On meeting Serge Pun in his office in central Yangon, it is hard to imagine that one of Myanmar’s most successful tycoons was once a penniless migrant in Hong Kong, delivering ship supplies from a small sampan and selling air sanitisers for a pitiful commission. Clad in traditional garb of collarless white shirt and longyi, or sarong, Mr Pun puffs on a cigar as he recalls: “I had just HK$5 when I arrived in 1973, it was all I had in the world. I was 20, I was fit, and I knew I had to survive.”
Negotiating difficult circumstances is something Mr Pun, a Myanmar-born ethnic Chinese, has done throughout his life. Just eight years before landing in Hong Kong, he was uprooted from a comfortable, middle-class life in Yangon by the socialist coup of 1962. Amid a backlash against foreign residents and businesses, the family moved to Beijing – only to be caught up nine months later in the Cultural Revolution.
The 12-year-old Mr Pun was separated from his parents and four siblings, corralled into a Red Guard work unit and sent with 1,500 other children for “re-education” to the remote Yunnan province. “For four years, we built a dam with our bare hands,” he says. “We lived in huts we built from bamboo and constructed beds from branches. We had no electricity and bathed in a stream – even in winter. We were given the bare staple, rice, and the rest was up to us. If your battalion was good, planting vegetables and raising pigs, you could eat meat. Otherwise, it was dried vegetables – they tasted horrible”.