Hong Kong student makes transition from illness to detective story writer
When Adrian Ho was a Form One student in secondary school, he fainted and was unconscious in a hospital bed for three weeks. He had a disease called Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP), which means that his blood had unusually low levels of platelets – the cells that help clot blood. This meant he was prone to excessive bruising and bleeding.
Ho’s illness drove the 22-year-old to write and publish seven English-language detective novels in the past six years, the newest of which was released at the Hong Kong Book Fair yesterday.
The former student still remembers what it was like when he found out about his disease when he was around nine.
“It was devastating because I still had a bit of an ambition to become a footballer. But then it sort of gradually changed me.”
The disease meant that he could no longer play strenuous sports like football or basketball.
“I still remember crying that night, because I couldn’t take it. And then I had to sit in a corner at school when people were having PE lessons. I’ve had a slightly different upbringing from my friends.”
When Ho was unconscious in hospital, his father, barrister and Communications Authority chairman Ambrose Ho Pui-him, remained at his bedside. When Adrian Ho woke up, he soon developed an impulse to write.
I’ve had a slightly different upbringing from my friends
“When I got up, I couldn’t move my hands or my feet, and I realised that I couldn’t take those things for granted.”
“That was the driving force behind me writing my books,” Ho said. “I’ve just learned to live with it; it’s just a part of me.”
He eventually regained control of his limbs, wrote a draft of his first book but set it aside until three years later when he was at boarding school in Britain. He became ill again later in Hong Kong, which meant he could not fly back to Britain. It was at that time that he started refining the draft he had started all those years ago. He has since written more detective novels, because those are his favourite genre. He is now a fourth-year law student at the Chinese University.
Ho published all his books at Systech – where authors pay around HK$10,000 to get their books published. He said his parents paid for his first and third books, but he paid for the others himself. He said it was not about the money, and so he had never bothered to find out how well his books sold. He said he wrote because he enjoyed the process of exploring a world created in his mind and putting those observations on paper.
“I see people go around Central every day and their objective is to earn as much as they can within a time frame and basically to feed their kids, to have enough for themselves. There is nothing wrong with that, but I personally feel that somehow it makes them no different from their neighbour or from the other person.”
Despite his interest in writing, Ho said he still wanted to be a lawyer because he enjoyed the process of arguing a case before a judge. Ho said he would now take a break from writing until next year or 2017 to focus on his university work.
