AustLit

When Adam Aitkens parents first met his father, a white Australian, had been posted to Bangkok by the advertising company her worked for. Aitken's mother was a university graduate from southern Thailand. In his quest to understand the people they were - from before he was born through to their eventual separation - Aitkens explores letters and photographs dating back more than 50 years. One Hundred Letters Home is also an account of his attempt to search for his Thai identity during a visit to the country in his early-twenties.

"Adam Aitken’s evocative memoir probes the reasons his father married his mother, an ‘Asian woman’, by researching family history, experimenting with Plots A, B, and C, and intertextual references to Christopher Koch’s 1995 novel Highways to a War, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, and Marcel Proust’s ‘Swann’s Way’ translated into Thai by his uncle. He tests the construction of his hybridity, the notion of his Asian ‘face’ and where it might be welcome, and where and with whom a trans-Asian citizen belongs' (Gay Lynch, Transnational Literature (ctd. Vagabond Press).