I arrived at my mother's home for our Monday family dinner. The smells of food flew over from the kitchen. Mother was pulling out quilt (被子) after quilt from the boxes, proudly showing me their beauties. She was preparing for a quilt show at the Elmhurst Church. When we began to fold and put them back into the boxes, I noticed something at the bottom of one box. I pulled it out. “What is this?” I asked.

    “Oh?” Mom said, “That's Mama's quilt.”

    I spread the quilt. It looked as if a group of school children had pieced it together; irregular designs, childish pictures, a crooked line on the right.

    “Grandmother made this?” I said, surprised. My grandmother was a master at making quilts. This certainly didn't look like any of the quilts she had made.

    “Yes, right before she died. I brought it home with me last year and made some changes, she said. “I'm still working on it. See, this is what I've done so far.”

    I looked at it more closely. She had made straight a crooked line. At the center of the quilt, she had stitched (缝) a piece of cloth with these words: “My mother made many quilts. She didn't get all lines straight. But I think this is beautiful. I want to see it finished. Her last quilt.”

    “Oh, this is so nice, Mom,” I said. It occurred to me that by completing my grandmother's quilt, my mother was honoring her own mother. I realized, too, that I held in my hands a family treasure. It started with the loving hands of one woman, and continued with the loving hands of another.

    As you enter university, you are likely to be confused by new demands and challenges. You need to decide for yourselves what you want to achieve when you graduate. It is important that you have appropriate and realistic expectations of a university education and know how far you can go towards achieving your personal and academic goals, so that you will have a sense of achievement at the end of your first year as well as when you graduate.

        This website aims to be a quick one stop information hub to help you understand more about learning at HKU and make better use of HKU's support services.

    University Life is an adventure that—literally everyone here is a key player.

    Your strategic moves at each stage have a direct impact on the outcomes of this adventure. The key to winning is mainly about how you manage your resources, especially your time. Most successful players engage themselves in activities that meet their needs and goals.

    First Year Experience

    As a new player, you may find yourself standing at the crossroads and wondering which directions you should go. An open mind for handling new challenges and a roadmap or planning and setting priorities during your stay at     HKU are what you need to start your journey.

    And don't forget to check out the following to familiarize yourself with the 'game rules', 'support and resources' and 'opportunity cards' on hand:

    * HKU Education aims to help to fulfill what you are expected to achieve.

    * The key cards that contribute to your academic, professional and social excellence, e. g. Horizons Office, Common Core, Centre for Sports and Exercise (CSE), Centre for Applied English Studies (CAES).

    Honeybees can do three kinds of jobs.

    It is one of the most unusual insects in the world. Bees are special because they divide up their honeybee work. Each bee has a certain job to do.

    The busiest bee is the worker. Workers build the nest, called a hive. Inside the hive, workers make a honeycomb from wax(蜂蜡). They store honey there for food. Workers are always cleaning and fixing the hive. They even stand at the opening and fan their wings to cool the hive. Worker bees will attack anything—even people—to keep their hive safe, if need.

    Another kind of bee is the drone(雄蜂). Drones are male bees, and their job is to fly with the queen bee and mate with her. After the queen mates, the worker bees drive the drones away. The drones then starve to death.

    The third kind of bee is the queen. Each hive needs only one queen, and her job is laying eggs. She can lay as many as 2, 000 eggs a day.

    At 29 years old, Ding Ding, who has cerebral palsy (脑瘫), has been accepted to Harvard University. Ding Ding succeeded in his academic studies and overcoming many of his physical disabilities because of his mother's persistence(坚持不懈) and endless love.

    In 1988, when Ding Ding was found born with cerebral palsy, Doctors suggested to his mother Zou Hongyan that she give up the baby, saying it was worthless trying to rescue him as he would grow up either disabled or with low intelligence. Even the boy's father agreed with the doctors and told Zou that the boy would be a burden for the family for his entire life. But Zou insisted on saving the boy and soon divorced (离婚).

    To support the family and provide treatment for her son, Zou took up several jobs. In her spare time, she regularly took Ding to a recovery hospital. She taught herself how to exercise his muscles, and would also play educational games with him.

    Zou also insisted from the start that her son would learn to overcome his disabilities as far as possible. She insisted on teaching him how to use chopsticks during mealtimes, even though he found this extremely difficult at first, so he would not have to always explain his disability to others when he had meals with them.

    "I didn't want him to feel sorry for his physical problems," she said. "Because he had poor abilities in many areas, I was quite strict on him to work hard to catch up where he had difficulties. "

    Ding graduated with a degree in environmental science from Peking University's school of engineering in 2011. That same year, he took part in a second degree program at the university's international law school. In 2016, after working for two years, Ding was accepted into Harvard Law School.

    "I never dared to dream of applying to Harvard," Ding said. "It was my mother who never stopped encouraging me to give it a try. Whenever I had any doubts, she would guide me forward."

    They were a happy family: four daughters all in the same school in different grades. The youngest, Janice, who was in my class, seemed to be glued （粘）to her mother's skirts. The three older girls took the bus to school every morning, but Janice was always driven to school by her mother.

    One Friday, Janice's mother asked for a talk with me. She said in a soft voice, "My husband is going to Europe on business for two weeks, and he insists that I go with him. I have tried to explain over and over that Janice needs me here. But he thinks that she will be fine without me so I have no choice; I have to go. I have told the babysitter to drive her every morning. Will you please give Janice special attention and help her? I want to be sure everything goes well for her." I told her that we would make every effort to support Janice. I even volunteered to meet Janice at her car so she would see a familiar face. As a mother myself, I'd like to help. Janice's mother thanked me for our understanding.

    On Monday morning, expecting a tearful, anxious child, I planned a special program of fun and games. I waited outside to greet Janice, but just then the bus arrived and not three, but four girls got off. Janice skipped along joyfully, saying "goodbye" to her sisters as she ran with two friends into the classroom. I walked slowly into the classroom and called Janice over to ask how the bus ride went. Impatiently she said, "Oh, I always want to take the bus with the other kids, but Mother needs to be with me. You see there won't be any more babies, so I have to be a baby a little longer. While she is away, I'll just ride the bus every day. I am five, you know.

    When Iwas.in the third grade, we had a hunt at school. We gathered up chalk，pencils，stones, and so on, rapidly filling our checklists. It was a very close race. I was out of breath when I reached the clover (三叶草)patch in search of the last, most hard-to-find item: a four-leaf clover.

    I was pretty sure that I was going to win. 1 have always been able to find four-leaf clovers. I just see them.

    I spent my childhood collecting and pressing four-leaf clovers into books at my mother's house. I started with big cloth- and leather-bound books. When I ran out of romantically bound volumes, I began to put my treasures into anything I could find: fiction paperbacks, cookbooks. The same is true in my house today. Shake a book, and a papery treasure just might fall into your hand.

    A few years ago, in Nova Scotia, my husband and I pulled off the road for a picnic. The ground was thick with clover. Some shoots had four, five, even six leaves. I lined them up on the picnic table to admire as my husband, never yet having found one four-leaf clover, looked on with awe. To me, it was simple. The differences in their shapes popped out, breaking the pretty pattern of the conventional clovers with their three perfect leaves.

    Two summers back, while waiting for an airport shuttle in Munich, I found a tiny four-leaf clover in a traffic circle and put it into my passport. On the way home, my husband and I were upgraded to business class. Friends attributed our good luck to the clover. I think, it's more likely that we were upgraded because a kind customer service officer took pity on us.

    People disagree about whether the luck lies in the finding or in the possession of a clover. Some believe that the luck is lost if the four-leaf clover is even shown to somebody else, while others think the luck doubles if it is given away. I believe that positivity is increased by sharing. I feel lucky to find the clovers so often, but I don't think they influence my life any more than it does to share anything a little special—that momentary closeness between you and a friend or a stranger, as you all lean in to wonder at a rare find.