It’s ‘a losing battle’ against abandoned fishing nets but he’s fighting anyway: meet Hong Kong’s ‘ghost net hunter’
- Harry Chan is known as Hong Kong’s ‘ghost net hunter’ for his work clearing the city’s waterways of ‘ghost nets’ – fishing nets that have been abandoned
- He reveals why his parents almost sold him as a baby, business booms and busts, and how he fell in love with diving and beach clean-ups
During the historical changes in China in 1949, my grandfather, parents and eldest brother moved from Yantai, in Shandong, to Hong Kong. When I was born, in 1953, my family was sharing an old stone house in Diamond Hill in Kowloon with other families from Shandong.
I cried all the time as a young child because I was so hungry. My parents almost sold me to someone so that I could eat, but my grandfather refused to let them because I was the second grandson. He didn’t speak Cantonese, but he was a kung fu teacher and made a little money from that.
I’m the second eldest of seven kids – four boys and three girls. Two of my sisters passed away soon after they were born.
Handsome dad
My dad got a job in a factory. He didn’t look like a typical factory worker, he was handsome and had clean fingernails.
The factory owner was from Shanghai and illiterate. He asked my father if he could read to him. So, my father began reading the newspaper to him every day.
One day, the boss was offered a job making plastic watch straps for a client in the Middle East. He turned it down because there wasn’t enough profit in it for him but asked my father if he wanted to take the job and even supported him to set up a factory.
Too cool for school
By the time I was four, my father had a factory in Cheung Sha Wan, in Kowloon, making plastic flowers. By 1960, he was one of the four big plastic flower producers in Hong Kong. Later, he opened a factory in Taipei because he had a lot of relatives in Taiwan.