Creating chances … in soccer and in life
Peter Lo has overcome a difficult start in life to help many young people learn, get a trade and develop their skills on the football pitch
In the late 1960s, Peter Lo Wai-hung would stand by a football pitch in Tsz Wan Shan near Wong Tai Sin, where groups of young men played games or just lounged around. There would be more than 100 of them, often unskilled having left school without qualifications, and prime pickings for triad members who also frequented the sports ground.
If so, they would help him redecorate a school. They were paid, and when the work finished months later they were skilled carpenters and decorators. While the trades had not, until recently, been regarded with respect in Hong Kong, it provided these young men with a start in life.
"I could only take 20 out of the 100 who were there," Lo says in the office and workshop of Law Wing Kee, a construction and decorating firm founded by his father in the 1930s. "Some of the lazy ones would go with the triads, but other juvenile delinquents would come and work with me for HK$3 a day and I would teach them skills."
Lo, who has been nominated for a "Corporate Citizen" award in the Spirit of Hong Kong Awards 2014, knows what it means to struggle.
"I left school after Form One when I was 14 years old. My father couldn't afford my education," he says. One of six children, he describes a poor upbringing and a father who battled to keep the company afloat with many debts. But Lo was to meet a life-changing mentor as he hauled a trolley of bricks along a street.
"It was in 1969, and things were very difficult. Father C.Y. Cheung stopped me and asked why I wasn't at school," Lo says.
