Author Bi Feiyu leaves it all down to chance

''Fate is a very funny thing," says Bi Feiyu. "It can hit you in ways beyond your wildest imagination, but I love surprises - they are my sources of inspiration."

At 50, the Nanjing-based author and winner of the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize has turned one surprise after another into award-winning masterpieces. His fan base in the West is on the rise thanks to the translation of his novels into foreign languages and movies. Six of his novels, including The Moon Opera (2001), can be read in as many as six languages. The 1995 movie Shanghai Triad, for which Bi wrote the screenplay, and the 2014 film adaptation of his novel Blind Massage (2008) have both won awards at international film festivals.

Bi made headlines in Hong Kong recently when he lamented that the city was becoming more like those on the mainland, noting the erosion of common courtesy among locals. "Good habits take hundreds of years to develop, but losing them can happen very quickly. Hong Kong people should be proud of their culture and etiquette. Safeguard them and don't let them fade away," he said.

The author is currently writer-in-residence at Baptist University's International Writers' Workshop. Professor Kathleen Ahrens, the workshop's director, calls him a "fearless" writer who tells his stories - those surprising twists in life - in a "very direct and visceral way". He also narrates with extraordinary depth and sensitivity.

Bi's first surprise came early.

"When I was seven years old or so, I was puzzled when my schoolmates were busy preparing sacrificial stuff for ancestors during the Ching Ming Festival while my family - my schoolteacher parents, two elder sisters and I - did nothing. So I asked my father, 'What about our ancestors?' He replied, 'We had none.' That's all he said."

It was an identity crisis that haunted Bi at each Ching Ming that followed. The boy was further shattered to learn, by discovering abandoned name chops in a wastebasket, that his father's surname was Lu. His father had been adopted by the Lu family during the second Sino-Japanese war (1937 - 1945) but changed his name back to Bi after his adoptive father was executed for treason, for having traded rice with the Japanese.