'Sixteen exquisite stories exploring recent Chinese migration to Australia and elsewhere, exploring intergenerational and interracial relationships, the search for meaning, and the effects of isolation and the inability to express oneself in a second language. Best-selling author, Debra Adelaide, says Isabelle Li's prose is powerful, exquisite and finely tuned, and each story draws us deeper into the complex emotional and cultural dilemmas of characters who are solitary, sensitive, perceptive and powerless, sometimes all at once. 'What does it take to master a second language, to be so skilled in that language that you're published in it? Chinese/Australian writer and translator Isabelle Li reminds us that learning to love an adopted language does not come without its struggles.' ABC Radio National' (Publication summary)
'As the date of the twenty-first anniversary of my arrival in Australia approaches, I acutely sense the space between ‘Asian’ and ‘Australian’ in ‘Asian Australian’, which is how I refer to myself. This space divides not only two words but two worlds, a fact that I, as a bilingual writer and translator of more than two decades, know only too well. Crossing this space is a process of positioning, consciously adopting and abandoning a myriad of reference points between common perceptions of what it means to be ‘Asian’ and ‘Australian’.' (Introduction)
'A zebra gazing into the river asks himself, 'Am I a white horse with black stripes of a black horse with white stripes?' I put a similar question: am I a migrant who happens to be a writer or a writer who happens to be a migrant? The answers have implications, both 'for whom' I write and 'as who', and therefore for my artistic vision.' (Introduction)
'A zebra gazing into the river asks himself, 'Am I a white horse with black stripes of a black horse with white stripes?' I put a similar question: am I a migrant who happens to be a writer or a writer who happens to be a migrant? The answers have implications, both 'for whom' I write and 'as who', and therefore for my artistic vision.' (Introduction)
'As the date of the twenty-first anniversary of my arrival in Australia approaches, I acutely sense the space between ‘Asian’ and ‘Australian’ in ‘Asian Australian’, which is how I refer to myself. This space divides not only two words but two worlds, a fact that I, as a bilingual writer and translator of more than two decades, know only too well. Crossing this space is a process of positioning, consciously adopting and abandoning a myriad of reference points between common perceptions of what it means to be ‘Asian’ and ‘Australian’.' (Introduction)
