It looks glamourous now; the 94-room hotel looms on your right, stretching up toward the sky as soon as you turn off the Queen's Park Savannah. The lobby doors whisper open onto smooth, polished surfaces and inviting chairs. Professional staff greets you courteously. Local fashion maven Meiling's only retail outlet is a few steps away, her brand-name presence a brilliant business coup for any hotel.
So to imagine Kapok Hotel as it began–a diner where an 11-year-old Diane Cohen-Chan washed dishes, swept floors and bartended–is quite a stretch for the imagination. But Cohen-Chan and her younger sister Jane Chan, now the owners of the local hotel, are matter-of-fact about their humble beginnings, even proud of them. "In Chinese families, it's a given," Cohen-Chan said. She remembers biking home from their alma mater Bishop Anstey and multitasking on the diner's counter: cashing orders, answering the phone and homework all got their turn.
"You don't question it. But all my friends went home and had normal lives; they didn't have to work." The hotel celebrated its 40th anniversary on May 11, complete with Asian-style orchid and bamboo decorations by Brian MacFarlane and a reputedly wild staff after party. Kapok's Cotton Hill location started as their mother Ena's vision for safe housing. "The police station was right there; the bus stop was a few steps away," Cohen-Chan said. And that vision blended with their father's entrepreneurial savvy, the business grew from the ground floor diner under their living space in 1964, to a small 71-room hotel in the early 1970s. Renovation after renovation led the hotel to its current incarnation. And the Chan sisters have grown right along with it. Eleven years younger than Cohen-Chan, Jane Chan has a warm, dreamy smile and comes across a little gentler in comparison to her older sister's brisk, business-like finish. By the time she reached the age to help out, the Kapok Diner and Lounge had moved upstairs and been transformed into Caf� Savanna. Like her older sisters, she worked at the hotel after school and during school holiday breaks.
But Chan had no intention of following in their footsteps permanently, she said. She studied Business Information Systems abroad and became an ICT specialist. And although not happy about the tech part of her job, she loved customer service. One day, after moving around a bit, she found herself at a loose end. And that's when her father Godfrey pounced. "He asked me to help automate the running of the hotel. But that meant I'd have to understand how the hotel worked," Chan said, smiling at his sneakiness. She spent months going over the daily running of the hotel until the automation was finished and she was completely up to speed. "And before I knew it I was working for him. Then he started paying me. Then he gave me a title– Assistant Manager of PR and Marketing, I think it was."
Cohen-Chan's route was just as circuitous in some respects, but in others it's as if she was groomed for the position. She studied Biology intending to go into medicine, but the dedication needed from a med student was not her bag. She considered other fields like law, but eventually did an MBA and came back home to work at Kapok.
"It's hard to separate what you want from what you should do," she said. "It wasn't a burden. I saw my father and mother working so hard and you wanted to contribute to put food on the table." The Chan family dealt with the death of its patriarch in 1994, and oldest sister Margarita also died a few years ago. And there was a time, Cohen-Chan said, where they had to decide whether they wanted to sink or swim. After all, running a demanding hospitality business without their charismatic father and founder was a challenge. But the ladies waded right into Kapok's biggest expansion project in 1997 without blinking an eyelash and without closing hotel operations for even one day. They personally oversaw construction, nodded over drafting changes and still ran the hotel at full capacity. And being female bosses didn't faze their focus at all.
"We decided on expansion because it was the right business decision," Cohen-Chan said firmly. Despite being a traditional Chinese family in many other ways, their parents never made them feel that they were handicapped because they were female. In fact, Godfrey Chan was probably looking at his female middle child to take over even before she felt she was ready, Cohen-Chan said. "It never crossed my mind that I was supposed to be the weaker sex and men were only accustomed to dealing with me on a project this size. In fact, I think being female was an advantage, because most of the men were very respectful toward me." "You do what you have to do," Chan added. "I've never thought that it was a man's world. That's just so foreign to me."
And there is no sister-sister power play between them either. "She's the boss!" Chan said of her older sister, laughing. "There can't be two equal heads and I know my role. We have different strengths, she knows what my strengths are and she doesn't usually dabble in my area."
Cohen-Chan agreed. "My role has evolved jointly because of my skills and because I'm the older one, and in Chinese families, the older one takes charge. But if I don't know something, why force it? I defer." These Bishop's girls have no regrets about their career choices, or the upbringing that guided them. And neither of them sees anything wrong with bringing Chan's three children, ages seven, nine and 11, into the family business when they're a little older. Floors always need to be swept, after all. "Today's generation has a lot more choice than we did. Because of what we went through. We had to work. But we learned that to make a dollar is not that simple but spending it is really easy. We should never forget to teach this generation that value of work."
