“Some of us would save a wotou [steamed corn bread] from breakfast to take with us. But my breakfast ration was never enough for me and there would be nothing left to take. When I occasionally saved a piece, it was frozen solid by the time I wanted to eat it, and biting [it] was hard on your teeth.

“The food was so bad that I found it hard to swallow. Yet I had to eat it to suppress my hunger and maintain energy. I was hungry and yet eating was not enjoyable.”

During his years spent in dire poverty in the arid backwater doing back-breaking work, Shan could never have imagined that today he would be managing billions of dollars in private equities from his base in Hong Kong.

Shan is the group chairman, chief executive and managing partner for PAG, a private equity firm that manages US$30 billion in capital.

PAG has stakes in businesses ranging from The Cheesecake Shop in Australia, to Paradise Group in Singapore, famed for its soup dumplings, Universal Studios in Japan, and Yingde, the largest independent supplier of industrial gases.

In Out of the Gobi, published last month, Beijing native Shan, now 65, recounts how he thought his fortune would change for the better after being sent to the desert to be re-educated by the peasants in 1969. At the age of 15, he was sent to the Gobi “to help turn the countryside into a proletarian paradise with their labour”.

But later he realised the campaign was a complete failure – a waste of time and energy.

Shan has been promoting the book in London, New York and now Hong Kong, where he has lived for more than 20 years, and will give a talk at the city’s Asia Society branch on February 26.

It was Shan’s love of learning and persistence in trying to read as much as he could while in the desert, and a dose of luck, that helped him get out of China to the United States.

Towards the end of the Cultural Revolution, a period of political and social chaos that lasted from 1966 to 1976, he managed to gain approval to study languages at the Beijing Institute of Foreign Trade. It was his ticket out of the Gobi. In 1980, while in Beijing, he met representatives from the San Francisco-based Asia Foundation and was awarded one of three scholarships to study in the US.

While in the US, he earned an MBA and doctorate, and became a professor, before going into the private sector in 1993 with JP Morgan in Hong Kong.

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For all his later success, Shan never forgot the years of hardship, which he has channelled into his memoir.

“They are bittersweet stories that recount a most horrific part of Chinese history, and how China got out of it and opened up,” he says from his office in Hong Kong’s Central business district.

“My personal experiences are unique but also very representative of people of my generation. I think it’s very important to remember that part of history. And I think the stories are entertaining, too,” he says with a chuckle.

He began writing his memoirs 27 years ago when he was an assistant professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of business, but put the project on ice until January 2017. The book includes a forward by former US Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen, who was his economics professor at University of California, Berkeley.

As Shan recounts in Out of the Gobi, his life mirrors that of modern China; he was born in 1953, four years after the founding of the People’s Republic. He witnessed Chairman Mao Zedong’s failed policies from 1958 to 1962, including the Four Pests Campaign – aimed at the eradication of mosquitoes, flies, rats and sparrows, resulting in insects destroying wheat crops and people starving.

There was also the economic and social campaign Great Leap Forward, when the populace was expected to produce industrial-grade steel in backyard homes, which was later found to be unusable.

But it was the Cultural Revolution that profoundly affected Shan and his generation, when he and almost 300 others (half boys, half girls) were assigned to the “Eleventh Squad of the Third Platoon of the Fifth Company of the Nineteenth Regiment of the Second Division of the Inner Mongolia Construction Army Corps”.

“We had no choice. Everyone was persuaded or forced to go,” Shan explains. “My family of five was split into four … my mother was sent away, [so was] my older sister, and myself, while my father was considered ‘old’ and he looked after my 11-year-old brother.”

Life in the desert was a miserable existence, he recalls. They lived in makeshift shacks made of unbaked bricks, roughly chopped tree branches and dried weeds packed with mud. There was no insulation, so they burned dried cow dung before going to bed for warmth.

He also writes about the empty promises that were used to entice them to the desert.

“It became very clear to us a few days after arriving that we would have none of the things that the Army Corps representatives had promised us in Beijing. There was no white [wheat flour] bread. The major means of transport was not a helicopter, but our legs. There was no plan to build a road as wide and straight as Chang’an Boulevard [in Beijing],” the book reads.

“Our monthly stipend would be five yuan, enough for two tin cans of pork. At the same time, it cost 120 yuan, or my two-years’ stipend, to buy a domestic-made, Shanghai-brand watch.”

The corps used shovels and brute strength to dig canals connecting to a nearby lake and the Yellow River. But the soil in the Gobi was highly saline and alkaline, making it hard to grow anything.

Even in the middle of winter they were forced to use primitive tools to harvest reeds around a frozen lake, and transport the bundles to a paper mill. They even had a hand in making bricks – without any instructions – which meant thousands of wasted bricks before figuring out the right ratio of sand, clay and water.

“My generation was very lost,” he says, though he managed to hide himself in a toolshed to read whatever materials he could get his hands on – even an insecticide manual. He would try to listen to Voice of America radio broadcasts to find out what was going on in the world.

In the book, Shan is unflinching in his assessment of the policies implemented in the Gobi. At one point he writes: “The Army Construction Corps did not help in any way to develop or transform the impoverished countryside for the better. In fact, we only made things much worse.

“By my calculation, we were consuming three or four times the amount of food we produced every year. Yet we were made to continue to toil on the land throughout the year and to waste all the resources we put into it.”

During our interview, Shan says: “I tell the story as it unfolded. I try to tell my experiences matter-of-factly. Those things happened. I try to lay it out for the reader to have a sense of what we experienced and refrain from commentaries.”

When he arrived in San Francisco in 1980, he was overwhelmed by the culture shock – being able to choose what he should study, experiencing his first Halloween, and meeting people who went above and beyond to help him complete his studies.

“I never thought I would be … doing private equity buyouts,” says Shan, who now forges deals in China, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia and Hong Kong.

He says that despite China’s reform and opening up in the past 40 years, the country still needs to change even more.

“State-owned enterprises are too large and inefficient, and too many resources [are] allocated to them. That is a cause for worry,” he says.

“The economy cannot be efficient when you have inefficient sectors. I think that the structural reforms should continue and deepen, and the private sector should grow even stronger to be the leading driver of economic growth, and China should be more open to trade and investments and flow of information.”

But will it happen soon? He can only hope, he says.

Weijian Shan will speak about his book, Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America, at the Asia Society Hong Kong on February 26 at 6.30pm. For more information go to asiasociety.org/hong-kong