‘Hong Kong’s Dr Fauci’, Yuen Kwok-yung, on growing up poor and weathering Sars and Covid-19
He had an impoverished childhood, but went on to become world-changing infectious-disease scholar – Yuen Kwok-yung tells PostMag why we can expect the next pandemic within a decade
My mother was 16 when she arrived in Hong Kong in the 1950s, fleeing famine on the mainland. Not long after she arrived, she met my father, who had also escaped the famine. They married in 1954. My birth is recorded as December 30, 1956, though my mother insisted that I was actually born a few days later, on January 1. Perhaps a mistake was made in the paperwork over the public holiday. My mother was illiterate and we didn’t have the money to give red packets to the nurses and midwives as was expected.
Beyond basic
For the first two years of my life, I lived with my parents and older brother in a 60 sq ft room overlooking Wan Chai Market. My father was an apprentice under a dentist and worked 16 hours a day. Then we moved to Sai Ying Pun, where my two younger brothers were born. The living conditions were very basic. There were no toilet facilities – you urinated in the kitchen in the floor drain. Faecal material was collected in a bucket and at midnight sewage collection tanks collected the waste for the whole floor.
