My life: Anna Pao Sohmen

M When my father (late shipping tycoon Pao Yue-kong) decided to leave Shanghai for Hong Kong in 1948, it was the second relocation for the Pao family in seven years. In 1942, Shanghai fell to the Japanese and the family moved to the wartime capital of Chongqing. The two characters in my given name (Pui-hing) mean "celebrating victory at the secondary capital", as I was born (in Chongqing) in the days following Japan's surrender. From a European-style three-storey house with a garden in Shanghai, we landed in a mid-floor apartment on Seymour Road, in Hong Kong. Father was very busy starting up his business, which he began with savings of HK$20,000. But every morning he would walk me to school and then take a bus to work. As the eldest daughter, I received more discipline from my father than my three younger sisters. "You are the eldest. Whatever you do, you must set an example," and, "Anything a boy can do, a girl can do," are words that have stayed with me all my life.

Like my father, my mother, as a Ningbo person, didn't use much. "Making something out of nothing" was her ethos. She was avant garde when it came to "recycle, reuse and reduce". She always wore old clothes, even her underwear was all patched up. She never threw away old curtains and would instead turn them into golf travel bags, long before they became commercial products. At her memorial in 2011, family friend Gordon Mau had a line about a photograph of my parents that sums it all up very well: "Aunty Pao darns the socks of Sir Y.K. Pao".

Thriftiness in my family led me to be conscious about the poor. When I was 16, I went to work with the delinquent girls in Ma Tau Wai Road (To Kwa Wan) and also the people at the temporary estates and hillside cottages in Tai Hang. I couldn't tell my parents what I was doing as I would have been disallowed. But I was determined. At Purdue University (in Indiana, in the United States), I majored in psychology and sociology in spite of pressure from my parents, especially my mother, who was very traditional in thinking that an educated woman always ended up a spinster. So I became self-supportive in my graduate studies in social administration at the University of Chicago. The scholarship I obtained would only pay for the tuition fee so I worked as a waitress, for a free meal a day. After I got married (to lawyer and businessman Helmut Sohmen), we moved to Canada and I went to McGill University, in Montreal, to work with black delinquents. In 1970, we returned to Hong Kong and joined father's ship-ping business.

It was the time of the tumultuous Cultural Revolution. But father was a visionary and always looked at the bigger picture and beyond. It still amazes me that he would tell us in 1968, a time when Red Guards were rampaging across the mainland, that "one day China is going to open up and we will all go home". His positive thinking was best shown by a scene on Changan Avenue, in the heart of Beijing. It was long after the Cultural Revolution and China had just ushered in reform and was opening up. There I saw a mule pulling a fully loaded peasant truck, moving very slowly. To my remark, "Look at the pace of the mule, China is just like that, taking forever to catch up," he said, "As long as there are peasants pulling a cart like this, there will be employment, and soon this will be replaced by cars."