The Starlet and Life in Wah Yan College Hong Kong

The Starlet Collection

1985-86

Vol 21 First Issue December 1985

My predecessor, Lee Kwok Chuen, asked me to take over the role of the Chairman of the Starlet as soon as the school started. It was really an honor and a surprise. After 2 years of devotion and experience of being a reporter of the school newspaper, I did have the passion and desire to try running an organization. The first month was to form the Editorial Board. To spread the workload and to arouse interest of the lower form students to get publication experience, I decided to enlarge the editorial board and invite as many students as possible for different roles.

For the next 2 months, while we were designing the content and collecting articles, I spent much time to learn the skills of typesetting, making the draft ready for printing. This was something new that I had never learned before. The printing company was very professional in offering assistance during the drafting process. Every page requires manual arrangement of placing the articles to fit the space, selection of font size and style, advanced planning in photo taking and more important, reserve space for advertisement as this was our key revenue source. With the assistance and devotion of Tam Sai Chung, our Art Designer, many creative art work was done.

I tried to make the school newspaper more entertaining and informative by adding interviews with character outside of the campus. One of the interviews was with Mr. Peter Cheng, a pioneer tour escort who travelled to North Korea. His travel experience in this hermit kingdom was truly insightful. Another interview was with Mr. Lo Ying Hum, who was responsible for producing the long term radio program, “Breakthrough Moments", which was popular among young audience.

The Editorial for the first issue was about the history of The Starlet. I was very passionate about my new role and wanted to know everything about the school newspaper inside out. Hence I read many past issues and dug out the reports from The Star, our school magazine, to research about the history of the Starlet. We also tried to find topics abut social events. The year of 1985 also marked the 40 anniversary of the end of World War II. Bernard Yue and many others interviewed our teachers and fathers and recorded their life during the war. There was a section about the history of Wah Yan during the war. 1986 was also the year when Halley's comet was close to the Earth. Albert Tsang wrote an article about this astronomic event.

In Chinese section, the front page was about the leaving of Mr. Raymond Yu. He dedicated most of this is life with Wah Yan College and was highly respected by all Wahyanities. Mr. Yu passed away in 2018 in Canada.

Anthony Poon had an interview with Mr. Siu, the social worker in school, about how people should look at their life in a positive way. The trend of young people committing suicide was getting serious. This article was truly inspiring.

After 3 months of preparation, the first issue of Volume 21 was finally came out in time right before Christmas on December 20, 1985.

Photo taken on the day of the publication of the first issue of Starlet on December 20, 1985.

Yau King Yin (Left) John Tam (Middle) and Anthony Poon (Right).

2021...25 years after the interview

Light--突破運動40年特刊

鄭彼得在旅遊樂園接受訪問時攝鄭彼得在旅遊樂園接受訪問時攝

「戰地領隊」盼重出江湖遊遍阿富汗伊拉克疫下懷念烽火遊蹤塔利班重奪阿富汗政權後，全球關注當地局勢轉變，但真正深入烽火陣地的港人寥寥可數。「戰地領隊」鄭彼得10年前開始踏足戰地，多年來帶團走遍伊拉克...

Second Issue - Mar 1986

When the Editorial Board was looking for a key topic to be featured on the 2nd issue of the Starlet, we were all on the crossroads of paving for our future. Some classmates might be bright enough to admit into the universities in Hong Kong, while some were looking at opportunities of continuing the studies abroad. Studying in Hong Kong was quite straight forward and there is not much excited to talk about. Studying abroad would be a new experience for all so we would like to give an overview of how the life of studying abroad would be like. To make this topic more interesting and relevant to the audience, we decided to use the letter format from true overseas students to introduce the actual situation of studying in Canada, the US and Australia, the 3 popular countries for overseas studies. Besides, we interviewed Mr. P. T. Chan and Fr. Barrett who expressed their opinion about studying abroad. It took a total of 12 editors and reporters to produce this key topic on the front page. To make the design more creative, we even made the Chinese preface in round shape, which required much efforts to arrange wordings line by line.

For interview with character out of the campus, this issue we wanted to unveil the mystery of the City Magazine, by inteviewing its editor, Mr. Fung Lai Chi, who was is also a well known Music Critic in Hong Kong.

In English front page, we interviewed 2 Assistant Principals, Mr. Chau and Mr. M.S. Cheung, who replaced Mr. Raymond Yu to be the new Assistant Principal in 1986.

馮禮慈，香港樂評人。評論文章多年來發表於香港報章雜誌如《壹週刊》、《明報周刊》、《號外》、《香港周刊》等等，並曾創辦及主編《Top》音樂雜誌與《豁達音樂誌向》。2000-2002香港藝術發展局評論組顧問。中國多個流行樂頒獎禮評委。香港中文大學新聞與傳播學院客席講師，講授《香港流行音樂--製作與賞析》。曾出版雜文集《在都市的森林和原野》、《雷射人》、《石屎人》、《號外Yuppies》、《不是甚麼哲目》、《都市輕觸覺》和漫畫集《人間閒話》。

香港流行文化的可能與限制：以《號外》為例

2015/04/30 來源：服諾網

《號外》創刊於1976年9月，創辦人陳冠中參考外國地方報刊，或外國綜合文化周刊《村聲》等模式，在香港創辦一份包括新新聞體的報道、嬉笑怒罵的城中八卦與點滴的文化報道和短論的小型報紙。早期的創辦人和主要作者如陳冠中、丘世文、鄧小宇等都是有識之士，亦有新聞觸覺、幽默筆觸，第一期就以報道贊育醫院輸錯血的另類新聞引起注意，其後更以靈活尖銳地討論本港流行文化尤其是電視文化得到廣泛支持。凝聚了不少城中話題、都市感性、語文戲劇，在文化評論方面，如丘世文對「純粹中文」觀念的反駁、陳冠中對余光中「狼來了」政治事件的指責，以及介紹種種新知、肯定本地文化，都是在主流意識籠罩之下，較早較敏感也較直接地作為知識分子從事發揚批判論述文化的工作。

《號外》是流行文化中一個相當豐富的文本，的確可以作為研究對象，但研究者亦必須理解《號外》經歷幾個時期的轉變，由早期小型報紙的形式，到中期的雜誌形式，而至與養德堂合作後的大型豪華版本,不僅是形式不同、定位不同、讀者群不同，雜誌的方針也不同了。而且每個時期不同的編輯(70年代的陳冠中、胡君毅、鄧小宇、丘世文……80年代的岑建勛、馮禮慈、邵國華、簡國慧、周肅磐……90年代的黃源順、趙德強、麥成輝、蘇蘊婷……)也各自帶人了不同的風格和取稿標準，因為不同時代的潮流風氣各自作出不同的轉變或適應了。

During my Lower Six year, I almost carried the same orange bag every day. Inside the bag were tools to make the newspaper draft, and original articles collected from all the editors. It was how devoted I was to the Starlet in that year. It could have paid more attention in class and spent more time on studying but I found the experience I gained from running the Starlet and the time I spent on making success for each issue was worthwhile.

Third Issue - June 1986

With more experiences in typesetting and printing , we thought the publication of the 3rd issue would be easier. But in fact we still need another 3 months to make a birth of a new issue. English section focused very much on the school news and activities. The front page was about the championship of the Intershcool English Debate Competition. This championship brought a lot of excitement to the school. We were pleased that the Debating Team was classmates from Lower Six Science, i.e. Leo Goodstadt, Marcus Chen, Clement Tham and Timothy Wong. So we interviewed each of them and let them expressed their views. In addition, the Topping ceremony of the new school building, later called Gordon Wu Building, was held on April 6, 1986. Starlet of course recorded and reported this important milestone in our school history. One of the breakthroughs in terms of the design was the centre page which reported about the Student Festival. We maximized the section by breaking the printing margin so it gave more space to cover more content. We printed a total 6 papers = 6 pages for English and 6 for Chinese, which required us to have sufficient articles or topics to cover the space. For Chinese section, the front page features a hot topic of "Today's Television" which talked about the competition and declining TV viewership. A very meaningful topic about a character outside of campus in this issue was the interview with Mr. Ng, who talked about his personal experience during the Vietnamese War. This inspiring interview was a good reminder to us that we should treasure living in a peaceful time.

Fourth Issue - September 1986

I believe it was the first time The Starlet was published in September. It took us almost 3 months of preparation to publish an issue as we emphasized very much on the quality of the articles and the design. Hence, during the entire school year we were able to publish only 3 issues. But we decided that it would be even better if we could spend our summer holidays on the production and get the 4th issue printed at the beginning of the (next) school year when students just returned to school and might feel eager to know what was written on the school newspaper. With the whole summer holidays to decide on the key topics and collect articles, we found the content was rich and meaningful as we touched on even more social topics and had time to analyze in depth the topics that we would like to share with our fellow students. In Chinese section, the front page feature was titled " Unroot Your Bad Habits/Weaknesses". It analyzed the weaknesses of the Chinese people. This topic was inspired by the Sino-British negotiations about the future of Hong Kong and was an exploration of our own national identity as a Chinese. Another article was about the new nuclear plant in Daya Bay in China. Kwok and Ng made an analysis about its strengths and weaknesses, and its impact to Hong Kong society. In English section, we put the article about "Sects in Hong Kong" on the front page as it was a hot topic for during that year among the public. Tsang wrote about "English in the 80s". After a few decades some words are no longer new but it was interesting to find some words or phrases were in trend in the mid 80s. On the Editorial Board, there was an appreciation statement to Fr. Reid S.J. I do not remember what had happened but I believe it was very likely that Fr. McGaley was out of town and he asked Fr. Reid to edit all our English articles. The 4th issue was not the thickest issue among all 4 issues but it was definitely my most favourite issue because we had more time to prepare and proofread and we spent much time on quality control before it was published. It was also the last time we devoted our time on school activities before we focused again on our own studies.

Soon after the publication of the 4th issue, we made a handover to the next Editorial Board.

Editorial Board of Starlet in 1985-1986. Staff of Starlet were formed by students across Form 4 to Form 6. Everyone was given a Starlet pin of its logo.