Hong Kong’s best selling English language author Nury Vittachi creates everything from thought-provoking non-fiction and novels for adults, to hilarious essays and novels for teens and children.

Born in Asia but schooled in the West, he has imbibed the best of multiple cultures. He has an amazing range of over 90,000 books in print, and is globally renowned for his series of humourous crime mysteries about the Feng Shui Detective.

His popular columns in The Far Eastern Economic Review cover the stranger and funnier happenings in Asia. He was recently short listed for The Aurealis Award in Australia. In his latest book, Twilight In The Land of Nowhen, the Theory of Relativity is used to save the main character from becoming a non-person. Already a bestseller in Australia and Hong Kong, this children’s book is slated to release in India in January under the Scholastic India banner.

Does living in Asia and writing primarily for an Asian audience, allow you to delve deeper into the ‘cultural confusion’ that is today’s Asia? Would your perspective be different if you were an expatriate writer?
Today’s Asia is a wonderfully rich environment. Already more than 60 per cent of the world’s consumers are Asian. Asian culture will soon be the world’s leading source of books, movies, music and other arts.

An astonishing number of movies, books and TV shows, are set in boring and predictable Western settings. It won’t last. The ‘average’ citizen of this planet is not a tall, white, heroic, blond-haired male, as the movies would have us believe. It is a short, Asian female with black hair.

I make an effort to set my books in a real world— where Asians and Westerners work together in confused, noisy cities where a great many different influences press upon them.

I once discussed whether locals or expatriates have a more objective view with a group of well-known east-west authors including Kiran Desai and Romesh Gunasekera. We concluded that the best person to write about a place was someone who had both lived in it as a resident, and also observed it from far away as an exile or expatriate.

You have said, “The first (Feng Shui Detective) book … shows how two people make their worlds into larger places, it’s a very moral story.” Do you feel the need for a message in your writing?
Yes, the moral element is very important to me. People have always lived around stories that educated their hearts at the deepest levels— whether it was the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita or the Koran. Today’s people have lost this grounding. Yet the most popular books and films tend to have deep moral values— so there is still a hunger for this. All my novels tend to contain the same theme: East and West seem miles apart, but when they work together problems are solved and we start to see how magical the world is.

My novel, Asian Values (1996) for example, was an allegory of colonialism. A young Asian man is handcuffed for 48 hours to a strange Western woman as part of a college ‘rag day’ stunt. The book shows how West and East become linked together. They have to work to understand each other. 

In your children’s story ‘The Amazing Life of Dead Eric’, the hero downloads his brain into a supercomputer and dies in the process... Books like this and your Feng Shui Detective novels display a brilliant imagination and also a unique sense of humour. What are your sources of inspiration?
My sources of inspiration are the news media. I love those short, wacky stories that you see in the ‘world briefs’ columns. I love to read New Scientist and Discovery magazines. And I love obscure publications such as the Borneo Bulletin. The world is a funny place. I don’t have to invent humour— mostly I just watch it and write down what I see.

Can humour be cultivated?
Yes, humour can be cultivated. I sometimes give people classes in how to be funny. Here are some tips.
1. Scribble feedback comments on news items, emails and magazine articles— it builds your ability to produce quick-fire rapid comebacks.

2. Practice being deadpan, which makes your jokes funnier.

3. Master the art of humourous, ironic understatement— “There are a number of people who believe that World War II was actually a bad thing.”

You are passionate about creating relevant books for Asian children.

So many talented writers from the Asia Pacific region write brilliant novels for adults. Why isn’t there a comparable growth of new writing for children?
Writing books for children has never been seen as a good way of earning money in Asia, so few people do it. Most Asian parents only encourage their children to read school textbooks. But I think things are changing. Adult Asians are realising that a really good read can entertain a child while secretly educating as well.

Tell us about your forthcoming books.
My latest Feng Shui Detective book comes out in spring 2008. I am also working on a series of non-fiction books based on ancient Asian culture.

The first in the series, The Kama Sutra of Business, has already been well received in certain countries.
The Kama Sutra that is generally circulated is actually only the chapter on sex. The underappreciated rest of the ancient Kama Sutra contains fascinating information about how to be a good leader and a conscientious citizen.
My book points out interesting facts; the first business book ever written was published by an Indian more than two millennia ago— The Arthashastra.

Also, people in India were using stone credit cards at the dawn of recorded history, 2000 years before the birth of Christ.