The Tiger Balm Kings
Aw Boon Par & Aw Boon Haw
Courtesy of Aw Cheng Hu
(Daughter of Aw Boon Par & Grandmother of May Chu Harding)
How Did They Really Get Their Start?
Order
Escape from Paradise
C. V. Devan Nair, former President of Singapore - “It took me two and a half evenings to complete your un-put-downable book...A moving memoir...it is a unique contribution to the appreciation of a life in Singapore. Thank you for having written it. ”
|
|
|
Barely a decade after the brothers started to manufacture and sell Tiger Balm from their mother’s kitchen in Rangoon, they had already amassed a string of pharmaceutical companies stretching from Burma to Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the East Indies, Hong Kong and China. By the eve of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, the Aw brothers had built a business empire with 10,000 workers toiling in the Tiger Balm factories.
Just when everything was going so great, a squad of policemen showed up at the brothers’ house to serve them with an arrest warrant. Boon Par and Boon Haw were charged with illicit trafficking in opium, and counterfeiting.
Well, you have to start, somewhere...
Aw Boon Par's Daughter Aw Cheng Hu
Aw Cheng Hu, known as "Emma"
with husband, Lee Chee Shan
Aw Cheng Hu, known as "Emma," was born in Rangoon, and brought to Singapore by her father, Aw Boon Par. Emma is May Chu's grandmother.
From the book:
My grandfather’s name was Lee Chee Shan, but I called him “Kong Kong,” Cantonese for grandfather. My grandmother, Emma, was “Mamak,” literally, “great mother.” Formally, my grandfather was known as Dato Lee Chee Shan, and my grandmother, Datin. Dato and Datin are Malaysian titles originally bestowed on tribal chiefs and their wives, but now reserved for the rich—especially the Chinese rich. Of course, at the time, I knew nothing of such things.
So much deference was shown to Kong Kong by Mamak, that you would never guess that she was the one with all the money. This did not mean that Mamak was subdued, or mousy. Not at all. While Kong Kong usually ate in silence, Mamak did all the talking. She was very animated, gesturing as she talked.
She enjoyed herself and laughed easily. She was truly Boon Par’s daughter. Still, out of respect for her husband, Mamak always dressed as he wished—colorfully, in traditional Chinese cheongsams, always with matching red lipstick and nail polish. Each cheongsam had its own matching set of jewelry—nothing subdued ever, not even during the day. Mamak made Kong Kong very happy. Everybody made Kong Kong very happy, and even at the bank, all the ladies wore cheongsams—they had to.
Sally Aw, OBE, the (Almost) Bankrupt Hieress
Sally Aw, the adopted daughter of Aw Boon Haw, inherited the Aw's newspaper empire at the age of 23. In 1988, she won the most prestigious American award for journalism—the Carr Van Anda Award from the University of Ohio, a distinction which is usually reserved for the most outstanding figures from the American media such as Walter Cronkite and Ted Turner.
May Chu first met Sally Aw in Hong Kong.
From the book:
In impeccable English, she [Sally] greeted me saying, “Who would have thought you were a relative of mine? If I saw you on the street, I wouldn’t even recognize you.”
Did I look wrong, somehow? Not Chinese enough? Had I made a mistake by sitting down? Should I be kneeling?
In 1999, Sally found herself deep in debt and verging on bankruptcy. She also faced a serious legal problem.
From the book:
Sally finally managed to squander the vast fortune, which luck had dumped in her lap, and reached the brink of bankruptcy. In 1998, she was arrested for falsely inflating the circulation figures of the Hong Kong Standard, her English-language Hong Kong newspaper. Even the U.S. State Department protested when Sally got off the hook, citing her “close ties to Beijing.”
There is a Chinese proverb that wealth in a family lasts for only three generations. Sally managed to make it in two.
