'A less-commonly discussed aspect of the process of immigration and assimilation is the fact it makes you feel like a massive loser. In Ouyang Yu’s The White Cockatoo Flowers—his first collection of stories in English—this feeling is explicated with blunt vulnerability and comic aplomb. His glum protagonists largely consist of Chinese immigrants living in Melbourne who make a miserly living off fiction and poetry. They endure a relentless series of tiny humiliations due to mystifying language gaps, racial discrimination, and the futile desire to separate themselves from other Chinese people, who they’ve either left behind or are struggling alongside. These embarrassments are fleshy, sometimes scatological: in two separate stories, the protagonists try in vain to have a satisfying restaurant meal, which either results in explosive diarrhoea or ‘a solitary hour of furious sweating’. Ouyang’s authorial voice is self-deprecating, yet finds arch humour in this mundane suffering.'(Introduction)
