PEARL OF THE Orient, the Fragrant Harbour, Hollywood East, call it what you will, but books not written by people born and bred in Hong Kong tend to idealise the place. Perhaps it's because this city gives newcomers more opportunities than most, or because bright young things far from home discover a freedom from their watchful families.
Author Richard Tong, 37, is one of those who've done well out of Hong Kong. Arriving from Australia in 1991 with a little experience in television, he talked his way into a job in advertising, a field in which he'd never worked. Now a creative director, he met his wife here, settled down and has recently had his first child.
Years of getting to know Hong Kong and endless hours in Asia's airports and hotel rooms provided the chance to lay down notes and nuggets that became his first novel, The Durian Effect, his attempt to show the impact this city has on some people.
'I had the idea for a book about Hong Kong showing a different point of view,' Tong says. 'There's a tendency to romanticise it, but it can be cold, hard and brutal, not in a physical sense, but emotionally.'
With more than a hint of autobiography, the novel follows Richard, a recently arrived Australian of mixed race as he finds his feet in Hong Kong, rises meteorically in advertising, splits with his girlfriend from home, and descends into indulgent perverse excess, before crawling back up again. The novel is set against true events that straddled the handover and interspersed with the 'only in Hong Kong' variety of news clips about murders and attacks.
Though he was an experienced writer in the commercial world, Tong found himself cast as a raw first-time author when he contacted the established circle of published writers in Hong Kong. Finding them patronising and unwelcoming, he turned to his friends, local and expatriate, to comment on drafts as he worked to give the book a realistic tone. Though he procrastinated for years before finishing the book, getting it to the shelves of shops in Hong Kong proved the hard part.
