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But like many Chinese parents, my mother valued education, and Hong Kong offered places to study. She enrolled me at a new English-language Maryknoll school in Happy Valley run by American missionaries, even though I didn't know the abcs. I threw myself into my studies, quickly mastering English. I moved again, and soon was living with an elder half-sister, crammed into her Kowloon apartment and sleeping on a bunk bed tiered four layers high. When I graduated from secondary school, I went off to the U.S., where I majored in broadcast journalism at the University of Southern California. I was inspired by Watergate: it wasn't just Americans who wanted to follow in the footsteps of Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein. I returned to Hong Kong in 1976, working for the South China Morning Post and, later, at TVB News. My passion for politics began to develop in 1982, when China told Britain that it would impose a settlement on Hong Kong if the two sides couldn't reach an agreement by 1984. From that moment, politics began to matter here. I cut short a stay in Britain (I had studied at the London School of Economics and then taken a job at BBC-TV) and returned to Hong Kong, where the action was. I joined the Far Eastern Economic Review, where I refined the art of haranguing British and Chinese officials alike. Responding to my skeptical question at a 1984 press conference, Margaret Thatcher declared: "Everyone in Hong Kong is happy with the agreement. You may be a solitary exception."
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