Dr. Gloves meets Emily Lau

Emily Lau at HKIST

Doctor Gloves has been back in Hong Kong for 18 months. Returning as a lecturer at HKIST University, he is about the only academic who provides specific courses on Hong Kong society.

Gloves complains at his heavy timetable – six hours a week, but fortunately he only teaches Monday and Friday. This gives him plenty of time to pursue his passions for music and painting. Indeed most nights of the week he can be found performing with a Philippino band at the ferry terminal, playing Bee Gee covers. How cool a moonlight is that?

Today, Emily Lau is invited into his class. Lau was the first woman to be directly elected into the Legislative Council (LegCo), in September 1991, and co-founded The Frontier party in 1996. She served as a legislator until 1997, and was re-elected in 1998.

In 1998, she sued the Hong Kong branch of the Xinhua News Agency due to the latter's slow response over her queries for personal information. She lost the case and was ordered by the court to pay a legal fee of HK$1.6 million. Claiming that her lawsuit was in the public interest, she attempted to raise funds from the public to repay the debt. In December 2000, with over $1 million still outstanding, the agency (now the Central People's Government Liaison Office) applied to the court for her bankruptcy.

Besides being a victim of such institutionalized repression, Lau has been the subject of several criminal nuisance cases, including telephone nuisance to her office in January and October 2003, and two cases where food and/or faeces were splashed outside her office in Shatin in July and September 2003. A woman and an old man were arrested and fined in connection with some of these cases. Most notably, an arson attack against Lau's office took place on 21 June 2004. Posters outside her office, about an upcoming rally, were burned. Words were left saying "All Chinese traitors must die”. Paradoxically, such attacks exemplify how much her fight for freedom of speech remains relevant in today's Hong Kong.

Asked how the students responded, Gloves notes “They were quite in awe. She was passionate in her opinions. Not a whole lot of substance in the talk, but it was quite interesting to hear how she and her colleagues have been banned from entering China."

Lau is planning to have some of the students work in her office and run a voter registration drive.

Dr Gloves swanks it up in the exclusive Mandarin Oriental