Hong Kong legislator Claudia Mo on Tiananmen Square, Junius Ho and why ‘you have to take sides in life’

Refugees in Hong Kong: My parents and elder brother and sister came to Hong Kong from Shanghai in 1950. We were a refugee family and, as far as my father was concerned, Hong Kong was just a place we were passing through. He was aiming for Taiwan. But my parents stayed on, they had another daughter and then me, the baby of the family.

By the time I was born, in 1957, it was obvious to my parents that Hong Kong was their home; they were not moving anywhere. My father ran a small shop and factory doing interior design and interior construction work and my mother was a housewife. I was brought up in Happy Valley and went to school there – St Paul’s Primary and then Secondary School. It was a girls’ convent and I had a Roman Catholic education, although I wasn’t converted.

The school was run by French nuns, the Sisters of St Paul de Chartres, and I managed to learn quite a bit of French. I’ve always been interested in languages. Although I spoke only Shanghainese until I was six, I consider Cantonese my mother tongue – it’s the language I count in.

Finding my identity: At secondary school, I began to develop a sense of personal identity. When I was 14, there was an event at Hong Kong Stadium for the governor, Sir Murray MacLehose, and one of the nuns suggested we all go to be faithful citizens of the colony. I thought, “We are Chinese, why are we under colonial rule anyway?”

About that time Szeto Wah began a campaign for Chinese to be the official language of the Hong Kong government and I handed out fliers in support of the movement. I began writing columns for Youth Weekly and the Sunday Examiner, a weekly publication of the Catholic diocese. I thought about becoming a writer, perhaps a novelist, because I love words and language.