“Jump off the building, commit suicide!”: a sombre journey towards trust, self-importance, storytelling, and collaborative teaching and learning in Hong Kong through a proposed i.e.poetic-memoir

This chapter investigates a series of poetry events and direct experiences that occurred prior to the Hong Kong protests and since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, addressing the following question: How can poetry be used to show the Hong Kong university student the importance of personal thought, experience, and references to the self throughout the entirety of the student’s university life? It proposes, based on these occurrences, and by incorporating creative practice-based research as both framework and methodology, an i.e.poetic-memoir, resulting, specifically, from my personal observations of the rift in trust between teacher and student; Hong Kong’s familial and governmental beliefs and practices; “Lucky Eighteen” poem I had written as an enquiry into the experiences that led to my brief state of depression on a February morning in 2018, and which I had read at the 2019 Writing Roundtable Conference; and the recent dialogue between former students of mine from an English Language subject and myself on poems they had written in response to “A Moment in Life” activity. Consequently, these allowed me to infer a much needed teaching and learning opportunity for both student and teacher alike. In this chapter, the “storytelling” elements are reflected in the narrative-style of what I propose as a memory process through poetry. For Hong Kong’s current young adults, the city’s current infants and the ones who will be on their way, the necessity to ensure that their personal experiences, thoughts, and identities are given attention, that they are able to verbally refer to themselves as individuals, as I, me, my, mine, and possibly we and us, we should avoid addressing this only when it has already become a matter of urgency.