Hon's strong Chinese cultural influence comes from his parents, as he had a primarily English-language education at school.

His father taught him poetry and the teachings of Confucius, which are "ingrained" in his mind and he had many conversations with his mother, who hoped he would become a scholar, about Chinese culture.

"I learned quite a lot of things from this, and I have thought about many aspects of Chinese culture," he says. "I don't follow things blindly, but I think at least 90 percent of the old wisdom still makes a lot of sense today."

He adds that whatever he does in life, he's been taught by his family and teachers to be like a lotus, emerging from the mud, clean and straight.

"I really appreciate this metaphor from an essay Ode To the Lotus written by the philosopher Zhou Dunyi during the Song Dynasty (960-1279) over 1,000 years ago. It was something my father would ask me to recite," he says.

Hon studied at the Tak Ming High School in Hong Kong, which was built in memory of Dr Sun Yat-sen, who was also known as Tak-ming. He says that the school placed great emphasis on patriotism and traditional Chinese values. "I read a lot of history books, including about how the Chinese fought the Japanese during World War II when I was in middle school," he says.

A diligent, hardworking student, Hon was accepted by National Taiwan University as a pharmacy major in 1969. His academic journey took an unexpected turn in 1971 when he was banned by the Taiwan authorities from the island over his patriotic beliefs.

Determined to finish his studies in pharmacy, he moved to the US, working part time to support himself at the School of Medicine at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. He remembers the days when he was financially constrained, and often had to work to be able to pay for his tuition in the US. In order to save on both tuition and time, he managed to complete three years of study only in two.