How Mirchandani family went from poverty to major players in Hong Kong book industry

MY FIRST MEMORY of Hong Kong is not even my own memory. It’s a story I’ve been told so many times that it’s become a memory. And it’s of Kai Tak airport. We had just arrived, and my memory is me running down the ramp at Kai Tak, straight into my father’s arms. And he told me this story, that it was the first time I had ever met him, because my parents had an arranged marriage in Mumbai, India, and a few months after they got married, my dad had the opportunity to move to Hong Kong to work for a relative. But he could only scrape together enough money for a ticket for himself, so he left my mother behind. He had HK$50 left over, so he stayed at Chungking Mansions. He lived on condensed milk sandwiches and that’s how he saved up enough money to bring my mum and myself over.

MY FATHER, MOHAN MIRCHANDANI, came from a family of eight – there were five sisters and three brothers and he was the third youngest. My grandad died when Dad was three years old. When Dad was 16, he went to work for his uncle in the book industry. The uncle used to import Parker pens and light tubes from the United States. Then, during the independence movement (in India in the mid-1940s), Mahatma Gandhi had this real shift towards locally made products. So, if you wanted to do retail in books, one of the few things that was allowed was education material. That’s how the family got into the book business. They were very poor. They lived hand to mouth, often with not enough clothes, not enough food, but because there was this uncle, there was always books. Four of them went into the book business, and the other four sisters were married off.