How this descendant of Chinese paper merchants built a successful stationery business out of quarantine souvenirs

My parents met in the queue to join the Spanish Society during freshers week at Exeter University. My mum didn’t realise she needed 50p to join and dad gave her the 50p. We always say that was the greatest investment he ever made. He was a working-class Brummie (from Birmingham) and she was from a Hong Kong Chinese family. My mum hardly understood a word he was saying for the first few years because he had such a strong Brummie accent.

Hong Kong connection

I was born in Banbury, England, in 1980 and have two younger brothers. We moved around a lot in the UK with my dad’s work. Even though we didn’t live in Hong Kong until I was eight, we were back and forth a lot in the holidays. We stayed in a four-storey walk-up on Prince Edward Road. My great-grandmother lived on the ground floor, my grandfather and two of his brothers and their families on the other floors. I liked to play on the roof where there were preserved ducks pegged on the washing line. It was directly under the Kai Tak airport flight path and planes would come so close you could almost see the passengers. My favourite food was rice and frogs’ legs. I felt much more connected to my Chinese side than my English side.

The expats

Dad worked for Cadbury Schweppes and when it was bought by Coca-Cola, he was offered an APAC (Asia-Pacific) role and we moved to Hong Kong when I was eight years old. He had a fantastic package and we lived in a beautiful home on Stanley Mound Road, and I went to Bradbury School. We’d always been with family on Prince Edward Road, so moving into an expat community in Stanley was a completely different experience.

Family firm

My Chinese family are paper merchants. They started out 120 years ago making shipping dockets for the ships that came into the harbour. The business was on Pottinger Street, which in those days was on the waterfront. Until the mid-1990s, we had a stationery shop on the corner of Pottinger Street called Che San. It is still going, but now it is a wholesale paper company. My grandfather is 96 this year and he still goes to the office most days. As kids, we would go to the shop on Pottinger Street. I’d put what I wanted in a basket and then take it upstairs to Grandpa and justify each thing before he’d sign it off. All my family worked in the family business in those days – my grandfather, his brothers, my cousins – and they all lived and socialised together.

Sense of duty

Although I had a liberal childhood, I also had the sense of duty and formality that you have with a Chinese family. It gave me a sense of structure. You showed respect for your elders and Sunday was always dim sum with the family. It was non-negotiable. We had a home in Fanling that the whole family shared. It was right in the bush with a big swimming pool. All the extended family would go at the weekend and hang out.

Full circle

I went to Malvern Girls’ College (now Malvern St James Girls’ School) in England when I was 12. My friends at boarding school thought it was weird that I never got homesick. When I was 40, I was diagnosed with ADHD and now that makes more sense – (with ADHD) you live totally in the moment and have a kind of object permanence and don’t miss things that aren’t in front of you. In 2000, I went to the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology to do a (bachelor of science degree) in management. I went from being top of the tree at boarding school – and told I could do anything I want – to feeling like a dunce. It was a shock to the system.

Tinkering with tailoring

I was thankful to graduate and get into the so-called real world. I had an idea for a menswear business – a mobile bespoke tailor in London. A tailor on Mody Road gave me swatch books of cloth that I took back to London. I was always pestering people to buy shirts or a suit. I had no money to start

my business, so my best friend from Malvern suggested I join her waitressing events for a recruitment company. The events were at racecourses. Andrew Yates was running the company. He was quite taken with me and always gave me the boxes where the wealthy people were, so I made good tips. That was how I made the money to start the business. For ages no one really bit, but in the end, I was an accredited tailor to the British Army – I went to Sandhurst and made all the dress shirts. I ran the business for seven years.

Return to Hong Kong

Andrew and I got married in 2007. Our son was born in 2012 and our daughter two years later. We were living in Clapham, London, when my grandmother in Hong Kong was diagnosed with cancer and given 18 months to live.

I was asked to come out and be a companion for her. Andrew was working as an estate agent. He got a job with Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) in Hong Kong and we moved out in 2011. I’m not a natural carer, but I must have done something right because she lived for another eight years.

Itching a niche

My uncle Simon could see that while I found supporting my grandmother fulfilling, I had given up my business in London and was itching to do something else. He suggested I do a business in Hong Kong and said he’d back it. I wanted to do something that would carry on the Che San legacy. I felt there was a niche for affordable, well-designed, Hong Kong-themed stationery. I started (The Lion Rock Press) in 2013 with two charity Christmas cards for Mother’s Choice, a couple of birthday cards and some wrapping paper and asked our printer in Kwun Tong to print them. It took off quickly. Arti Mirchandani at Bookazine loved them and said she would stock everything I made. It was an incredible vote of confidence.

Onto something