Profile | ‘To make high-quality food accessible’: how urban farmer in Hong Kong found her mission growing micro greens for top restaurants
- Jessica Fong, founder of Common Farms in Hong Kong, tells Kate Whitehead about her childhood split between Canada, Hong Kong and ‘Wild Wild West’ Shanghai
- She learned about business from her dad, helped a restaurateur expand and saw an opportunity to supply Hong Kong restaurants fresh, high-quality micro greens
My grandparents were from Canton province – my grandfather on my mother’s side escaped China by swimming to Hong Kong – and my parents were born in the city.
They came from poverty, they didn’t finish school and grew up in public housing. My dad was in the trading business and by the time I was born, in 1990, my parents were middle class.
When I was six months old, my mum and I moved to Vancouver and my dad continued working in Hong Kong. He was in the kitchenware industry, acting as the middleman between the factories and big retailers such as Target, Walmart, Tesco and Sainsbury’s.
He would come to Canada for a weekend or a week at most three times a year, so I didn’t see much of him when I was growing up.
School work
In 1995, we moved back to Hong Kong; by that time I had a younger brother. I went to a [top] local [government] school, Heep Yunn, which was a struggle as I didn’t know how to write in Chinese and my Cantonese was poor.