原創平行對齊閱讀篇章

Marcus had never been the kind of student teachers remembered. So when he wheeled his project — a tangle of copper coils, a humming battery pack and a glass tube that glowed faintly green — into the school hall, nobody expected much.

It was the glow that caused the trouble. Mr Pang, the chemistry teacher, took one look at the bubbling tube and went pale. “Everybody back!” he shouted, herding students towards the doors. Within minutes the hall had been cleared, the caretaker summoned, and a small crowd had gathered outside, whispering that the new boy had built a bomb.

Marcus, who had simply mixed a harmless fluorescent dye into warm water, stood beside his project in bewildered silence.

By the time the panic subsided, the judges had decided that any project frightening enough to empty a hall must be a work of genius. Marcus was awarded first prize for “Innovation and Daring”.

He accepted the trophy with a fixed smile. Later, a junior asked him to explain how the reaction worked. Marcus opened his mouth, paused, and admitted that he was not entirely sure himself.

For Hong Kong’s small community of guide-dog users, the hardest obstacle is rarely the traffic. It is the closed door.

Wendy Lau, partnered with her labrador Coco for three years, says she is turned away from shops and minibuses “almost every week”. “People assume Coco is a pet,” she explains. “They don’t realise she is my eyes.” Her tone is weary rather than angry — the resignation of someone who has explained the same thing a thousand times.

Ordinary commuters, by contrast, are often quick to help. Several passengers on the MTR described the dogs as “remarkable” and said they would gladly give up a seat.

The official response is more measured. A transport spokesperson confirmed that trained guide dogs are permitted on all railway lines, but added, carefully, that “enforcement against individual minibus operators and private premises lies beyond our jurisdiction”. It was the language of an organisation reluctant to promise more than it can deliver.

For Wendy, such caution is cold comfort. “A rule that nobody enforces,” she says, “is just a sentence on a poster.”

Madam Ng did not teach the piano so much as wage war on it. Every wrong note I played was met with a sharp tap of her pencil on the music stand — a small, precise act of violence that made me flinch more than any shout could.

I was nine, and I hated those Tuesday afternoons with a passion I could not name. My fingers, she said, were “lazy soldiers who would not march”. My phrasing was “a wilted flower”. For two years we circled each other like duellists, the metronome ticking between us like a referee counting down.

My parents, oddly, never intervened. When I begged to quit, my mother only said, “Finish what you started,” and returned to her newspaper. I read their silence as indifference, and it stung.

It was only years later, when my own hands found their way through a difficult passage without fear, that I finally understood. Madam Ng’s pencil had not been cruelty; it had been a kind of stubborn faith. And my parents’ silence had not been neglect. It had been a door they left deliberately ajar, waiting to see whether I would walk back through it on my own.