Source: South China Morning Post, 16th February 2008

School days: Author found the meaning of life at daughter's birth

I was about the age of two when we first came to Hong Kong in the 1950s from Britain. My father was a naval meteorologist and we lived for a time in the Four Seas Hotel in Kowloon. I remember buying strings of firecrackers, unravelling them and putting them into a sandpit that contained toy soldiers and blowing them up.

I was a slow developer. I didn't walk until the age of 18 months and didn't talk until three years old.

We moved to Northern Ireland for a time then returned on a P&O liner to Hong Kong when I was about six. I remember going through the Suez Canal, where there were delays because of the troubles in the region at that time.

Further on, there was a sandstorm in Aden, Yemen, and there was a terrific sense of it being all around you. When we arrived in Bombay I was heard to ask where all the Indians were. They're all around you, came the reply. "OK. So where are all the cowboys?" I added.

There was more confusion when we arrived in Hong Kong and the Star Ferries were pointed out to me. "I don't see any star fairies," I said. I think I expected to see lots of little lights dancing.

I was a solitary boy. Living in central Kowloon, my explorations were filled with rich daydreams.

At the age of 10, I was sent to boarding school in Ireland. I found there was a pecking order. Most people were eight while I was 10, and those who'd been there longer were superior to new arrivals. However, I gained some kudos when I pushed the school bully off a rock in the first term.

At primary school one teacher had told me my best subject was English, and in my first year at prep school I won an award in the short story competition. However, I don't think I thought I could write and considered myself an average student. I did always read though, and it might be Enid Blyton and Ian Fleming's James Bond stories at the same time, and I'd not be aware of any discrepancy.

I had a friend at school who was also from Hong Kong and came from a family of readers, and we'd go into the bookshop and buy books by Waugh and Hemingway. He'd play Bob Dylan music and later I found I couldn't read without having Bob Dylan in the background.

I went on to do social anthropology at Sussex University in Britain. I was nearly thrown out though because I was struggling and had got in with the radical students who boycotted their exams. That meant assessing us on our coursework and I failed that too. Somehow though they found a way to keep me on.

What prepared me for writing books was having to write 5,000- to 10,000-word papers, though I was told by a lecturer that I was the only social anthropologist who couldn't spell the world "family".

My last day at university, I remember looking out across the campus and thinking I didn't understand the world.

In fact it was the birth, much later, of Stevie, my daughter, who had Down's syndrome, who taught me the full meaning of love. She also gave me my life purpose, part of which has been expressed in the founding of the Hong Kong Down Syndrome Association and Mental Handicap Network China.

She was also born with a hole in her heart and although the operation was successfully dealt with, she was left severely brain damaged as she had a few minutes without oxygen during her recovery period. This left her profoundly handicapped.

The impact of her life on mine was overpowering. She lived only eight years but without her arrival in my life I would've remained emotionally cold and disassociated. She saved me from that fate.

After university I went on to be, among other things, a hospital porter, which led to reorganising the hospital's pharmacy and selling books in a shop. I spent seven years after university scribbling away, writing about things that had happened to me. I came to a point where I realised I'd done my writing apprenticeship.

That led to writing Chinese Gods (An Introduction to Chinese Folk Religion). My new book, King Hui: The Man Who Owned All the Opium in Hong Kong, looks at a character called Peter Hui who I knew from living on Cheung Chau.

His was a bizarre story: he was an English teacher, a playboy, gambler, a collaborator with the Japanese and more. In fact, he was a man infatuated with folly.

I'd wanted to read about what Hong Kong's like from a Chinese perspective and this was the vehicle that allowed me to do so.

Jonathan Chamberlain is an author. He was talking to David Phair.