“I grew up in a very well off family. My father was a movie producer in Hong Kong. I was a number two son, and my older brother as a number one son was the joy of the whole family, especially for my grandmother the matriarch. Every weekend we would go to grandmother’s — all the aunts, uncles, children would be there and everybody who wanted to please grandmother would treat my brother like a little emperor.
My mother also treated me less kindly than she treated my brother. She was very smart. She never had a college education, but I would count her as one of the five smartest women I have ever met. She would be very impatient if you were not following her level of intelligence and not responding the way she wanted you to respond. And my older brother and younger sister were very brilliant, smart kids, and I wasn’t. And she used to get upset with me and strike me with her knuckles on my head. I got a lot of that. It’s not that it hurts, but the way it comes at you with her face behind it, I can still visualize it.
So I was a bit of an outsider and I never felt that comfortable around my mother and I started to hang out with other people in our household, the cook, the chauffeur, the assistant. I made friends with them. The cook would make me food from leftovers, they made a seaweed soup with some salt and pepper and a spoonful of pork. I loved it. My brother and sister didn’t know the cooks at all. And I found that cooks have their own stories and their own humor, and so on. So I’m fascinated. And so all my life, I’ve reached out to outsiders, and that all started with not being as clever as my siblings.
You know, you take care of your own kid, you take care of your own wife, you take care of your own parents, and this is the tendency for most people. But I try to look for people who need help outside of my family. What’s meaningful to me is if I really make somebody happy, and especially if that person is an outsider, someone in need of some attention and love.”
