School Daze
Trial & Error’s Leung Yik-ho and Hui Yin try to examine Hong Kong’s brutal exam culture.
Once Upon a Time in HKDSE
Director: Leung Yik-ho
Featuring: Tang Ngai-hong, Hui Yin
Hong Kong • 1hr 59mins
Opens Hong Kong July 4 • IIB
Grade: B-
When I got to the advisor meeting at university I learnt I was three-odd percentage points too short in two high school classes to automatically earn the full year’s credit towards my degree I could have. Dammit! I got 18 of a possible 30 credits instead. Dammit!! Point is, I was short on the grades, but I got into my school of choice anyway – because I didn’t need a bloody exam to do it. Is that system better? Who knows, but it was certainly didn’t spawn celebrity cram school tutors.
Which is kind of the roundabout point of Leung Yik-ho’s Once Upon a Time in HKDSE | 公開試當真, the feature cobbled together from over 300 hours and 200 days in the gruesome run-up to the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education Examination – the HKDSE – that will ultimately determine student Tang Ngai-hong’s life, originally taken from the popular YouTube channel Trial & Error’s series (legendary editor William Chang Suk-ping lent a hand). Almost everyone who lives in Hong Kong is aware of the controversial test, almost everyone knows a kid that’s had to sit for it, and almost everyone has heard about the spike in juvenile suicide in recent years, much of it laid at the feet of the exam. The HKDSE is ripe for dissection.
Should it be this way?
But Leung and producer Hui Yin, who himself failed the test and re-takes it alongside Tang, aren’t really interested in a direct assault on the system (they couldn’t anyway) so much as a picaresque slice of Tang’s life and some reflection by Hui about the legacy of the DSE and his life now. Tang is getting ready for the 2023 edition of the annual trauma, and is told by private tutoring centre hotshot YY Lam (da fuq, seriously?) he should have started much earlier than four months prior to the five (!) tests. Tang’s a fan of football, a natural gadabout, and isn’t terribly diligent when it comes to school. But, of course, if he fails to find the 33222 holy grail of points on the DSE he kiss a worthy life good-bye. Yikes.
The more humorous B story, such as it is, follows Hui as he reconciles his own failure a decade before, puts the exam in context of his life in 2024 and chats with his charmingly frank mother about her choices and her regrets as they relate to driving Hui’s academic lunacy – lunacy that’s being repeated by the army of tutors and rigid scheduling Tang is tackling.
Once Upon a Time in HKDSE is enlightening for Hongkongers who didn’t go to school here, and maybe the few kids in sheltered international schools for whom another set of exams awaits. And it doesn’t matter how it ends. The pithiest parts of the film come from comments by other YouTubers, Pomato personalities and local media types (actor Neo Yau Hok-sau shows up) who reminisce about the stress of the exams and lament how securing a place in university via the HKDSE is the only barometer for any kind of brains/skill/character/ambition/creativity that counts. Many of them wonder how university admission became more important than a life. No one says it, but college drop-outs Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg and, erm, cough Li Ka-shing (who didn’t even make it to secondary) loom large. Leung and Hui’s probing is gentle; the questions never get too tough, but as a peek behind such an opaque and baffling curtain it’s a good start. And I’ll tell you one thing: If I had to take that exam I’d have zero university credits. — DEK