My dream when I was in elementary school was to become a film director. I was entranced by Hong Kong cinema and was particularly fond of action movies and literary adaptations. I even wrote my own scripts, drawing on the movies I had seen, and I would often use the school stage to perform plays for my teachers and classmates. I held on to my dream of becoming a director until my adolescence.
I was also enamoured of magic. Because this was in the days before television, the first magic show I ever saw was an outdoor performance by a magician. I became so absorbed in this art that I had an expert teach me some magic tricks and practised them enthusiastically. I got to where I could pull a dove out of a box or make an empty can overflow with rice.

On my own
The first elementary school I attended was opened by ethnic Chinese in Bangkok. Most of its classes were conducted in Thai, but we also studied Chinese for an hour a day. After studying there for a year, I transferred to a Christian boarding school in Ratchaburi Province, west of Bangkok.
Boarding school was a wonderful place for studying. Away from home for the first time ever, I had to take care of myself all on my own. Many of my classmates came from affluent families, and there was even a student from Malaysia. Many of the students were children of Chinese immigrants, but all classes in this school were taught in Thai. For the time being, my study of the Chinese language had come to an end, and later I would struggle to pick up Chinese characters.
The closest thing we had to playtime was honing our bodies. Once a week, we had a muaythai (Thai boxing) class. Any fights that broke out between classmates were settled by muaythai, with the bouts continuing until a clear winner emerged.
At around the age of 9, I began raising racing pigeons and roosters for cockfights. I enjoyed taking care of living things. There was no way I could raise them at the boarding school, however, so I raised them at my teacher’s house. I still enjoy cockfights and go see them when the occasion permits.

After the wars
During the Pacific War, my father was trapped in Malaysia, but once it ended, he returned to Thailand. Shortly thereafter, however, he headed off to Swatow, China. In addition to the seed store he had opened in Bangkok’s Chinatown, my father also owned a company in Swatow that supplied seeds to customers across Asia. His focus was to improve vegetable cultivars at his farm there.
The Pacific War ended with Japan’s surrender in August 1945, but not long after, another major conflict broke out: the Chinese Civil War, between the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party. Communist forces eventually gained the upper hand and, in October 1949, proclaimed the birth of a new China.
Despite this momentous development, however, there appears to have been little change in Swatow.
That is because during the earliest years of its rule, the Communist Party adopted fairly flexible economic policies. It did not seek to drive out or eliminate business owners like my father, and instead explored ways socialist ideologies and commerce could coexist and bring prosperity.
The Communist Party government called on ethnic Chinese around the world to help build the new country. Many families who had emigrated from Chaozhou sent their children back to their homeland.
When my father asked if I wanted to come to Swatow to study, I was overjoyed and began preparing to leave at once. I was 11 at the time.

Dhanin Chearavanont is chairman of the Charoen Pokphand Group.
This is the sixth of a 30-part series of “My Personal History” by Dhanin Chearavanont.
Reprint with permission from The Nikkei Asian Review.

But as of last year, they were catching up to 200kg a day thanks to the “crab bank” project set up |by the Local Fishermen’s Community.
Launched in 2010, the project cultures crab eggs and then releases the babies into the sea, increasing the population, Anant Manil, head of the P Sub Anant Local Fishermen’s Community, said recently.
“When the number of fishing boats increased, as most of them also catch both crabs and pregnant crabs, the number of crabs in the sea decreased, so we could catch only 20 kilograms of crabs per fishing boat per day in 2010 from normally 200kg before 2010.
“This impacted our income and other fishermen in the district, so we learned how to increase the number of crabs in the sea,” he said.
Anant started to cooperate with the National Institute of Coastal Aquaculture Songkhla, Rajamangala University of Technology Srivijaya and PTT Exploration and Production (PTTEP) to learn how to increase the number of crabs by cultivating eggs until the babies are born before being released into the sea.
“We don’t want someone to pay money to us. We want to improve our quality of life by ourselves. The crab bank is the way to improve our quality of life by ourselves,” he said.
The community is training other communities in Songkhla and other provinces in the South such as Pattani and students in several communities to do the same.
This helps them to develop their community and improve their household earnings.
Nat Lohsuwan, senior vice president for corporate communications and public affairs at PTTEP, said the company started to support this project in 2013 when it saw the project providing benefits to the community.
“The crab-bank project helps the community take care of itself. This is a sustainable project for the community.
“It is our policy to support all communities undertaking projects that can support them for the long term,” she said.
The company also is studying offering the same project in other provinces such as Pattani and Ranong, she said.
PTTEP’s corporate-social-responsibility strategy focuses on cooperating with communities to improve their quality of life.
For example, in Songkhla, the company has collaborated with |the provincial administration |and TK Park to develop the Songkhla Smart Centre in Muang district.
In Phitsanulok, it also supports the community’s production of its local snack, fried bananas, and also promotes the product for the community.

The type of franchised retailing operation they envisage entails little initial investment capital and inventory costs for such entrepreneurs, while offering the potential to make a profit of more than 50 per cent, said one of Easy Salad’s co-owners, Charee Sripaisalmongkol.
She and her partner, Ratchadaporn Lueagsuriya, are seeking franchisees and retailers to whom they can supply their salad dressings and other food products, because such a move would enable the duo to save on their current operating costs and give them more time to be with their own family, as they would be working from home.
Charee, 33, said that after establishing Easy Salad in 2012 and running the business for more than three years, she and her partner had decided to downsize from having a shop near a sports club to opening a small store in Bangkok’s Prachachuen area, from which they could focus less on retailing and more on franchising or supplying to other businesses.
The rationale was that they would no longer have pay for rented space, would have lower operating costs, while she would have more time with her family now that they have a baby.
Although their business income has decreased since they made the downsizing move, this has been more than offset by a significant fall in operating costs, she said.
To be a full-on retailer requires a great deal of time and energy, whereas acting as a supplier to other businesses will save in both these respects, while the firm’s production costs are significantly lowered, she said, adding that she also wanted to be able to help others have their own business at a small investment cost.
“In seeking retailers and franchisees, we are looking for shop owners that have sufficient free time from their daily work, or housewives that can work from home and take care of their families. This type of business needs only a small investment budget and, if well-managed, the cost of waste is minimal,” she explained.
Moreover, for those becoming retailers of Easy Salad’s dressings and other products, the potential profit margin is about 50 per cent, the co-founder said.
Charee said that next year, the company would launch a serious search for retailers or franchisees in different areas.
The company has a clear business model not to compete with franchisees, as it wants to focus on supplying products, while each franchisee would concentrate on retailing in a limited area around their own shop, she stressed.
She would provide training if anyone meeting her criteria wished to open such an operation selling Easy Salad’s range, she said.
Easy Salad was established four years ago after Charee and Ratchadaporn decided to quit their salaried jobs to run their own small business.
Ratchadaporn was well-versed in being a chef, after graduating from Le Cordon Bleu culinary arts and hospitality management institute in France and gaining hands-on experience in many restaurants abroad.
Charee, meanwhile, graduated from the Faculty of Arts at Chulalongkorn University.
The couple decided to leverage their knowledge of cooking and restaurant business management to establish the business as a joint venture between them.
Easy Salad, which is located in Prachachuen’s Pracha Niwet village, offers 14 fresh salad dishes, 10 salad dressings, a range of eight healthy sandwiches, and various fresh fruit juices.
The company also takes bulk orders for seminar groups and meetings, with its healthy snack boxes costing Bt45 to Bt70 apiece.
Charee said Easy Salad’s main strength lay in its homemade salad dressings, offering a wide range of good tastes, such as white sesame, Shitake mushroom, wasabi, raspberry, tom yum and blue cheese.
Some 70 per cent of its income is from wholesale business and providing boxed food for seminars and meetings, with the remainder coming from retails sales at their shop.
The company hopes to double its income next year, not least because of increasing awareness of the benefits of healthy eating, she said.