Cirrus@Austlit

'Ching Chong China Girl portrays four generations of Tasmanian Chinese and canvasses changes in society from White to Multicultural Australia. Its theme is the search for identity with the sub-themes of East versus West, the integration of Australian and Chinese values, and my accidental career in journalism. Unlike conventional agonising over a Catholic childhood, this memoir, with its racial, religious, sexual and sexist humour, agonises over both the colour of the flesh and the sins of the parent's flesh. It is also an amusing expose of off-air antics inside the once-chauvinist ABC.

'A former Beijing correspondent, the first non-white reporter on Australian TV and the first female posted abroad by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, I am a fourth-generation Tasmanian Chinese. A daughter of Australia's first Chinese divorcees, I grew up in 1950s Hobart. My sister and I were the only ones at our Catholic school with divorced parents. We were the only two with black hair. In that world of fair-haired girls from nice homes with Holden cars, we kept a shocking secret. Our mother, Miss Henry, was a nude model. She lived in sin with a foreign devil and drove a red MG. Fortunately, the family feud kept our father's three other marriages under wraps.' (Provided by the publisher)

'... Lazy Man in China is John Martin's witty, perceptive, self-deprecating take on China, drawn from letters to family and friends, and edited and updated by his wife, former Beijing correspondent Helene Chung.

John Martin, the self-dubbed lazy man, accompanied Chung and worked as "the token Australian and the token man" in the Australian embassy aid section. His images are shot through with colour, ironic humour and insight as Old Communism gives way to New Capitalism. He didn't live to see the China that Chung experienced in 2002, the cosmopolitan China of BMWs, new rich, new poor and a Tiananmen Square emptied on the thirteenth anniversary of the massacre by a World Cup soccer game viewed on giant screens.' Source: http://www.helenechung.com/ (Sighted 22/09/10)

'This is a story of love, death and grief. John Martin and Helene Chung met as students at the University of Tasmania in 1963. Thirteen years later, when he was a lecturer in history at the Gordon Institute of Technology in Geelong, and she an ABC television reporter in Hobart, she interviewed him on This Day Tonight — an interview that sparked a lifelong romance.

In 1991, when the couple were living in Melbourne, John underwent apparently successful surgery for colon cancer but, a year later, an inoperable tumour was found in his pelvis. In 1993 he was suddenly admitted to hospital again, with an obstructed bowel. Although John and Helene thought he would be home within days, surgery was needed and he proved too weak to recover. John died peacefully and painlessly, Helene by his side...' Source: http://www.helenechung.com/ (Sighted 22/09/10)