James Tien Pei-chun
Liberal Party chairman James Tien Pei-chun says explains why narrowing the poverty gap is not on his agenda. His family, incidentally, made a fortune in pants.
I was born in Shanghai in 1947 and my family moved to Hong Kong two years later. I can barely speak Shanghainese.
When I was 17, I traveled to the States to study chemical engineering.
Remember the riots in 1967? I was lucky – I was studying in the States then. No one from my family told me about the riots.
The riots didn’t really concern my family business. Our pants factory was on Castle Peak Road and we lived in Kowloon Tong – we weren’t sure if the riot was in Tsim Sha Tsui or Central.
My wife and I met in college – she’s Vietnamese-Chinese. In 1970, my father asked me to go back to Hong Kong to work for his factory. It seemed like a better idea to work for my dad than for both of us to look for jobs in the States.
She would never stop asking me when we would move back to the States. She finally stopped recently.