How Diana Lin went from militant Maoist in the US to the face of English TV news in Hong Kong
- Deported from San Francisco for overstaying her visa, she went on to become a familiar face on English-language television
- Now retired, Lin never lost her appetite for politics and attended ‘almost all’ of last year’s protests
Ideal childhood: My grandfather went to Hong Kong University and studied Western medicine. There he met Sun Yat-sen, who was a couple of years older, and who asked if he’d join the revolution. He said he couldn’t, he had eight kids. One was my mother. During the war she was sent to China and went to Lingnan University (Guangzhou) to study agriculture, which was more like botany. Flowers were her lifelong passion and she was often trying to cross-pollinate them.
My father studied at St John’s University, in Shanghai, and moved to Hong Kong, where he met my mother. He owned a textile factory. I was born in 1951, in our family home in Tsim Sha Tsui. My grandfather delivered me – he delivered all his grandchildren. I have three sisters and a brother; I’m in the middle. It was a happy childhood. We moved to Kowloon Tong where we lived at 41 Cumberland Road, a house later bought by Bruce Lee.
Up with people: I went to Diocesan Girls’ School, on Jordan Road, from kindergarten. School life was great. Nowadays people talk about the pressures of elite schools, but I don’t think any of us felt pressure in those days. I was into sports. I joined an organisation called Moral Re-Armament. It was interdenominational and had a youth wing called Up With People. Gandhi and Henry Ford were said to have been members.
There would be 100 young people on stage singing uplifting songs. The Japanese caught on (to the movement) and formed a singing group, which came to Hong Kong. I covered it for my school newspaper – we didn’t have a newspaper as such; I used the school noticeboard to post my stories – and a lot of my friends joined.
We formed a group called Sing Out Asia and got members from other Asian countries together to tour the United States. Moral Re-Armament ran an experimental college on Mackinac Island, in Michigan, called Mackinac College. When I was 17, I decided to join the singing group and study there. It was a beautiful college in the middle of the Great Lakes, but it soon went bankrupt (in 1970).