My life: Arthur van Langenberg

We come from a long-established Macanese family. Except for two years I spent doing post-graduate work in the United Kingdom, where I had a Commonwealth scholarship from 1965-67, and the war years, which we passed as refugees in Macau, I've lived all my life in Hong Kong. I was born here. And my whole working life and career - I'm a surgeon, specialising in colorectal cancer - has been spent here.

I went across with my mother to Macau in 1942 - I was two years old so I remember nothing about that journey - but I do have distinct memories of growing up in Macau during the war. My father was a marine engineer and (spent) most of his career on the China coast run out of Hong Kong to northern China ports. While we were in Macau, he spent the war years with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, mostly in the Indian Ocean, based out of Ceylon. We didn't see him again till after the war ended.

Along with the other Portuguese families who went across as refugees from Hong Kong, my mother, sister and me lived in various refugee reception centres. During those years, we were financially supported (mostly) by the British consulate; Macau wasn't occupied, so some sort of normality prevailed and the consulate continued to function. Some of our time, early on, was spent in the old Club Militar, on the Praia Grande. I still remember exactly where on the floor we slept. Then we moved just around the corner to Rua Formosa, to another refugee centre, where we shared space with six other families for the rest of the war. Little kids get used to anything, and it was a fun time.

When we came home at the end of the war, I started school at Maryknoll girl's school (a lot of Portuguese boys like me went there then - it was far from unusual) then went on to La Salle College in Kowloon Tong. I liked sports and was quite athletic, and ended up a few years ahead of the others academically, too. So I went on to Hong Kong University to study medicine when I was still a teen-ager - I started when I was 17 and qualified on my 22nd birthday - and have been a doctor now for just over 50 years. Medicine has been my whole professional life up till now.

I liked teaching at HKU and think I gave a lot to my students over the years, and got a lot back as well; they still come to see me, and call me Lo Si - teacher - which is a great feeling. It makes me feel I must have done something right, after all. But there is a lot of nastiness and falsehood in academic life - needless back-scratching and back-stabbing - and I am glad I left that world behind. I've been very happy ever since.

I've always loved plants and gardens. My mother, Celeste Rosario, was a keen gardener, and some of my love of plants must have come from her. Before the war, her family had a large garden at Ho Man Tin; there were a lot of Portuguese families like ours living around there in those years, and for some time after the war. Their garden was about a quarter of an acre - it's hard to imagine such a size and space nowadays. When we lived on Nathan Road, when I was growing up, we had a very large balcony and that was full of plants as well.