Gigi Chao: I hope my parents accept my other half
Cecil Chao's daughter tells youth forum she hopes family will recognise her 'other half' and calls on minorities to 'make people like them'
Gigi Chao, the lesbian daughter of property tycoon Cecil Chao Sze-tsung, said she would never stop trying to get her parents to accept her partner.
She said that the generation gap had always existed and she would just keep on communicating with her parents, although they had shown no sign of accepting her partner, Sean Eav, so far.
Chao, a 33-year-old executive director of her father's Cheuk Nang property development company, came out of the closet last September in the middle of a global media frenzy, after her father promised HK$500 million to the man who would marry his daughter.
She encouraged the city's sexual minorities to make themselves more attractive to improve society's view of difference.
"We should think of ways to improve our mental wellbeing," Chao said. "It's difficult to be minorities in Hong Kong, as Hong Kong is very materialistic and superficial. We cannot change this, but we can make ourselves more attractive to make more people like us."
She also acknowledged that discrimination existed even within LGBT groups, where, for example, transsexuals were the minority within the minorities.
