Personally, I see Donald Tsang as a bit of an icon because he's the only world leader I know who wears a bow tie and I think that's great. It gives him some character. At the end of my book, Ming puts on a big bow tie.

The idea for Ming the Minibus came after a friend I worked with overseas was killed two years ago in a car accident in France. She was only 32 and one of her girlfriends told me afterwards that police said if she had worn a seat belt she would have survived.

I go to school in a minibus every day and I had a look at the seat-belt signs and they were typical of Hong Kong. One bus had a sign threatening to fine you HK$5,000 and jail you. Another one said, 'Think of your wallet, put your seat belt on'. None of them would appeal to children and get the message across.

So I came up with an idea for Ming the Minibus and I approached one bus firm - I won't mention which one - to ask if we could put seat-belt safety stickers on their buses. Their reply was, 'How much is in it for us?' So I went to another bus firm in Sai Kung and the woman there was really enthusiastic.

She offered to allow me to have the stickers I'd had made put on the back of the 1A minibuses saying, 'Ming the Minibus 'Always wear a seatbelt'.' About 40 of the minibuses carry the stickers and the whole fleet has smaller versions of the sticker inside.

After that, one of my teaching colleagues said, 'Why don't you write a book?' The hardest part isn't writing a book but getting the illustrations done. But when I was in Shenzhen a female artist tried to sell me some still-life pictures because she wanted to raise 4,000 yuan for her son's education.

I wasn't interested in buying the pictures, but I went back the following weekend and asked her to do 12 drawings. This woman had never been to Hong Kong so I used a digital camera to take pictures of the minibuses and e-mailed them to her. Now we have a team of illustrators from all around the world including two on the mainland and one from Sai Kung and we're up to 30 books.

One of the books was sent to the United Nations Year of the Dolphin website and I got a letter from them asking if they could use it. As a result of that, a town in Portugal asked to translate the book into Portuguese - which is funny because I always thought it would go into Cantonese first.

I don't make any money from the books. Their aim is to change the material that is available to students in Chinese schools. Most reading books they use are American or English and it is very difficult to find stories they can relate to. A running gingerbread man means nothing to them, but they can relate to Ming the Minibus because they've all been in one.

I wanted to make a series of reading books that were based on the mainland, Hong Kong and Macau and things that children would recognise and relate to. In fact, when I take children out of school and they walk down the street and see a minibus, they point and say, 'Ming!'

As for the seat belts, it's very difficult to change the way that people behave. A lot of people still don't use them. But one guy who lives in Sai Kung came up to me after the programme had been running for a while and said, 'I hate you.' When I asked why, he said he'd been on the minibus and a five-year-old child had come up to him and told him to put his seat belt on. So obviously it has had some effect.