Dear Wah Yan Conference attendees,
Welcome to San Francisco, the gateway to the Pacific and the far east. Hope you are all enjoying the sunshine that the State of California claims “the best in the world.” While you are winding down from the excitement during the World Cup matches, we are bringing you 3 full days packed with events. In addition to meeting new alumni and finding long lost friends you have the chance to participate in our theme open forum discussion, the foundation building process for helping in constructing the future Wah Yan Community.
We are pleased to have Mr Luke Wong to be our Conference Keynote speaker, presenting and kicking off the theme discussion, Towards A Global Watt Yan Community. Luke, a Wahyauite himself, (Class of 59) is the Director of Student Affairs at the University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong. He also chaired the previous Wah Yan International Conference (1992 Hong Kong). Two full sessions are devoted to this theme discussion as we expect heavy participation from our fellow alumni.
The 1994 World Cup captured over 32 billion television audience featuring eight “Firsts” including the largest client-server computer network environment ever used for a single sporting event, the same computer technology – Sun Microsystems workstations and servers will be linking 3 major hubs (San Francisco, Hong Kong, and Vancouver) exchanging newsletters, distributing event announcements and maintaining the global Wah Yan alnmni database featuring fully automated and interactive membership information retrieval system. The world was impressed by the first computerized World Cup database to provide journalists around the globe with instant access to information, the same software and hardware environments allow Wahyanites the same access to membership information around the world and around the clock. A prototype will be demonstrated at the conference with the Phase 1 fully operational (2 hubs, San Francisco and Hong Kong) by the end of 1994. The San Francisco hub will act as the gateway to the Internet. The Information Superhighway is not a hype presented by Vice President Al Gore of the United States, it is coming to the Wah Yan alumni community, as the Conference theme suggests!
We hope you all will enjoy the cool breeze and romantic moments during the dinner cruise, and the sunshine during the scenic drive along the California coast, not to mention you might have already established new business contacts or shared hobby interests among fellow alumni. I am certain this 3-day weekend will bring lots of memory for the years to come.
Finally, I would like to thank our two Conference Advisors, Mr Philip Ching and Mr Raymond Yu, who not just provided input to the loglstics of organizing an international event, but provided contacts for the financial support arrangement. We would like to express our appreciation to the San Francisco Chapter's Mr & Mrs Ambrose Wong, who provided guidance, leads, contacts, and financial support to bring to you the best programs. Our committee members, Stan Chow, Oliver Ko. Johnson Lee, Peter Lal, Alexis Wong, Justin Wong, and Timmy Yu, who all spent numerous sleepless nights in making this a successful conference. Finally, to Thomas Ngan, who acted as my pier in Hong Kong. Thomas spent much of his time in designing and implementing the conference logo and banners. I must have missed out several names…. Without their valuable support, this conference would never have been possible.
With best regards,
Kelly Chang, Organising Committee Chairman
4th Wah Yan International Conference 1994
San Francisco, Califomia
It is a great pleasure to welcome you all, Wahyanites from every corner of the world, to the 4th Wah Yan International Conference being held here in our beautiful San Francisco Bay Area. Our conference theme is “Towards a Global Wah Yan Community.” This indeed is a pressing challenge for us who would like our Wah Yan Spirit to flourish despite the fact that more and more of our Wahyanites are dispersed around the world. The Wah Yan International Conferences have been very successful in helping us strive towards a global community. I sincerely hope that this 4th International Conference will again help towards this goal.
Our chapter is a very young one. The San Francisco Chapter was only recently incorporated in late 1993. For this, we owe a great deal to Mr Kelly Chang and Mr Oliver Ko to make this all possible. Moreover, most of our committee members are in their twenties and early thirties, just starting a career and a family, yet we are all committed to make this chapter a successful one. We would like to make up for our inexperience with our hard work and love for our Alma Mater. Special thanks have to go to Mr Ambrose Wong for all the valuable advice and help he has given us.
Finally, I would like to thank you for coming to this 4th Wah Yan International Conference and may the Wah Yan Spirit flourish among us.
Alexis Wong, President
Wah Yan College Alumni (San Francisco) Association, Inc.
My dear Wahyanites,
I have just seen Nigeria scoring a goal against Greece. Think of it! Here I am in Hong Kong watching a game between an African and a European team taking place in Boston, U.S.A. By the time the World Cup Final comes along the eyes of countless millions of people all over the world will be glued to T.V. screens watching __________ and __________ (If I knew how to fill in those blanks, I could make a bit of money for the Wah Yan Development Fund!)
The effects of the World Cup may not be very deep and long lasting. However, the huge interest generated by this competition can help us all to get to know one another a little better and to have some admiration, understanding and sympathy for those very different peoples represented on the screen.
The World Cup Final will be taking place in California. In California too, will be taking place another world-wide get-together – 4th Wah Yah International Conference. We must admit that it won't get exactly the same amount of publicity but, nevertheless, it is important to us.
Our getting together at this conference will enable us to establish even more firmly the ties that link us all to-gether wherever we are. We are now a global community but the community was born in successive stages on three quite small sites: Hollywood Road, Hong Kong; Robinson Road, Hong Kong and Queen's Road East, Hong Kong. We are unified in our source. With care and effort we can be unified though widely separated.
I am confident too that the secondary aims of the conference can be achieved. We can and must influence for the better the communities in which we are living and, I am sure, the Alumni will be able to enhance and reinforce the education currently provided in Wah Yan.
To the organisers of the conference I extend congratulation for all that has been achieved so far. To you all I extend a warm welcome.
Yours sincerely,
John C. Coghlan, S.J.
Principal
Dear Fellow Wahyanites,
Finding a convenient time and a suitable place for getting together is no easy task. I hate to decline your kind invitation to the 4th International Conference; but owing to prior commitments and pressure of work, I have to do what I hate doing. If the meeting had been ten days earlier, I would have been able to attend at least some of its sessions, for I was then in Los Angeles with my family. I wish to thank all those people who have helped to make this meeting possible; and Kelly Chang is to be specially congratulated on his success.
As the International Conference is one of the important vehicles for keeping us together in the same family, I wish to share with you the joy of the meeting and some of my personal observations of what unites as.
We have all been educated in a rather strange school. The school appears to be loosely organised. In this respect, our Alma Mater falls nicely into the category of “loosely coupled systems” in modern organization theory. It is claimed that in a loosely coupled organisation, nobody knows exactly what another person is doing. This makes management difficult. I think this is the situation in many schools and educational institutions. Our school is, however, a very well managed one. This is because of strongly rooted traditions and beliefs.
All at Wah Yan, teachers and students alike, work for the good of the school and try their best, always feeling that they have not done enough. They are given the freedom to do so. This has resulted from the Ignatian vision of personal response to God and the “mallis” (trying to do more and more in response to God's love).
This is the mark of Wahyanites and what makes us unique: We had been given the opportunity and freedom to pursue our own interests and encouraged to answer God's call in our own ways. We had been trained to be critical on a value system gradually acquired through our years in Wah Yan. We do not just do what others do and just say what others say. Yet we love and accept people as they are, became we ourselves had not been in any way rejected by our school on account of our mischievous but harmless behaviours. Instead of being explicitly asked to win fame for the school we were told to work hard for human excellence so that we might serve the world better. In the end we are all different; and yet we are so much alike. We find pleasure in conversing with each other about our visions and experiences, and in knowing more about our school. We hope to help our school grow in its established tradition so that future Wahyanites will share the same characteristics as we do. This is also what keeps us together, and I sincerely hope that this will be the force which moves us towards a global Wah Yan community which has already begun to take shape.
I shall be brief. Fr Coghlan and Fr Deignan will certainly have much deeper thoughts to share with you; for they are the people who taught us through their personal examples. I hope to be with you in future conferences; for I still remember the good time I had during the 3rd International Conference in December, 1992.
Yours,
Norman So Chung Ping
Principal, Wah Yan College, Kowloon
Graduate of WYK, 1965
When we meet as alumni, among other things, there are always expressions of our appreciation of the education we received in Wah Yan and our wish that through our different roles in the community in contributing to Wah Yan in one way or another it can provide an even better education for the generations to come.
With our alumni scattered in different parts of the world, our feelings and aspirations have not changed. In the three international conferences held in 1988, 1990 and 1992, we have re-affirmed ourselves that under the Wah Yan spirit, our unity will give us strength. On this occasion of the fourth international conference, we are asking ourselves two bold questions. In what way can we through our collective strength contribute to the betterment of the community where we live? In what way can we enhance and reinforce the education provided in Wah Yan?
Our strength is twofold: our readiness to serve and our bilingual and bicultural upbringing. At the present stage of world development, the end of the cold war, the economic upsurge in East Asia, the information technology revolution and others, the world is undergoing some drastic structural changes politically, economically and socially. With few exceptions, all communities in the world have become tolerant to diversities in languages, cultures, believes and ways of life. The world is in a rapid process of moving towards a global community with emphasis on acceptance and respect for diversities. The new generations of this global community have to be educated to be multi-lingual and multi-cultural so that they can accept and respect diversities.
We are among a small group of elites who have received a sound Anglo-Chinese education and have the experience of living in a cosmopolitan city at the gateway between the east and the west. With large numbers of us now settled in the new world, and with our united strength, we are in an excellent position in the promotion and introduction of an Anglo-Chinese education in some communities in the new world. One method in achieving this goal is for us to set up and run Anglo-Chinese schools in the new world in the way as what the Jesuit Fathers had started in Hong Kong 75 years ago. With the school open to children of all kinds of background, I am sure within a few decades, it will educate another group of elites with a good bilingual and bicultural upbringing to be future leaders of the global community. Through this, we are able to fully utilize our strength in serving the world community and in promulgating the spirit of Wah Yan.
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If you would like to supply any extra information about this conference, please contact ic2002@wahyan.ca. Thank you. |