I began thinking about Hungry Ghosts in the years immediately after I
left Hong Kong, with the broad intention of writing about the place before it
officially left British hands and was reclaimed by China in 1997. My interest in the subject was first sparked because by chance I happened to be in Hong Kong at the time of the Tiannamen Square massacre in June, 1989. The whole place was riveted by the spectacle of what was happening across the sea in China. You could almost hear the communal intake of breath as this tangled, frantic city of millions waited to see what would happen. The students were camped in the Square, taking on the brute force of the government, and the people of Hong Kong watched on television screens, on satellite, read newspapers and waited. There were marches in the streets, meetings of a thousand people holding lighted candles and swaying. The city was blazing: charged, electric and I had never witnessed anything like it.

Like many others of my generation, I had grown up on the dream of Europe, and Asia had not really penetrated my consciousness. Suddenly I was vitally interested in this place so close to Australia, attracted by its terrible dramas, much like one’s eyes are irretrievably drawn to an accident. Also, other things were going on in my life: I met the man who became my second husband and by the end of the book I was awaiting the birth of our first baby. The book was written in a kind of mad rush to the finish line and I think the panting tone of the book reflects this. The plot rushes ahead to its inevitable conclusion and I had to force myself each night to stop. I began the book in London in 1994 and finished it in Sydney on August 7, 1995 and our son Caspar was born the next day.

Readers often ask how autobiographical Hungry Ghosts is, and I always reply: everything I know is contained in every book I write. Obviously, some books more readily resemble the outward facts of a writer’s life than others and this book uses much of my own experience of living in Hong Kong, my sense of internal “exile”, my bouts of dislocation and mental disarray (in my case, panic attacks when I was in my early twenties), my own knowledge of love and its betrayals. There are clear parts of myself in Anne-Louise, and in Rachel and probably in Martin, too. But for characters to truly come alive in fiction there must undergo some transmutation, a kind of alchemy which makes them represent more than themselves. As James Atlas recently wrote in an essay in The New Republic, “A writer would never take someone from life in this thieving way, for the good reason that there are only a limited number of things to say about an actual person, while there are an infinite number of things to say about an imagined person. Characters are always composites: a little of this actual person, a little of that one, and then a strong imagined element”.

As I have written elsewhere, I have sometimes borrowed bits and pieces here and there from my own life, from people that I know, from stories that I have heard. But these borrowed parts must form a new whole, a totally new person, cut adrift from their early, scrambled selves. It is fiction’s job to re-imagine life in its entirety, so that in the end the artful lies of a novel shines brighter than ordinary life.

In Hungry Ghosts, I wanted to write, too, about the birth of artistic consciousness, and the character of Rachel allows me to do that. I loathed living in Hong Kong actually, and I gave Rachel all that passionate hatred. It’s a dark, tangled book and readers either love it or loathe it.