to operate on exists because we’re all in such close proximity. Do anything out of the ordinary and you’re instantly labelled, categorised, judged and filed away for future reference. Does this not greatly inhibit the exploration of interests in young people? Has standing out become so terrifying that teenagers would rather spend their days doing nothing?

Does Hong Kong even really allow for the exploration of interests that lie outside the realm of computers, television, the occasional band and window shopping?

I find it highly doubtful that the young mind in Hong Kong is absent of these urges to be creative, to nurture a hobby or flex its imagination. What I find more probable is that the intense stereotyping the people of Hong Kong engage in is helping to foster this aimlessness in the young. Teenagers are incredibly astute (even if they don’t know it) and rapidly pick up on the signals that the city sends them. Being teenagers, those signals are likely then magnified which in turn heightens their receptivity to it. The CJCISFYP (whew) study may be suggestive of a problem but we can’t go charging youngsters as the culprit, as having no interest or ambition.

Perhaps it is the people of Hong Kong who need to look at the youth with a more open eye and create opportunities – real and lasting opportunities, not the summer camp type – for teenagers to explore their interests. Perhaps in a city where the slightest idiosyncrasy is often regarded as a massively weird oddity, the youth need a gentle kickstart to their imagination engines, a slight push just to gain that initial momentum.

Interests often bloom late in this city. It’s not a symptom of a problem in the youth. It’s a symptom of a problem surrounding them.

Words: Hugo Stanford

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