Elaine Leung May-yin

I usually get up around 6.45am because I've got family, two boys, and I sit with them while they eat their breakfast. They leave the house for the school bus at 7.30am so we only have about 30 minutes together in the morning. I like to make sure they see a face before they leave for school because when they get home from school I'm not there. I can't have them grow up saying, 'When I was growing up I didn't see my mum.' Breakfast depends on my mood. If I'm feeling extravagant, I'll have bird's nest. It's really good. It's a vanity thing for us women, spending time on yourself, but it's still decadent I have four places of work. Home in Middle Bay, an office on the 23rd floor of Success Commercial Building in Wan Chai, the bookshop and meeting room on the 18th floor, and the warehouse next door. I do a lot of work from home. I get about 150 e-mails a day. I see all the orders that come in. I don't have to worry about them, but I like to have a feel for how busy we are. I'll check on shipments and payment. I have people to do that, but they don't usually have the whole picture. Besides, I'm always looking for ways to cut costs. We have a new processing system in the warehouse, so I've been in there recently learning how it works. My husband [Peter Gordon] works in the office, not in the warehouse, so I go there to run away from him. It's important for the staff to know the boss knows what's going on. They are the frontline workers. They answer the phones, they get people yelling at them, they have the damaged goods arriving. I want to make sure I know what's happening. If I don't stand there and actually try to do the work, I don't know what the staff might be doing wrong. Our only contact with customers is through e-mail or telephone and the package itself. So every contact point needs a certain level of professionalism. Most days I'll have lunch at my desk. My staff call me around noon and ask if I'm coming in and what I want. Today I had lunch with my husband because I drove in late. We don't always manage to eat together. He doesn't like eating lunch. We are at an age where we don't like to eat too much. In the run-up to the Literary Festival, we'll have a two-hour meeting every week. Madeleine [Dignam], the general manager of the festival, does a run-down of the things we have to worry about; things we have to make decisions about. We are taking money from sponsors so we need different people with different backgrounds to make sure we provide the sponsors with value for money. It's all brainstorming. I look after logistics, making sure things such as the ticketing system works, that tickets are distributed properly and that all the books are here. I'm making sure the festival doesn't go broke. Rosemary [Sayer] handles the public relations. She schmoozes with the sponsors. Nury [Vittachi] looks after the writers and I make sure it all works. I don't just do the dirty work, I also get to schmooze. I'm the Chinese face so the Chinese press talk to me. Last year one of the Chinese magazines revealed I was the granddaughter of Leung Chik-wai, one of the founders of Hang Seng Bank. I hadn't talked about it before because it wasn't relevant to what I was doing. My father's a doctor. At the moment there's a new sponsor that wants to give us some money and we don't know what we can give the sponsor in return. We have to figure out whether or not we should take the money. That's something we have to worry about because if we aren't giving value for money, we feel like it's stealing. But if we give too much, then it's not fair to the other sponsors. There are 40 authors coming this year and we have to order 3,000 books from eight or nine different places. The books come from Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, and you need to co-ordinate with all the people across all the time zones. The audience at the festival can have two experiences. The first is listening to the author speak about the topic; the second is getting the book. The trouble is, some of the author's books may not be readily available. We try and have copies of all the books they've written - even if it's just one or two copies. It helps enhance the experience. I do get to read. I should read more, but I don't. I don't find it hard to find what to read. I'm like a kid in a sweet shop because there are just so many things to read. I get uncorrected book proofs and I've got to read them before they come out. There are some things I don't like to read, such as heavy literature. My mother tongue isn't English so I didn't grow up reading English. I was never encouraged. I try to encourage my boys to read, but I've got one reader and one non-reader. At the moment I have four books sitting on my bedside cabinet. I read in the bathroom, in the bath, in bed, I read everywhere. There are so many things competing for our time these days. When I was growing up there wasn't that much. Now there's video games, work, movies. My newest fad is CSI, which I watch all the time. I was sick on Sunday so I watched one and a half DVDs of CSI. I also like to walk along the beach near my home on the south side of Hong Kong island. I get home at about 8pm and we'll have dinner. We'll sit and talk about school. The boys compete to see who is going to tell me about their day first. After that we watch a bit of television. They go to bed at 9.30pm. Depending on my mood, I go to bed from between 11pm and 1am. It's quite a long day. The Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival 2005 runs until March 15.