Music lessons for disadvantaged Hong Kong children bring hope and possibility of finding passion

At 5pm on a Friday, a modest, ground-floor office in a Sham Shui Po housing complex becomes a jumble of small bodies and snatches of music. Students in different school uniforms stream into the back room to line up in neat rows or pull instruments out of their cases. A boy with a saxophone half his size blows out a few initial notes; another pings out one final scale on a silver xylophone before the instrument is pushed to the side to make way for the night’s choir practice.

Among the small crowd of arriving children are Mei-yin, 11, and her brother Pui-lam, eight. Their father, Louis Chan, travels over an hour each way from the family’s home in Kwun Tong to bring his children here, the main centre for the Music Children Foundation. Here they join music lessons that the not-for-profit group offers to poorer students in Hong Kong.

“It’s not easy to bring them back and forth all this way, but it’s worth it to see them learning and improving,” says Chan, who stopped work due to a long-term illness yet continues to bring his children three times a week.

“They love coming so much, if I took it away, their lives would feel empty.”

Chan’s son and daughter are among more than 1,200 Hong Kong students who take music and singing lessons with the foundation. The group was founded in 2013 by music educator Monique Pong in Sham Shui Po, one of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods.