Johnny Yip Yee-tat used to be one of Hong Kong's most prolific romance novelists. The fictional daily newspaper columns he began writing in serial form as a teenager have been combined to form more than 300 potboilers, and his name is familiar to most Hong Kong women of his generation (Yip reluctantly admits to being 'near 60'). Two years ago, however, Yip's Sing Pao column took a sinister turn when he quit romance and started churning out ghost stories instead. Yip, it seems, was bored with tales of love. In fact, he appears positively embarrassed by them. He now regards his extensive oeuvre with disdain and cringes at the juvenile sentimentality of his bodice-rippers.
So the newspaper's publishers suggested he switch to spooky stories, which he pulls from sources as diverse as well-known Ching dynasty legends and hoary urban myths. Each has a mysterious, Twilight Zone-style ending, a stark contrast to the tidy, uplifting climaxes of his romantic fiction. What caused such a late-life shift? 'As I've got older I've switched to more realistic things, more serious stuff,' he said airily. 'All the romance isn't real to me anymore. When you get older love isn't always so beautiful.' Did he have a broken heart? No, said the unmarried Yip, who remained tightlipped about his love life.
If realism was what he wanted, perhaps writing ghost stories wasn't the most logical place to start. But Yip said it was the detached third-person style of these tales he found realistic and refreshing. And, yes, he does believe in ghosts.
His earlier fiction, by contrast, usually came from the heart: Yip put something of himself into his romantic leads, most of whom were female. The most popular of his grandes dames was Monita, the central figure in Yip's best-selling Monita's Diary. Published when Yip was 20, it went on to sell more than 250,000 copies, not only in Hong Kong, but in Chinatowns around the world.
Monita was a rich and superficial Hong Kong schoolgirl who wore Chanel suits and dined at Gaddi's, until her father's bankruptcy forced her onto an introspective roller-coaster. 'She is very naive and innocent. She has been spoiled,' Yip said. 'Then her life completely changes. It has a happy ending, but she experiences a lot. At the end she is very humble and mature.' Was she beautiful? 'Oh, yes!' Yip exclaimed. 'She had long hair, very big eyes, tall ...' The character was based on a Hong Kong school-friend he once admired from afar. Yip moved with his family to Hong Kong from Shanghai in 1949. His father, who had been a banker in China, owned a series of construction-related businesses, but the family never lived in Monita-style luxury. Yip's mother didn't consider writing a suitable profession for her only son (Yip has two sisters, one older, one younger), but his prolific output and impressive earnings soon undermined her opposition. He was paid less than $600 for his first book, published when he was 17. But this made him 'rich among the students'. Later, his income would be boosted by film adaptations of more than 30 of his books. He doesn't regard himself as rich, although he will be able to retire comfortably in a few years.
I had thought Yip would enjoy revisiting the heady success of his youth, but his clipped answers suggested a strong desire to bring the conversation back to the present. He avoided any attempts to pinpoint the reason for his apparent antipathy to much of his life's work. It seemed as if an inexpressible frustration was simmering under his amiable surface, but he steadfastly refused to explore it. When he made the surprising admission that he doesn't have a single copy of any of his books in his apartment, it was clear he was mysteriously haunted by his past as a romantic novelist. 'At that time, for an author less than 20 years old, Monita's Diary wasn't a bad novel,' he said, sweeping long strands of hair across his balding pate. 'But now I hardly want to mention it. I never read my old books because I find them very silly.' Ghost stories could easily be written off as silly too, but Yip doesn't think they're as important as his other assignments anyway. Nowadays he primarily regards himself as a travel and food writer, and tackles both tasks with enthusiasm. In addition to his daily dispatches from the spiritual world, Yip writes a thrice-weekly travel column, regular restaurant reviews and food articles for Sing Pao, and a monthly food column for B International magazine. His propensity for writing favourably about the destinations he visits has made him popular with organisers of junkets: in the two weeks following our interview, he was going to Hamburg for a week, then to Sendai for two days to write travel stories. Next month he's off to visit a Campbell's Soup factory in California.