Wing Shya: photographer to Wong Kar-wai on working with the great and good of Hong Kong cinema

I WAS BORN in Hong Kong in 1964. My parents came from Shandong province, in mainland China, arriving illegally, later legalised – a common story for that generation. I went to the all-boys Salesian School, in Chai Wan, and was not a good student. I spent all my time messing around with friends. Then, at 17 or 18, I watched a film called Boat People (1982) and there was a character holding a camera who looked cool. Something happened in me. “I want to be that,” I thought. Not the actor – the photographer. I saved every dollar I made from part-time jobs until I could buy a camera, then I started to photograph everything: friends, family, the street, skateboarders. I didn’t really have a plan. I just liked looking through that little window.

MY ENGLISH WAS so bad and I didn’t do well in my exams, so university in Hong Kong wasn’t possible. Art school was the only door open to me and, I’ll admit, a good excuse not to get a real job yet. I went to a technical college, the Lee Wai Lee Technical Institute (in Kowloon Tong), before I found the Emily Carr College of Art and Design, in Vancouver, Canada – the only overseas school I could afford, where tuition for international students was the same as for local students.

I WORKED THREE or four jobs at a time, sometimes illegally, as I was on a student visa. I delivered food for a Chinese restaurant, waited tables and even cleaned houses that were a two-hour drive from the city. On weekends, I would sell my drawings in Stanley Park.

I DID A double major: graphic design and fine art. In the summer, I’d drive to San Francisco, or fly to New York on the cheapest ticket I could find. I could earn a few dollars drawing people in Washington Square Park, in Greenwich Village. I had so much energy then.

AFTER GRADUATING IN 1991, six classmates and I opened a graphic-design company in Vancouver. Eight months in, we were doing well. One afternoon at a restaurant in Chinatown, I picked up a Hong Kong gossip magazine and looked at the layout. I said to my friends, “I have to go back – this design is terrible. I want to do something in the city.” They tried to talk me out of it. But within a week, I’d sold my car and bought a ticket home, without telling my mother. I flew back and rang the doorbell. She opened it and said, “Why are you here? You’re not welcome. We have no space.” I slept on the sofa.