Maria Sung’s autistic daughter couldn’t find a job, so she opened a cafe to employ people with learning disabilities

Small wonder I was born in 1959. I was a premature baby. When my mother was seven months pregnant with me, she was rushed from our family home in the fishing village of Tai O to St Paul’s Hospital. I was born weighing just three pounds (1.4kg) and spent my first three months in an incubator.

I grew up in Tai O. We lived in the old town close to the river. Tai O in those days had no electricity – we burned firewood for the stove and used oil lamps at night. We didn’t have a telephone, there was just a radio. I have an older brother and a younger brother. My father was an architect and our family was reasonably well off, but that all changed when I was nine. My dad was a heavy opium smoker and ended up spending all his money on the drug, then he abandoned our family and went to live on Hong Kong Island.

Learning the hard way I went to a Catholic school in Tai O. When I finished primary school, it was expected that I would stop going to school and that my brothers would continue their education. That was the tradition at the time. After finishing school, aged 12, my mother got me a job working at a Tai O factory making light bulbs. I worked in the factory 10 hours a day and was paid HK$10 a day. A lot of my classmates worked in the factory, too. Most of the girls just wanted to get married, but I wanted to do something more.

When I was 15, the Tai O Primary School began running secondary school education in the evening. I decided to take the night classes. I finished work at the factory at 7pm and at 7.15pm the night school started. After a year, I started coughing up blood. I had tuberculosis, which was common in Hong Kong at the time. I was admitted to the TB hospital in Wan Chai, the Ruttonjee Sanatorium, and stayed there for six months.

A helping hand My mother’s elder brother was left in charge of taking care of the family. He ran a laundry shop and my mother helped him out. My grandfather ran a small convenience store and I helped him in the shop. My grandmother had a job taking oil and rice from the village up the hill to the monks at Ling Yan temple. I helped her carrying the bags of rice, which were really heavy. They weighed 30kg. There was a small garment store in Tai O where my mother got a part-time job embroidering the fabric that would be made into cheongsams for the women who worked in nightclubs. She brought the fabric home and worked on it in the evenings and I helped her out.