As a former trustee of a non-profit Hong Kong legal educational trust, I joined its legal study tour to Foshan, Guangdong, China from March 23-25, 2018 to celebrate its 30-year anniversary. Other participants were former scholars of the trust and those who had contributed or facilitated in the knowledge transfer process. The legal study focused on the concept of one-country, two systems, from constitutional principles to conflicts of rules.
I met up with a professor who also sat in my Hong Kong University (HKU) School of Law admission interview in 1981. I befriended with a judge whom I first appeared before in a civil application in the District Court in 1986. The legal issues studied reminded me of my submission in the Basic Law consultative exercise, suggesting the establishment of a constitutional court in Hong Kong post-1997, and my other contribution thereafter.
I also met up with some of my former colleagues in the Attorney General's Chambers (AGC) from 1985 to 1991. For those who stayed put in AGC, they retired years ago; and for those who switched to private practice, they are still practising, witnessing the dynamic scenes now and then. At the gala dinner, I was surprised that the HKU Faculty of Law Dean invited me to join him in singing a song to entertain the host and the audience!
When I was 19, I wrote a work entitled "Part of the Cosmos", suggesting what matters to us as humans in the universe. If I had expanded the context infinitely large, there is still no instance to falsify that we are the lonely intelligent beings in the cosmos. While I am curious if we are just located at different parts of "space-time" (ie no past, present or future), the study tour has definitely brought my past, present or future together!