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)