Second wind - Hong Kong Institute of Certified Public Accountants

should know exactly how much it would say
on the receipt. I was as good as that.”
While doing long additions became second
nature to Fong, a trip to newly opened China
wasn’t as easy. Fong, who joined Arthur Andersen
in 1973, volunteered to go to the Mainland
in the 1980s to set up an office for the firm
and was faced with a list of difficulties.
“The laws and rules were not in order and
you couldn’t hire your own people because
the Chinese government controlled employ-
Nellie Fong
ment agencies. Everything was very difficult,”
Fong remembers. “The hardest part
was we were losing money because there
were no jobs and no work. Every year I had
to explain to management why we were not
making money and appear before the board
to explain that it wasn’t an expense, it was
an investment.”
Eventually, the firm built up a roster of
clients made up of foreign multinational
companies investing in China.
A PLUS
Fong’s decision to pursue her career in
the Mainland changed her life in more ways
than one. After being a member of the Hong
Kong Legislative Council from 1988 to 1991,
Fong was appointed by the Chinese government
as a Hong Kong adviser for the preparatory
committee on the territory’s transfer of
sovereignty to China. It was during this time
that Fong devised a project that she holds
dear to her heart to this very day. “Provinces
in China were planning on giving us a gift to
mark the occasion so I felt that Hong Kong
should give back to China,” she recalls. “I
came up with a hospital built on a train.”
“We are now training
local doctors to do
cataract operations
and setting up
cataract centres in
local hospitals.”
Fong founded the charity project Lifeline
Express – a train-mounted eye hospital that
travels to remote areas of China to provide
free operations to blind cataract patients. It
launched on 1 July 1997, the day Hong Kong
returned to Chinese sovereignty.
With around five million cataract patients
in China and an increase of 500,000
patients each year, Fong is working to expand
the reach of her trains. “We are now
training local doctors to do cataract operations
and setting up cataract centres in local
hospitals. We call it a Lifeline Express train
that never leaves,” she says.
Fong, who in 2008 received a Global
Initiative Award from former U.S. President
Bill Clinton for her charity work, now
has four trains, 15 training facilities and 17
cataract centres. Rather than using her time
in retirement to wind down, she is fully engaged
with the charity’s work, addressing
issues such as the lack of senior eye doctors
in China. “I went all over the world, appealed
to international experts to come to
China and help... That’s why I’m very busy.
I’m retired from my accounting career yet
found something very worthwhile.”
Man of the match
Taking orders for tea, coffee and sandwiches
was just one of T. Brian Stevenson’s duties
while working for an audit group, fresh out
of university in Scotland. “It was a masterservant
relationship, that’s how it was,” re-
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