His father was an itinerant martial arts teacher. The family was not wealthy. The specific economics of the Poon household were, like those of many peasant families in the Republican China of the 1910s and 1920s, defined by the constant management of modest resources against the pressures of an uncertain world. His brothers’ wages — earned in factories, the kind of industrial employment that the early decades of the twentieth century were producing in China’s developing urban centers — contributed to the household. These wages helped pay for Poon Lim’s schooling.
The political environment of China in the 1930s was not one that offered clear or safe futures to young men of military age. Japan had been extending its military presence in China through the decade, with the full-scale invasion of 1937 eventually consuming the country in a war that would last until 1945. The specific threat that faced the Poon family, in the accounts that Poon Lim subsequently gave of his early life, was the prospect of forced military service — of being conscripted into a war that the family did not choose and could not control. His father’s decision to send him away from Hainan in 1936, when he was around seventeen or eighteen, was partly an attempt to remove him from the reach of this conscription.
The direction of his departure was British Hong Kong, the colonial territory on the south coast of China that provided a different kind of possibility for a young man with the sea in his inheritance. Hong Kong was, in the 1930s, one of the major maritime hubs of Asia — a port through which vast quantities of goods moved and in which the shipping industry offered employment, if not comfortable or dignified employment, to men from across the region.