Father Franco Mella on 40 years helping downtrodden in Hong Kong and China
The Italian priest tells Kate Whitehead how became fascinated by China, was eventually barred, and how he has fought for the rights of the disadvantaged
G My parents are from Milan, Italy. My father worked for a fur company and my mother worked in a factory. She was very active and started her own union, and encouraged my father to join the union in his factory. I remember my father striking in the late 1960s and fighting for a bonus.
I sang in the Milan Choir from the age of nine - every Sunday for four years we sang songs in Latin. Aged 14, I entered the seminary of the local Milan diocese, to become a priest. One day, our secondary school teacher at the seminary asked us to prepare an exhibition on a continent. Our group was given Asia and I was in charge of China. It was the first I knew of China and I was fascinated - it was around the time of the Great Leap Forward and everyone was talking about it positively then.
When I was 18, I shifted to the Pime (Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions), to which I still belong. With the support of a lawyer, we created the first social action group in Milan. Young people involved in politics and social action were called Maoists at that time. To say "he is a Maoist" was to say "he is involved in social action". During the Cultural Revolution we saw the so-called proletariat changing: they were more interested in serving the people than getting money or living a comfortable life. I thought, "Why in China is there such a spirit?"
I was 26 when I arrived in Hong Kong, in 1974, and Mao was still alive. In 1976, when he died, China shifted to revisionism, so it was a kind of disappointment. When I came to Hong Kong, my hope was to live according to (communist) ideas, to live with the common people. All the new Pime arrivals stayed at a place in Clear Water Bay, we learned Cantonese and it was very comfortable - but I was lonely. After a few months I moved to Diamond Hill, which was a squatter area. The local priest there said, "You have to say the mass in Chinese by yourself." So I practised, writing down the sounds, and within nine months of being in Hong Kong, I was giving mass in Cantonese.
I worked in 14 factories over 12 years. At first, I got a job at a garment factory in San Po Kong. The pay was HK$15 a day; after six months it was increased to HK$15.50. Even if you stay a long time in a factory you don't get any benefits. Sometimes I was dismissed because I protested - especially about safety at work, because at that time there were many fires and people would die. I would say mass at 7am then go to work at 8.30am. On Sundays, I would go to church and say mass again.