Founder of Asian People's Theatre Society, Gus Mok Chiu-yu

I grew up in what you’d call a squatter area in Shau Kei Wan. But it was nice, we had fun. We didn’t have a TV or anything, but we would create our own games. Like for example, we’d go up into the hills, catch spiders and make them fight each other. And we would stick broken glass on a string and fight each other to see who was the toughest.

My father was locally born but my mother was was born in Sandakan, in what used to be known as North Borneo. She came to China to study after the Japanese invaded. She and my father met when they joined a very interesting high school. The headmaster and the teachers traveled from one place to another, retreating as the Japanese advanced – taking the students with them. They got married after the war.

I still have a lot to find out about my father. He was quite a drinker. In his later years he enjoyed whiskey, but in those days he drank local wine - really hard stuff. And with his peanuts in his hand, he’d tell us stories about legendary figures from the Qing Dynasty. We enjoyed listening to those stories. We didn’t have TV or radio.

I went to Queens’ College, still supposedly an elite school, through back then all the students were proletarian. We were real bookworms. We just lived for exams. But it wasn’t what I wanted; I was unhappy.

I studied economics at the University of Adelaide. I found the Australian students very happy-go-lucky. I did well, but in my third year I started to look around a lot more. Unlike my fellow Hong Kong students in Adelaide, I reached out. I saw young Australians going off to the war in Vietnam, so that was when I got involved in activism – anti-war activity.

What did I learn from economics? That the world it sustains is exploitative and unjust.