Undersecretary for Financial Services and the Treasury Julia Leung Fung-yee spent a career covering the business world as a reporter. But her favourite story was not about markets or investment.
'A Long Voyage Home From Taiwan to China,' published in the Asian Wall Street Journal when she was its China correspondent in February 1988, describes the first soldier in Chiang Kai-shek's army going home to the mainland to meet his family.
After the Communist Party of China took power in 1949, there was no communication between the mainland and Taiwan for almost 40 years until 1988. Leung, 50, remembers clearly accompanying the soldier Hsiung Kuang-yuan on a bumpy road back to his old home in a village on the outskirts of Nanchang.
'I remember the soldier did not recognise his son and he was furious when he learnt that his wife had remarried when he hadn't,' Leung said. 'He was also so upset when he learnt his mother died just one year before he returned.
'The mother, until she died aged 81, refused to move from the village as she always believed her son would return one day. She always put a bowl and chopsticks on the dinner table to prepare for his return.'
The heart-wrenching story is now a distant memory, with economic and social relations between Beijing and Taipei now well advanced. Indeed, the issue of cross-strait relations that Leung wrote so passionately about as a reporter is something she now is working on in the corridors of power.
As the undersecretary for the financial sector, she and other financial regulators are helping to facilitate cross-border investment flows between the mainland and Hong Kong and Taiwan. A recent example is the cross-border exchange-traded fund (ETF) project that allows Taiwanese investors to buy into mainland firms by trading units of the funds listed in Hong Kong or Taipei.