Dragon Seed In The Antipodes

How do the Chinese in Australia see and write about themselves and their relation to mainstream Australian society? Yuan Fang Shen offers us a fascinating reading of Chinese history in Australia, as revealed through the autobiographical writings of more than twenty Chinese-Australians from 1886 to 1996. More specifically, it is about how Chinese immigrants in Australia and their descendants have seen and portrayed themselves. This is a highly original piece of work on a subject of genuine importance that will be of immense value to scholars working in the broad field of Chinese-Australian identity. No previous research has ever been done on Chinese-Australian self-portraits. The attention given to Chinese-Australians' own accounts of their experiences is what distinguishes the project and gives it a weight unlike any other account of the Chinese in Australia so far published.