A WRITER WHO was born on the Macau ferry should be ideal for the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. But Brian Castro returned to his childhood home with some disquiet last week. He has the talent, the output and the prizes of a top writer, but has only recently convinced himself to join the marketing circuit at the occasional festival.
'For most of my career I've been a reclusive writer,' he says from his home outside Melbourne. 'But things have changed in the past 20 years. Self-promotion and marketing are now important. I find I have a body of work and readers don't know who I am. Writers with one book who do the self-promotion are better known than I am. I'm being overtaken.
'But that's OK. The commitments and pressure of self-promotion change your personality. You become a different person. Fame turns your head and makes it very hard to get back in touch with the daily grind of writing.'
Coming to Hong Kong - home until he was packed off to boarding school as an 11-year-old - leaves Castro untangling his life. Chinese characters dominate his writing, and his most acclaimed novel, the complex Shanghai Dancing, fills the gaps in the story of his family with fiction. But Castro says he struggles with this place.
'I don't feel any connection to it,' he says. 'Not that I'm hostile to it. While I write novels with a lot of Chinese or Chinese-Australian characters, I speak Cantonese at an 11-year-old level. My father enforced a European household. Everyone had to speak English or Portuguese. The west was where you had to go, he thought.
'Even though my mother spoke Cantonese and Mandarin and had Chinese friends, I wasn't really initiated into Chinese society.