Writers from China's diaspora
Her e-mail address contains the word 'mysterious'. She declines to supply either her age or a photograph because, she says, 'in my hermit tradition, we do not make our pictures public'. Not even her publisher, the Boston-based East-meets-West enterprise Shambhala, offers a picture of the Taoist sage in its catalogues.
But Eva Wong was born in Hong Kong and raised as a reader of this newspaper, which has a special place in her heart. Thus, although she rarely meets the public, she agrees to give an interview over the phone from her Colorado home.
And then everything goes pear-shaped. The text extract sample she sends me via what she calls 'fancy services' is returned to her twice. She mistypes her phone number, putting me in touch with a bewildered stranger called Mr Frost.
We reschedule. However, in an e-mail that mentions that the previous one she tried to send bounced back, she says: 'Something/someone is trying to prevent us from communicating. Don't you think this is strange?'
I do, but finally manage to tee up an interview with this Sphinx-like figure who has 13 eastern philosophy books to her name. Speaking in a low, slow, stately voice, she recounts her 1960s childhood spent in Kowloon and on Hong Kong Island.
Her favourite area was the New Territories, which back then was unspoiled. 'I would hike in those mountains and then come down and be in a village and there would be absolutely no cars, not any kind of modernity and I would be able to sit down and have tea and actually still hear rushing water which was still relatively clear,' she says with a mournful laugh.