Mr. Danny Fat Kuen Ho 何法權

Danny Ho (何法權), entrepreneur and adventurer, was born in the southern Chinese village of Enping in 1946 and died having sampled more of the world than the world had perhaps expected of an immigrant child carried across borders in search of freedom. He belonged to that generation of Hong Kong men who built their lives with hustle, nerve and a classifieds ad.

His first journey came early. In 1947, as civil war tightened its grip, his family fled Enping for Guangzhou. Two years later, in 1949, as the Communists consolidated power, his mother carried him on her back south to Hong Kong. In the face of tyranny, his parents had chosen uncertainty over submission. The theme would echo through his life.

He grew up on Hollywood Road, then a humming artery of traders, hawkers and antique dealers. The colony of his boyhood was cramped and improvisational, yet full of appetite. As a child, his mother took him to a restaurant where he tasted Baked Alaska for the first time—a theatrical confection of ice cream and flame. He never forgot it. Hong Kong, he learned, was a place where East met West not in theory but on a dessert plate.

Filial piety had its limits. Rather than work indefinitely for his father, the young Danny invested more than HK$20—a bold sum for him at the time—on a classified ad in the South China Morning Post: “Position Wanted: Young Man, Hardworking, Willing to Learn.” The line was concise and accurate. It brought him to the attention of the Jardine Matheson, the taipan conglomerate that schooled many in the disciplines of global trade. There he absorbed the mechanics of commerce in a city then entering its roaring, deal-making 1970s.

In 1976, Danny struck out on his own. He founded an import-export business specializing in photographic equipment. The enterprise prospered sufficiently to provide comfortably for a family of six. He never forgot that its first capital was trust.

On his inaugural business trip to the United States, he opened a Yellow Pages directory in his Manhattan hotel room and began cold-calling potential buyers. He was, by temperament and conviction, a hustler: persistent, unembarrassed and energized by opportunity.

The announcement in 1984 of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, setting the terms for Hong Kong’s 1997 handover, prompted another decisive migration. Sensing that history was again shifting, he moved his young family to Vancouver, Canada in search of a better life. It was the second time in his life that political tremors had redirected his course. As before, he responded not with complaint but with motion.

Curiosity propelled his leisure as forcefully as it had his career. He travelled widely and early: to Kenya on safari in the early 70s; to Russia soon after the Iron Curtain fell; to Machu Picchu in the early 1990s, when it was less trodden and more remote. A lifelong Elvis fan, he made a pilgrimage to Graceland in his last years.

Danny was strong-willed and spirited, but also accepting of life’s reversals, generous with opportunity, and loyal and sentimental in kinship. He was a beloved father, brother and companion—proof that the refugee child on Hollywood Road could grow into a citizen of the world, without ever forgetting why he had been carried there.

Danny’s inurnment will take place at Forest Lawn Memorial Park at 11am on March 6. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to BC Cancer (https://bccancerfoundation.com/ways-to-give/give-in-memory-honour-or-celebration/?form=FUNLUDVQJBZ&s_src=google).