Right

Never in the history of our country has any illegal immigrant made the headlines more than a 12-year-old boy who has lived in Hong Kong with his grandma since the age of three.

When I picked up a copy of South China Morning Post on my flight to London, I noticed that his story appeared at least twice in the news today.

But the distance between this mainland boy and me, ultimately, can be measured in light-years. I'd be more interested in the education of our local children. I skipped that boy's story, but found much more interesting feature articles. One of them is about local children's writers who named their favourite picture books for youngsters. I know some of the recommendations (like The Gruffalo); some others I had to jot down in my bucket list.

Another opinion article on the second page of the newspaper drew my attention. It's about the twisted education race, the tutoring centres that rob our toddlers of their childhood by training them how to handle interviews for kindergartens and primary schools. Remember the tagline in the education centre's poster, "You don't like competition? But competition will find you?"

Say those last two sentences out loud and wonder at them. There's never a shortage of places to keep the local kids busy, dizzy or, at best, crazy. Who knows how far that cutthroat game could go?

Terrible, yes.

But it's not one-tenth as thrilling as watching a local documentary of kids' after-school work. I watched a replay of it on the plane. Be grateful you (or your primary school kid) never had to keep track with the incredibly packed timetable of ten homework assignments, as what the poor kid did in the documentary. Yes, ten assignments. By his mum's account the boy is talented enough to finish each item within ten, maybe fifteen, minutes, setting time aside, around 2 minutes between each, for play. That doesn't make sense to me.

There is, of course, an escape hatch. Its name is Plan B. The boy asked his mum, "May I be excused, just for a short while, to go poo-poo?"

Yes, that's allowed. But I tell you, the Plan B is to swap the play time with poo-poo time. All his mum can do is, quite literally, hold her breath and wait for the poo-poo time to finish as quickly as possible.

I have no interest in defending a child's poo-poo time. That's as basic as a human right, and definitely much less controversial than the right of abode for an illegal immigrant. As a parent, I just want to remind myself the 10-minute rule: We should expect all homework assignments together to last as long as 10 minutes multiplied by the student's grade level (or perhaps 15 minutes if required reading time is included). If you don't believe in this rule, go and ask the National Parent-Teacher Association in the United States.