Karl Taro Greenfeld still vividly recalls his worst day ever. On a return trip from Shenzhen, he went to top up his Octopus card at the Hung Hom train station. While doing that, someone stole his laptop computer, which contained 40,000 words of an expose that he was working on about severe acute respiratory syndrome.
'Only writers might understand this, but for about a month I was catatonic, and then I sat down and started writing again,' the Japanese-American author, 45, recalls while sitting in a Wan Chai hotel recently. 'To redo that book was one of the hardest things I ever did. It was an awful, awful experience.'
Fortunately, China Syndrome: The True Story of the 21st Century's First Great Epidemic was completed and released to generally good reviews.
Greenfeld's take on the 2003 Sars virus, which marked a low point in Hong Kong's history, was also a cornerstone in his writing career, one that has seen him jet around the world from New York to Tokyo, Hong Kong and back to the US over the past 20 years.
Times were bad in the city, he says. 'There was Sars and the death of [singer] Leslie Cheung [Kwok-wing], and political freedoms really seemed at risk. Looking back at that was important. It was clear Hong Kong wasn't going to go quietly.'
While making the unlikely analogy that the Sars virus was like the shark in the movie Jaws and the central government was like the mayor on the beach, he demonstrates how he has parlayed his lifelong love of words into an unorthodox career. The son of New York-based writers Josh Greenfeld and Fumiko Kometani, the Kobe, Japan-born scribe started exploring stories in his teens before moving to Tokyo after university.
While there, he edited the Tokyo Journal, where he also met his model wife and turned his interest in Japan's subculture into his first acclaimed book, Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan's Next Generation. 'As a journalist, I think it's natural,' he says. 'You look for the subculture stuff because that's the sort of thing that's part of larger society.'
