Seeking refuge from the urban jungle, cartoonist Larry Feign, the creator of the popular cartoon strip The World of Lily Wong, and his wife Cathy initially favored Lamma as their place to live.

If Larry had chosen Lamma, then many of the adventures of Lily Wong, his cartoon heroine, would have been conceived here. Surely, Lily, too, might have become a Lamma regular. After all, “Lily was my alter-ego,” Larry said.

“Cathy and I used to go to Lamma all the time,” Larry said. “We knew the place, and it appealed to us. We liked the layout of the island, all the little coves and the beaches.

“In late 1989, we looked at moving to Mo Tat Wan (on Lamma), which was very attractive. But we decided to leave Hong Kong instead.

“After returning a year later, we stayed briefly in Western District. We’d decided to move to an outlying island. The only one we knew and liked was Lamma. So I took a trip to Yung Shue Wan (Lamma's largest village) to look around. All the accommodation that I saw turned out to be unattractive -- small, old and rundown with mildew on the walls. It must have been a bad day for real estate.

“I returned to Hong Kong Island feeling glum. Then a friend from Lantau Island invited me there for an evening. Right away, I noticed that Mui Wo (on Lantau) had better shopping than Yung Shue Wan did.

“The next day a newspaper ad offered a 2,100-square-foot house with a garden for the same rent we’d paid in the city a year earlier. So I grabbed it, and we moved to Mui Wo.”

For years, The World of Lily Wong appeared daily in the South China Morning Post, and Lily starred in most of Larry’s 14 books. Twice, she received Amnesty International’s Human Rights Press Award. But as media self-censors assailed her in 1995, Larry lost his newspaper job.

“I got dumped by one newspaper and then blacklisted,” Larry said. So he pursued other opportunities. In 2001, he created Stvdio Media, an animation company based in an office at his home on Lantau.

Back in 1990, Larry quickly adjusted to Mui Wo. “Within days, the shopkeepers knew me as a new gweilo who spoke some Chinese,” he said. “If I came up short on coins, the shopkeepers said, ‘Oh, pay next time.’ When I first heard that, I nearly fainted in surprise. Then I realized, ‘Hey, this is a good place’, and we stayed.

“Now I haven’t been to Lamma for years,” he confessed. “But it was just providence that we ended up on Lantau instead.”

The Feign family, including children Ivan and Annika and mongrel dogs Toto and Otto, has built a “dream home” in Mui Wo. For Larry, the new place means a larger office and studio. Cathy, Toto and Otto gain a bigger garden.

The entire family loves Mui Wo. “This really isn’t Hong Kong,” Larry said. “We have a different world here on Lantau. Living in Mui Wo keeps us sane.

“Although Hong Kong isn’t the most conducive place for what I do professionally, Lantau must be the best place in the world for us to live. It’s unique -- without cars, just getting around on bicycles, and with wildlife. If you want a dose of the city, it’s not far away. We couldn’t find anything like this in the United Kingdom. We looked in Australia and couldn’t find it there either. There’s nowhere better.”

Larry sounds exactly like a devoted Lamma Islander, except that he’s fixated on a different outlying community. Presumably, Lily Wong would feel the same way.

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