Kin Kam: resilience and enlightenment

K in F Kam is an inventor and writer who has severe haemophilia A. Born in Hong Kong in 1967, at age ten he came to the UK with his mother and two brothers to join his father, who had established a successful fish and chip shop in Oldham, Greater Manchester. He went on to academic success at university, obtained a doctorate and followed a career in research before going on to develop and market his inventions. All this he recounts in his autobiography Blood, Dragons & Lions. So far, so impressive. But Kin lived with the challenges of having haemophilia and being an immigrant from a minority ethnic group – a double dose of difference that weighed heavily on a child growing up in the North West of England during the ‘70s and ‘80s. The experience of coping with haemophilia and the associated stigma was so traumatic that he couldn’t bring himself to use the word throughout most of his book, referring to his condition only as ‘H’.