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[ 30 ] A Plus + November 2009

Before Nury Vittachi became a renowned humourist, life wasn’t always so light-hearted. Back

in 1960, a civil war was gathering pace in Sri Lanka; Vittachi, a two-year-old boy at the time, and his family were forced to flee after his father, a political journalist, defied a media blackout imposed by the country’s leaders.

“We got this phone call, it was the chief of police, who basically said: ‘I’ve been ordered by the prime minister to arrest you. Make sure you are not home when I get there,’” he recalls. “And then the phone rang again and it was the director of immigration… and he said, ‘I’ve been ordered to take your passports away… why don’t you use them.’ So my father said, ‘Okay kids, we’re going for a very long trip.’ And we got in the car and drove off.”

But even when they were running for their lives, his father, Tarzie Vittachi, never lost his sense of humour. “I asked my father: ‘Why are we driving in the middle of the night?’ And he said: ‘Because there is less traffic.’”

The Vittachi family then fled to Malaya (before Singapore split from Malaysia), but was asked to leave four years later – again because his father’s political writing enraged officials. It was, however, Tarzie Vittachi’s ability

to see the lighter side of life and seek the truth even during the darkest hours that inspired his young son to become a journalist and a humour writer.

“His principle was that a journalist’s job was to tell the truth and if that got him into trouble, then that [was] the right thing to do. That’s very inspiring, and it’s been my ambition to follow him in that sense,” he says.

Money and childrenIn a career spanning almost three decades, Vittachi, 51, has penned a plethora of novels and children’s books. In 2005, the Institute approached him to write its first storybook, May Moon and the Secrets of the CPAs, for its new “Rich Kid, Poor Kid” corporate social responsibility programme. The book, published in the same year, tells of a girl’s amazing adventures in learning how to save, spend and share money; more than 37,000 sets have been sold or given away to date.

In September, May Moon, the protagonist of the storybook, appeared on three trams running on all routes in an advertising drive to promote “Rich Kid, Poor Kid.”

Vittachi has just finished writing a sequel, yet to be named, which is a continuation of May Moon’s adventures

following the financial crisis and how she fixes the world economy. The Institute is planning to release it within the next six months.

His ties with the Institute date back to the late 1990s when he was first commissioned to write the Institute’s 25th anniversary book, Guardians of the Treasury House. It was published in 1998 and is about the history of accountancy in Southeast Asia. “They (the Commemorative Book Working Group) were worried that it might be a dry subject and so they wanted someone with a reputation for a light touch to write it,” Vittachi explains.

When the Institute approached him to write the first May Moon novel, Vittachi says he was also talking to a big publishing firm about writing a junior MBA novel. “But of the two, I much preferred working with the Institute,” he says. “People at the Institute wisely saw the dangers of encouraging children to focus on money, which is why the May Moon book carefully emphasizes that money and happiness are not the same thing.”

The author also made a guest appearance in the “Rich Kid, Poor Kid” documentary and trained some Institute members for the programme’s storytelling sessions in primary schools.

Stranger than fictionMay Moon author Nury Vittachi tells Naomi Martig how his father inspired him to become a humour writerPhotography by Brian Ching

November 2009 + A Plus [ 31 ]

Profile1958 Born in Sri Lanka

1960 Fled to Malaya with his family

1964 Moved to London

1980 Graduated from The University of Sheffield in the U.K. with a degree in English and theology

1987 Arrived in Hong Kong with his wife, Mary Lacey

1988 Began writing “Lai See” for the South China Morning Post, which became a hugely popular column and won him a wide following

1998 Started an offbeat relationship with the Hong Kong Institute of CPAs (then called the Hong Kong Society of Accountants) as a writer

2000 Published The Feng Shui Detective, which became his best-selling novel

2004 Became lecturer at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

2008 Started a syndicated humour column printed in many Asian countries

[ 32 ] A Plus + November 2009

Apart from his work with the Institute, Vittachi is a prolific humour writer and produces television and radio segments on business and financial issues for a wide range of media, including A Plus, the BBC, Bloomberg and RTHK. “I am a professional big mouth,” he says jokingly.

When he is not writing, he teaches story structure skills to filmmakers, game designers and others as a full-time lecturer at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and appears as a guest host of travel shows about Hong Kong on Discovery Channel.

Indeed, taking real topics, from politics to finance, and turning them into fictional stories is no easy task, but it’s a skill that Vittachi seems to have mastered through the teachings of his father.

“My father was forbidden from

writing about politicians at the time. So he used to write disguised animal stories, and people would have to work out which politician he was talking about. He would write ‘the leopard said to the tiger… and the tiger said to the eagle.’ And he would put it in the paper and people would race to read these and work out what was really happening,” he says. “So really, it was watching him that taught me how to do this.”

In discussing his new May Moon book for the Institute, Vittachi says being able to understand the intricacies of a child’s mind is a very powerful tool and adults can often end up learning more from children than the other way round.

“The second book was so much fun because I had to find out from kids, ‘How do you think we should fix the world economy?’” says Vittachi. He

recalls one child who reminded him that today’s low interest rates don’t benefit an average savings account holder much. “The child said: ‘If you take a bit of money and put it in a savings account with interest, and wait a year, it’s still a bit of money at the end. It doesn’t really grow.’

“I thought, ‘It’s actually true!’ We’re teaching them that interest makes [money] grow wonderfully. But she’s right, it doesn’t grow at all. It goes from HK$95 to HK$97,” he says.

Finding his voiceVittachi kicked off his journalism career in London, where he spent his formative years after his family moved there in 1964. He studied English and theology, which he says provided a great source for fictional writing, at The University of Sheffield.

Profile

November 2009 + A Plus [ 33 ]

“My mother was a Buddhist, my father was a Muslim, my girlfriend at the time [whom I later married] was a Catholic… so I had all these different influences and I was fascinated by the other world, by what you can’t see,” he says.

Studying ancient scriptures on Judaism and Christianity also helped hone his storytelling skills. “These ancient texts became a really good basis for books because all [of them] are based on a mythical story structure,” he explains.

Immediately after university Vittachi began working as a freelance journalist for a number of different U.K. newspapers, including The Times and tabloids such as The Sun and The Daily Mirror.

“U.K. journalism was a great teaching tool because it’s absolutely fearless. So I loved it. And it was such great training for journalism in Asia, which is so polite. It was inevitable that I was going to make a splash when I came here,” he says.

And splash he did. Vittachi and his wife, Mary Lacey, arrived in Hong Kong in 1987 – shortly after they were married – during their honeymoon tour of Asia. “We got to Hong Kong halfway through that journey and just fell in love with the place and decided to stay here for ‘just a while,’” he says.

More than two decades later, Vittachi says they are now on the 22nd year of their honeymoon: “All of our wedding presents are still untouched in a house in London, waiting for our return.” The couple have since adopted three Chinese children: Jem, 15, Kelci, 14, and Lexi, 10.

During that time, Vittachi became a popular columnist, writing “Lai See” and “Spice Trader,” which took a humourous approach on cross-cultural differences, for the South China Morning Post. “That’s where I

discovered humour is a great tool that nobody was using,” because it allows you to “deliver very powerful messages in ways that are acceptable,” he says.

His business columns became so popular that Vittachi eventually published the first collection in 1991, which sold out in 10 days and had to be reprinted several times, and another set in 1993.

But humour didn’t completely shield him from landing in trouble: Some of his columns were on sensitive topics, such as corruption in Hong Kong’s financial market, and SCMP let go of him shortly after Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.

“I caused so much trouble!” Vittachi recalls. “One day I wrote, ‘Half the people on the Hong Kong stock exchange are crooks.’ And the editor didn’t see it until the next day and said, ‘You can’t write this!’ And I put in a retraction the next day.”

Following the footsteps of his father, Vittachi also contributed articles to the Far Eastern Economic Review from 1993 to 2004. “There has been a Vittachi in the byline for some 60 years,” he says. “The oldest one I could find was [by my father] from 1958. And the most recent was my last article.”

The magazine will shut down next month after 63 years of publishing. It has been struggling with losses for years as readers moved to the Internet.

Writing fictionVittachi began publishing fiction that makes the most of cultural differences between East and West from the mid-1990s. He has since written more than 30 books, many of which have been released around the world in multiple languages.

His best-selling novel, The Feng Shui Detective, was published in 2000 and spawned four more books, including

the latest Mr. Wong Goes West, which went on sale last month.

Looking back at a career that has straddled both geographic and topical routes, Vittachi says his road to happiness has been remarkably simple: Do something you love, and make sure you are paid for it.

“Do something that causes a glow, ignites you, and you jump into it without noticing time passing,” he says. “Sometimes it happens when you are doing a leisure activity, sometimes it happens when you are doing a work activity. It’s finding out what makes that joy and enthusiasm, and doing that. And if you can make it as a [career], even better.”

Vittachi says he hopes people have learned from the financial crisis that “materialism and happiness are not connected.” He notices that more and more people are turning to spirituality in the face of hard times. “Churches are packed” these days, he quips. “What is rational? Thinking that you can sell billions of dollars worth of mortgages to people who couldn’t possibly pay them back? Or, going to a place where people realize that there is more to life than materialism?”

For Vittachi, in order to be happy, one must develop an appreciation of different cultures. His Feng Shui series, for example, focuses on two main characters, one embodying Eastern culture and the other Western culture, and how they misunderstand each other.

The underlying message, however, is that such divides are not a clash or a major problem. And with three Chinese children and an English spouse, there is probably no one better suited than the Sri Lankan writer to spreading this message. “Joining cultures is the most unbelievably positive experience that anyone can experience,” Vittachi says.