(Continued from here....)
He always dresses in Asian clothes, with Mandarin-collar shirts and Nehru jackets, and is occasionally mistaken for a priest. I'm an Asian militant. Ties are a Western imperialist trick to cut blood circulation to the brain, he says.
Does the name Master Vee imply some sort of religious pretensions? Nah, I use nicknames like Master Vee or Sam Jam because the kids can't pronounce Nuryana Samjam Perera Vittachi, he says. I don't blame them. Sometimes I can't pronounce it myself. On Saturday mornings, for example.
The glibness of his answers is initially off-putting, but after a few minutes, he drops the one-liners and starts to relax. Sorry, I'm a bit hyper after communing with 1,000 kids. Their intrinsic kidishness infects me. Is there such a word as kidishness? There should be. I'll write to the Oxford Dictionary people at once.
People who meet Vittachi can see why he is the only person who could have written The Feng Shui Detective novels. The marvellous multi-ethnic cast, each member of which individually re-invents the English language, has to be a product of someone with huge ears and a detailed knowledge of street culture in many places. The Sri Lanka-born author has an English wife and three adopted Chinese children: clearly destiny has raised him to be one of the spokesmen for a new Asia.
The books tell the story of feng shui master C.F. Wong, who specializes in feeling the vibrations at scenes of crime. Wong is a refreshing hero, because he is so patently un-heroic. He is puny and cowardly, a misogynist, he has antediluvian views on race and culture, and he doesn't have an altruistic bone in his body: his only motivation is money. And, surprisingly for a crime-fighting hero, he is not even honest, inflating his fees and overcharging his clients.
But the key to each story is that the feng shui master can usually only solve each mystery when he works together with people of other cultures, particularly the pestilent Western female assistant who has been foisted on him by the businessman who pays his retainer. The moral is simple, and laid on thickly with a trowel: only when people of different backgrounds work together, do we all win.
Who is Wong based on? Vittachi smiles. I thought I had invented him until an animator did a cartoon film which showed him as a fat Chinese man in Western clothes. No, no, no, I said. He's a puny, grumpy, bald man in an Asian suit. That's when I realized that I had based him on myself.
One has to wonder how a Sri Lankan ended up being an author touring schools in a Chinese city. We had to escape from Sri Lanka one dark night because of something my father wrote in a newspaper, Vittachi explains. That experience shaped my life and I decided to become a writer too. After their exile from Sri Lanka in the early 1960s, the family wandered around the world for a while, with Vittachi's mother eventually settling in London with the children. His father continued a nomadic existence until his death in 1993.
Vittachi Junior came to Hong Kong in 1987 on honeymoon, fell in love with the place, and has stayed ever since. I am Chinese now, he says, showing me a wallet photo of his three adopted children. Three-fifths of my family is Chinese, so I reckon that makes us a Chinese family. Our favourite vegetable is dau miu and we even drink that disgusting glutinous soup.
Literary success in Hong Kong was relatively easy to achieve, since there are so few authors in the city, either in English or Chinese. Picking up contracts with publishers around the world took longer, and his have spread across the globe over the past five years or so.
But unlike Wong, Vittachi has a streak of altruism. He has long had an active mission to encourage the development of competition for himself. He launched Dimsum, an anthology of local prose and poetry, in 1999 with author Xu Xi; it's now in its eighth volume. With writing teacher Jane Camens, he founded the Hong Kong International Literary Festival in 2000 and remains its managing director. He also gives classes in writing, urging people to create novels and screenplays.
It's a busy life, especially since he is making an increasing number of international appearances. But now that he has enjoyed a measure of success around the world, and filmmakers are hammering on his door, can he drop the frenetic pace and enjoy the fruits of his labour? Isn't he rich enough? This question makes his jaw drop to the floor. Books cost very little. Ten per cent of very little is very, very little. Authors work for adoration, not money.
Right on cue, an adoring child interrupts us to ask for the author's autograph. Vittachi signs a scrap of paper and makes small talk. As the child leaves, the author whispers: You've just watched an author get paid. Mr. Wong, the feng shui detective, may be based on his author, but the two of them don't have the same motivations.
(Ends)
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