These are the questions that Imelda Lam, Ph.D., GRE ’15, faces every day.

Lam is a curriculum developer in the Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong’s Religious and Moral Education Curriculum Development Centre, a group that produces teaching and learning content for religious schools and provides professional training for religion teachers. In 2006, she began writing religious education textbooks for Catholic schools across Hong Kong. Lam and her colleagues create content for both teachers and students, including instruction guides, lesson plans, PowerPoints, audio files, and videos. So far, they’ve developed textbooks for children ages 4 to 15, and they’re currently working on books for older teens.

Their textbooks touch on topics like love, ethics, temptation, and moral decision-making. Lam’s team selects the stories, activities, and biblical references that make it to publication—and it’s no easy feat. Lam says, for example, she has struggled with choosing the right words to talk about premarital sex, which Catholic teaching says shouldn’t happen.

“But why? How do you guide them [students]to think about that?” she said.

Lam, a Hong Kong native, began working at the Religious and Moral Education Curriculum Development Centre in 2006. That same year, the Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong released its first centralized curriculum for Catholic schools. It became the guiding point of the material that Lam and her colleagues use in their religious education textbooks.

After a few years, her life changed. Lam, who had previously been a primary school teacher for more than a decade, wanted to become an educator for religion teachers. She also realized that if she wanted to create the highest quality teaching aids for educators and their students, then she needed to strengthen her skills and continue her own education.

In 2011, Lam enrolled in the religious education Ph.D. program at Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education. She says the most useful thing she learned at Fordham was a deeper style of teaching. In Hong Kong, many religion teachers educate their students by reading stories from the Bible, singing songs, praying, and creating arts and crafts. But Fordham taught her that this is not enough.

“To teach religious education is to have them have a bigger mind,” Lam said. “To understand the meaning of life, and to think about Christian values.”

Their current curriculum is no longer limited to activities like storytelling and singing. Lam says religion school teachers are now more focused on providing reflective activities, like encouraging students to share their own experiences and the lessons they learned. Then they, in turn, can model this behavior when teaching their young students.

Let’s say a teacher is talking about the concept of forgiveness, Lam said. She might have them reflect on when they’ve been angry with someone, and vice versa. Did they forgive them? Have they been forgiven by someone? How did they feel? They can bring this reflection back to their work in the classroom.

“Children learn by experience,” said Lam, who is also a part-time lecturer in teacher training at the Caritas Institute of Higher Education, a post-secondary college in Hong Kong. “Learning through their own experiences and other’s experiences leads them to think bigger, and think more about life and values.”

Nearly half of Hong Kong’s Catholic schools—150 out of 270—have adopted the local  Catholic Diocese’s curriculum, Lam estimated. Most of the students in these Catholic schools are not Catholic. But everyone can learn something from a Catholic education, just like at Fordham, she said. In other words, a Catholic style of teaching can help the younger generation become thoughtful citizens and make wiser decisions in their lives.

“When you are growing up, you need to make decisions every day, every minute—to choose what to do, to choose a boyfriend, to make a family,” she explained. “Why don’t we teach the young guys [students]to know how to choose?”

“We don’t force them to accept Christian values,” she emphasized. “But at least they have the chance to know them: how to reflect on being a better person, how to have a bigger dream, how to have a meaningful life.”

Luk was born and raised in Hong Kong. At 14 he moved to Boston, where he attended Boston College High School and was encouraged to consider Jesuit colleges. That’s how he found Fordham.

“I was invited to join the inaugural class of the Global Business Honors program at Rose Hill,” he says, “and I was offered a scholarship. I was thrilled.”

At Fordham, Luk majored in accounting but pursued a variety of experiences. “I had a professor who told me to explore careers beyond accounting as well because he saw I had an adventurous mindset,” recalls Luk, who had once attended a career fair on campus where he pitched himself to Oglivy as a valuable intern during the Beijing Olympics. He got the job and spent the summer of 2008 in Shanghai, working primarily on an Adidas campaign tied to the event.

“To a certain extent, I became quite fearless,” he says. “I didn’t go through a linear trajectory. When I was offered an opportunity, I went with it. The mentality is quite Jesuit, if you think about it—magis, you should always do more.” After graduating in 2011, he joined a hedge fund in New York before deciding to move back home to Hong Kong. There, he joined Morgan Stanley and immediately contacted Fordham’s Office of Alumni Relations about creating a local alumni chapter.

The group’s big events include a yearly summer bash on a junk boat as well as a winter party on a double-decker tram car that travels the city. And, of course, there’s the Hong Kong Regional Reception, coming up on November 18 this year.

“The majority of our conversation revolves around our life in New York, and we talk quite a bit about U.S.-China cultural differences,” Luk says of the gatherings. “But we are also a part-time job placement agency, helping new members find connections.”

This is an area Luk has a lot of experience in, as he and a few of his Morgan Stanley colleagues founded Bright Minds Capital, a private equity firm, just three years ago, when Luk was 26. He says his Fordham experience certainly helped prepare him to connect with people from all over the world, which has been helpful in his career. “There aren’t a lot of programs where you can travel to Argentina, Beijing, and London over the course of your four years of college,” he says of the Gabelli Global Honors program.

He hasn’t had the chance to return to New York City since he moved back to Asia, but he’s looking forward to visiting the Rose Hill campus again this spring. He’ll be in the city attending classes as part of the master’s degree program in global finance run by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in partnership with NYU.

In the meantime, he will keep connecting with his fellow Rams in Hong Kong.

“I would say that the most practical service I can do is to make sure that everyone who comes to town not feel lonely. I want Fordham graduates who visit Hong Kong to feel that they have people here who have their backs.”

Fordham Five

What are you most passionate about?
I am most passionate about three things: investments, culture, and community. When I mention investments, obviously there’s my passion for the financial services industry. But there is also the investment in people. I’m passionate about making sure I help maximize people’s potential. In terms of culture, I’m an avid music fan, and I play violin, so the performing arts are huge for me. I also speak three Chinese dialects and English, so I enjoy bridging different cultural gaps. And that’s tied to how and why I like to form communities. When people are not informed, misunderstandings start to happen. And I’ve seen many times where people make mistakes when they’re too lonely, without a community.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
The best piece of advice I have received so far came from my late high school Latin teacher, who I used to spend every Thanksgiving with. He once said that the pursuit of happiness lies not in the pure achievement of goals but in recognizing and taking alternate paths, even when you have the ability to achieve your original goal. The advice actually came through an analogy of reading a book all the way through even when you realize you don’t like it. He believed that, if you really don’t like a book you’re only reading for pleasure, there is no point in finishing it.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
My favorite place in New York City is Carnegie Hall. I used to be a season ticket holder, and I love going to see classical music symphonies and concertos. There was also a great deli right next door, Carnegie Deli, that made a great Reuben sandwich. In the world … I don’t think I’m well-traveled enough to figure that out. But right now, I’m very happy to be in Hong Kong. In my mind, it’s a sort of perfect East-West place.

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
The summer before I started at Fordham, we were assigned The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. The book made a lasting impression on me because of its powerful message of how someone can create one’s destiny through openness, persistence, and sincerity. It shows how, if you take a leap of faith, you can end up in a place you would never have imagined. 

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
Paul Lynch from Fordham’s accounting department. He shared his personal story of how he decided to pursue academia after his financial career, and he helped dispel some of the myths I had heard about the financial services industry. Some people overglamorize it and wear the suffering and long hours like a badge of honor. But he was candid about it, and he provided me with a new perspective so I could walk into this career with open eyes.

And then people saw the movie he co-produced in Miami. Released last fall, it was acclaimed as one of the year’s best films, breathtaking and groundbreaking, “a poem written in light, music and vivid human faces,” according to The New York Times. It won dozens of awards, including the Golden Globe for best drama, and it’s in the running for eight Oscars—including best picture and best director—at the 89th Academy Awards on Feb. 26, which Hevia plans to attend.

The movie is Moonlight, a drama about the tribulations of a young black man growing up in a struggling Miami neighborhood known locally as Liberty City, where the movie’s Oscar-nominated director, Barry Jenkins, grew up. Hevia, who earned a master’s degree in media entrepreneurship at the Gabelli School of Business, spoke to FORDHAM magazine from his home in Los Angeles about the importance of making movies like Moonlight that show a locale’s true character.

How did you become involved in the making of Moonlight?
Barry Jenkins and I both went to Florida State film school for undergrad, and one of my best friends was co-producer on Medicine for Melancholy, Barry’s first feature, which he shot in San Francisco in 2007 while I was living there. I loved the idea that they were filmmakers from my program who were actually making films from the ground up, outside the studio system. When it became clear to me that Barry had made a movie about San Francisco that people later talked about as the definitive San Francisco film, because of the look and feel of it, it bothered me on a level that is not rational that Barry wasn’t making that movie in Miami about Miami. I made it my goal to get Barry back to Miami to make a movie.

Then, in 2010 or 2011, Tarell Alvin McCraney gave me a copy of his unfinished play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue—the story that eventually became Moonlight. I introduced him to Barry, gave Barry a copy of the play, and told him, “This might be the thing you make in Miami.” Time passed, Barry digested it, then the veteran producer Adele Romanski got wind of it, and she and Barry got Plan B, Brad Pitt’s production company, and the distributor A24 involved. They told me, “You’re the Miami guy. You should come on as co-producer.” I went to Miami after graduating from Fordham to start laying the groundwork.

Why did you feel so strongly about having Barry Jenkins make a movie in Miami?
When people think about Miami, they think about media produced by people from outside Miami, which often misses everything about the city that makes it such a strange and unique and wonderful place. An organization I co-founded in Miami 10 years ago, the Borscht Film Festival, is devoted to telling Miami stories—ideally, stories that go deeper than the South Beach or Miami Vice portrayal. One of the great things about new media is that more diverse voices can speak up for themselves, and communities can speak for themselves, so the goal of Borscht was to build that for Miami, a city of diverse voices. Again, one of my goals was always to get Barry back, and I did—in 2011, we produced a short film called Chlorophyll, in which Barry explored Miami with new eyes after growing up there and then finding his “voice” as a filmmaker in San Francisco.

What do you think Moonlight does for perceptions of Miami, particularly the Liberty City neighborhood?
I think this movie shows a part of Miami that is overlooked in mainstream media and the dominant consciousness. We had this happen a lot on the film—we would talk about Liberty City with people and they’d say, “Oh, you mean like The First 48,” a reality show that portrayed murder investigations in Liberty City and other Miami neighborhoods. If that’s the only story coming out of the neighborhood, that’s the public perception of the neighborhood. One of our goals was to make a film that showed a different side of Liberty City and showed what it was like to actually live there.

Naomie Harris has talked about being reluctant to play the mother of the main character, because so often, images of black women as crack addicts tend to be stereotyped characterizations of bad mothers. And one of the reasons she’s nominated for best supporting actress for it is that she fully rounded out that person and made it a real characterization of a woman who loves her child but is also struggling with this other problem. So you have the complicated messiness of actual life, not a simple, stereotyped version of bad people doing bad things.

What did you do as co-producer?
As a co-producer, my job description was basically “help Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski get the movie made.” During early pre-production, I was local to Miami, so I did a lot of the ground-level things like finding community partners and setting up casting events a few months before the rest of team arrived. During production my job description was a lot more flexible. On any movie, especially a small one, there are so many things you can’t control that you always need someone to help deal with the unexpected. That was me. I was a fireman, and my job was to solve problems and find solutions. It was a fantastic job and it was a privilege to work with this team. 

After Hong Kong, I went to Ecuador for two months to do another film, a family drama that takes place in Quito, under the cloud of an erupting volcano. I really like the specificity of place; it helps tremendously when stories make the effort to be authentic and grounded in actual places. It makes stories specific and personal.

Why do you think Moonlight has been so well-received?
Partly because it takes things you think you know and it pushes deeper. It tells a hidden story sincerely and with real feeling. It’s been amazing—I was at the International Film Festival Rotterdam recently, and I was talking to a blond Dutch girl who was telling me that she and her friend watched it and what they thought about it, and I’m thinking, this is so far from the demographic I had ever thought would see this movie, let alone have strong opinions of it, let alone talk about it like it was a necessary, urgent thing for her to have seen.

And that was a wonderful experience. I crossed an ocean, and they’re talking about this movie that takes place in this little neighborhood that has been marginalized and ignored by the dominant conversation for decades. When the international press describes it as a movie about the Miami you never see, to me, that’s mission accomplished.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Chris Gosier.

Watch the official trailer for Moonlight:

So how do these cities get that way? Can an art scene be “imported” via high-end art fairs, with their infusion of jet-setters who can afford to spend millions on a painting?

Andrew Hevia, GABELLI ’15, a documentary filmmaker, is spending a year in Hong Kong investigating that and other questions at the intersection of art, commerce, and identity, funded by a Fulbright that he won last year while earning his master’s in media entrepreneurship at the Gabelli School of Business.

His focus is Art Basel Hong Kong, the prestigious contemporary art fair that will bring more than 200 galleries to the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre at the end of March. Through interviews with a cross-section of local artists, he’ll produce a documentary about the city’s evolving character, viewed through the lens of the fair, which first came to Hong Kong three years ago.

Given the transition from British to Chinese governance and the recent protests about democracy in Hong Kong, “it was a really ripe ground for an interesting project,” he said.

Hevia, an Emmy-winning filmmaker from South Florida, got the idea for the project last year after happening upon a Fulbright information session at Fordham.

He had produced a similar film, Rising Tide: A Story of Miami Artists, centered around Art Basel Miami Beach, the annual fair that began in Miami Beach almost 15 years ago, and wanted to further explore how  cities acquire their own version of the arts “branding” associated with cities like New York and London.

“In New York, everyone knows artists are doing things and what it means to be an artist, and everyone has that friend who has the gallery somewhere or that underground show in Brooklyn,” he said. “In a city like New York, there’s a broader understanding of cultural output, so how do you grow and develop that?”

In Miami, it seems to have rode in on the wave of money, artists, “pop-up” galleries, and economic development that attended Art Basel Miami Beach and the unrelated satellite art fairs that arrived soon after, Hevia said.

“What I noticed in Miami is that once the art fair arrived, there was this palpable change in how we perceived the city and our identity began to shift—just a little bit—into that of an arts city. I wanted to know if Hong Kong was experiencing that same shift,” Hevia said.

The fair brought plenty of spillover business for galleries selling less-pricey works, along with a social scene that sometimes delivered art appreciation via libations and nightlife.

While people may initially associate art galleries with free drinks, “at the same time, they’re in an art gallery,” he said. “It’s sort of a backwards way of teaching people about art, but they still learn about art.”

Hevia is based at Hong Kong Baptist University’s Academy of Visual Arts, where an economic art historian on the faculty—Emma Watts, PhD—has been helping him place his work into the context of the global art market. He’s been seeking out the artists he’ll follow during the fair, hoping to represent the many faces of the city’s arts community.

And he may mix in some of his own experience of the city and its lively and welcoming expatriate population.

“In some ways, the city is built for ‘orphans,’” he said, using a colloquialism for expatriates living in the city without family. “My second week in town, I met someone who invited me to an ‘Orphan’ Christmas,’ so I had Christmas dinner with a group of people from all over the world, most of whom I’d never met.”

He’s still amazed and gratified that he discovered the Fulbright option at Fordham and got so much support in pursuing it.

“Fordham absolutely expanded my world, gave me opportunities that I was completely unaware were options, and really helped me clarify and understand the things that I am best at,” he said. “Fordham was instrumental in getting this, and this is fantastic.”

Affectionately called the “Forda-fan” or the “Fordham Man” by his friends, Reed grew up in New York City and came to Fordham with financial support from the University’s Higher Education Opportunity Program. He also earned a partial scholarship to play the trombone in the University Band. “Fordham offered [me]a lot of opportunities. … I’ve been very blessed,” he says.

Reed was working as a teacher in Brooklyn for several years when he says he decided to attend his Jubilee “to see some friends I hadn’t seen since I graduated.” One such friend, Kristin Nazario, FCRH ’02, GSAS ’04, was best friends with Reed’s roommate, Brendan McGinley, FCRH ’02.

Though they weren’t close friends during college, Nazario and Reed stayed in contact through Facebook. Having seen his travel photos and posts, Nazario broached the subject of international teaching when she bumped into Reed at the Sunday brunch. In two months, she said, she’d be departing for Italy for a two-year teaching contract at the International School in Genoa.

“He was enthralled by the idea from the first mention and kept saying, ‘I’m going to do this. You will be my mentor,’” Nazario says. After going abroad, she kept in touch with Reed via Skype, sharing her tales of life as an expat and counseling him on his resume and applications.

Reed already had some international experience. While working in New York, he earned his master’s degree in special and general education summa cum laude from Touro College, through which he did a summer semester abroad in Salamanca, Spain. But after what he calls his “fateful conversation” with Nazario, he dove full-force into pursing his vocation overseas.

He interviewed with seven schools in six countries, ending up as a finalist for schools in London, Zurich, and Beijing. Though he didn’t land any of those jobs, he stayed positive and expanded his options. “If I’m going to consider Beijing, why not Hong Kong?” he thought, so applied for a position at the West Island School. He was hired as a special needs teacher, something Reed, the son of a pastor, attributes to providence—and maybe even a bit of luck. It had been his eighth school interview and in Chinese culture, eight is an auspicious number.

Located in Pokfulam, Hong Kong, West Island School is part of the English Schools Foundation, with students from around the world. In addition to working as a special needs teacher, Reed is a U.S. admissions volunteer in the career department, helping students apply to American universities. He’s also heavily involved in debate, as a coach for the senior team at the school, as the assistant coach and team manager for the Hong Kong National Debate Team, and as a chief adjudicator for the World Individuals Debate and Public Speaking Championship in Hong Kong.

He says he’s adapted well to his new home. “I surprise my friends and family when I say this, but it’s a lot like New York, in terms of the vibe of the city, the people, the hustle and bustle,” he says. “But you also have those huge disparities of wealth, too.”

Reed says West Island School is actively involved in community outreach, helping the “street sleepers, the cage-dwellers, people who you would consider the working poor that can’t afford the ridiculously expensive housing.”

He also encourages his students to mentor others. Last year he organized a school service trip to Chiang Rai, Thailand, where his students provided teaching supplies and helped teach English to the people there. “That was really, really great,” he says, recalling the “Fordham model of service to others. That’s something that I grew up [doing]with my mom, [volunteering at]soup kitchens and clothing drives.”

Last October, Reed had the chance to meet some fellow Fordham alumni living and working in Asia, when Fordham hosted networking receptions in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing. One person in particular, Bryan C. Reilly, GABELLI ’08, who works for JPMorgan Chase, has been a regular connection for Reed in Hong Kong. They are working out an opportunity for Reilly to come to Reed’s school to speak to students interested in business. “Having that Fordham network available to you like that here” is helpful, says Reed.

He’s also staying connected to Fordham in New York. He recently reached out to Monica Esser, associate director for international admissions at the University, who took him up on his offer to host a small lunch at a restaurant for the five incoming freshmen from Hong Kong. “It was a great experience to be able to do that for my university. Coming here has been a series of fortunate events for me,” says Reed, who counts his encounter with Nazario at Jubilee as the catalyst.

Nazario echoes that sentiment. “That’s what I love so much about the special Fordham connection—many of my great Fordham friends were folks I became close to through events after graduation.”

– Rachel Buttner