Swimming with the sharks

Author Mo Zhi Hong. Photo / Paul Estcourt

There's an amusing moment in Mo Zhi Hong's The Year of the Shanghai Shark, when teenage orphan Hai Long is practising his English with his friends. They're on the bus to yet another English lesson in the Chinese city of Dalian.

They should know their stuff by now. "How are you?" Hai Long asks Xiao Wang. "I'm fine thank you. And you?" Xiao Wang said. "I'm fine thank you." "How are you?" Xiao Wang asked Po Fan. "I'm fine thank you. And you?" Po Fan said. "I'm fine thank you." And on it goes. "All they've been taught is this phrase," explains Auckland writer Mo, who drew inspiration for his first novel from a stint teaching English to teenagers in north-eastern China.

"And then they can just get stuck in a loop. They don't know how to finish." Mo came to China as somewhat of an outsider, which helps to explain his keen observations. Born in Singapore 34 years ago, he was "just a piece of baggage" when his doctor parents moved to New Zealand. After school and university, Mo lived in Canada, Taiwan and New York, where he took a job as a software programmer before the dot.com crash of the 1990s.

After jumping ship he moved to Beijing for a year, and eventually settled in Dalian with the intention of brushing up on his Mandarin. What he saw and experienced was enough to convince him to quit his teaching job and start writing. Insightful, wise and bursting with vividly realised characters, The Year of the Shanghai Shark is the regional (Southeast Asia and the Pacific) winner of this year's Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book.

The overall winner will be announced at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival tonight. Hai Long's story as a teenage pickpocket growing up in a rapidly modernising city paints a profound picture of China's fundamental problems. As he roams the city, drinking Coca-Cola with his basketball-mad friends, he meets many rich and eclectic characters on the brink of financial or spiritual ruin: Gambler Dang, who holds exciting poker matches in Hai Long's apartment building; Worker Chen, the ousted labourer who impresses on him an early work ethic; The Old Stone, an elderly man who makes a living weighing people on his scales.

Some are mean, others are wise and most are tinged with sadness. They represent all generations in a growing population affected by the outbreak of Sars, the rise of president Hu Jin Tao and the success of Yao Ming, the Chinese basketball star who played for the NBA. "China is obviously modernising very quickly and it's easy to see they haven't quite got a handle on all the aspects that go along with it," says Mo.

One of the strongest qualities of the book is Mo's ability to create the sense of time passing, even within the short space of each chapter. "The original idea was a broad representation of Chinese society," says Mo. "I wanted to work in as many characters as I could. Just thinking of lots of different characters lends itself to a very episodic structure. Each character is an amalgam of the different sorts of people I've met." The novel is all the more impressive in that it took Mo, whose day job is in IT, just three months to draft the story and one year to fine-tune and rewrite it. His prose sings with a lyricism of a natural-born storyteller, a romantic, fairytale quality that belies the process Mo went through before he put pen to page.

"A lot of writers will just write semi-consciously whereas I had quite a different experience. I did a lot of planning before I even started to write any of the stuff. So in that sense I have a very analytical approach to writing. "I just thought I would give it a go. They say everyone has one novel in them so I thought I'd try to get mine out and see how it went. I had been trying a little bit of writing before I went to China. I was doing a lot of reading at the time, which gets your mind ticking with ideas." It helped that the teens in Mo's classes were brimming with inspiration for the characters of Hai Long and his best friends Xiang Wao and Po Fang. So, too, were the experiences of his fellow teachers - many of the expats spoke of being robbed by teens like Hai Long.

Despite Hai Long's empathy with an array of characters less fortunate than himself, he never questions whether what he's doing is right or wrong; it is simply the way he has been taught to live. Mo's next novel will be very different, he says, and probably told from an adult's perspective. But it's likely his life in China will continue to inspire him. At the very least, he has plenty of funny teaching stories, of teens desperate to understand Western culture.

"If the kids don't have English names, your school has a policy where you give them English names and some people have some fun with it," says Mo. "I asked a kid once what his name was and he said James. James? Yes, James Bond. A teacher had given him this name. So I taught him that when a foreigner asks his name, to say, 'My name is Bond. James Bond'."

* Mo Zhi Hong will read from The Year of the Shanghai Shark today at 10am at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, Aotea Centre. The winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize Award will be announced tonight at the Aotea Centre at 7.30pm.