Dragon Seed in the Antipodes: Chinese-Australian Autobiographies by Shen Yuanfang

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Ex library copy with external stickers and protective plastic covering. Sticker on inside. Interior and binding are still excellent.

Dragon Seed in the Antipodes is a pioneering work on the nature and construction of Chinese-Australian identity. Shen Yuanfang's close examination of self-portraits by more than twenty Chinese Australians shows that they resist any facile generalisation about a unified Chinese identity.

The authors of these personal accounts, covering a period from the 1860s to the 1990s, fall broadly into five groups. There are nineteenth-century immigrants, those who arrived around the time of World War II, Australian-born Chinese, immigrants of Chinese descent from South-East Asian countries, and those who came recently from the People's Republic of China.

Shen Yuanfang brings her own complex experiences of immigration and of her brief but painful return to her homeland. She recounts the evolution of her own difficult feelings towards some of her subjects, and the processes by which she came to understand and empathise with Chinese Australians of startlingly different origins. (back cover)