Musing: Talk about an Over-achieving Family?

We ran across this obituary in The Guardian (UK). Mr Shiu's family typifies the high-achieving Asian/Chinese family across the world...

Obituary
Po-Ku Shiu
Man-Hei Shiu and Peter Shiu
The Guardian,
Monday June 16 2008
Article history

Our father, Po-Ku Shiu, who has died aged 95, may have seemed just an unremarkable self-made businessman from Hong Kong, but for the fact that he had the vision back in the 1950s - long before it became fasionable - to use his resources to send his many children to faraway Britain to be educated and acquire professional qualifications.

Po-Ku came from a well-to-do family in south China. But with the early death of his opium-addicted father, the barely educated teenager was forced to leave his "bound-feet" mother in Shiqi, a village in Canton province, to seek labouring work in Hong Kong, sending money home to support his two younger brothers. Nonetheless, he had the insight to recognise the importance of learning English at night-school, thereby enabling him to get a job as a runner for import agents.

In 1935, he married our mother, May-Ling Fung, a secretary, and had three sons before fleeing to mainland China during the Japanese wartime occupation of the colony. Despite great suffering as refugees, they had two more sons and a daughter, followed by another two sons after returning to Hong Kong in 1946. Thus they had together the supposed ideal Chinese family of "seven-stars-around-the-moon".

By the 1950s, our father was a highly successful businessman with his own company, Wah Tat, manufacturing electrical appliances (mainly domestic products such as lamps, plugs and sockets). He was rather proud that it even exported to the UK. But unlike many who went on to become fabulously rich, he decided to use his money to send his children to Britain.

In 1963, following the death of a younger brother, he also took responsibility for the education of two young nieces.

After many years in Hong Kong, Taiwan, the US and Britain, our parents settled in Birmingham in 1984. Following his wife's death in 1991, Po-Ku lived quietly as a respected member of the city's Chinese community.

He is survived by his eldest son, Man-Hei Shiu, a former transplant surgeon and professor of medicine at Cornell University, New York state; Peter Shiu, a former reader in pure mathematics at Loughborough University; Stephen Shiu, a mathematical physics graduate from Birmingham University who worked in industry; Man-Fai Shiu, a consultant cardiologist; Margaret Shiu-Tan, a prominent artist in Taiwan and economics graduate from the University of California, Berkeley; and Edward Shiu, a senior lecturer in marketing at Strathclyde University. Two of Po-Ku's sons predeceased him: Albert Shiu, a businessman and physics graduate from Birmingham University; and Matthew Shiu, a much-loved Birmingham GP.

He is also survived by his nieces, Diana Siu, a doctor in Hong Kong, and Teresa Siu-Tong, a recently retired partner with accountants Ernst & Young.


About this article

Obituary: Po-Ku Shiu This article appeared in the Guardian on Monday June 16 2008 on p31 of the Obituaries section. It was last updated at 00:03 on June 16 2008.