According to Stanley Wong, CEO of Shenzhen based Fnetlink Group, an IT solution provider for commercial uses, Macao is a small but inclusive city, where a reclusive lifestyle and amicable people well define its underlining character.

Moving with his family from Fujian province to the city in 1980, when Wong was eight years old, he found himself in a challenging environment without knowing a single word of the local dialect.

To make him better understand the indigenous culture, his mother, while still needing to take care of five other siblings, sent him to a kindergarten for re-education that led him to graduate from high school at a much-protracted age.

"If it wasn't for the inclusive culture in the city, I might have had lots of troubles in explaining why I graduated so late (at the age of 22) compared to the normal age of 18. I would have aroused suspicion in people wondering whether I had repeatedly failed to move on to the next grade," he said with a smile.

However, he has never faced any questions in that regard. After finishing his postgraduate education in Taiwan, he was employed by a Hong Kong IT company working for its sales and marketing sector.

"I gave up civil engineering as the major of my schooldays and chose IT, which was flourishing at the time, seeking for a way to help my family pay off its debts and pull through a period of financial difficulty," Wong recalled.

Born into affluence, Wong lived in a villa of about 20 rooms in Macao in his childhood. His father and grandfather were in charge of a securities company based in Hong Kong. However, they were not only businessmen but also good Samaritans.

In his childhood, the living room of Wong's big house always accommodated lodgers from Fujian staying temporarily for weeks or even months in hope that they could settle down in Macao by riding the tide of the city's well-developed light industrial sector.

However, when Wong reached grade four at a local primary school, the securities firm went bankrupt and the family could barely make two ends meet, let alone cover the children's tuition fees.

In order to allow them to continue their studies, Wong sought various part-time jobs, such as cutting thread residues.

"At that time," he recalled, "I learned that so many of the people who had been accommodated by our family were lending a helping hand. This was so touching to me that it fostered a strong sense of gratitude even in regard to the smallest favor."

Fortune did not desert Wong's family all the time. Upon his graduation in 1999 when the handover of Macao was officially launched, Wong experienced the first cusp of the booming Internet industry which grew at stratospheric rates.

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