AustLit

'I didn't do much travelling until I was twenty-seven. A strict Chinese upbringing coupled with the anxieties of genocide-surviving parents meant that I went through my university days living vicariously through the travel tales of my worldlier friends. The first time I went overseas by myself, I expected everything to be different: of course the architecture and food, but also the very material of the buildings, the composition of the leaves on the trees. I expected to see a substantially different world and was disappointed that the city of Beijing —apart from some historical quarters — looked like a city. I tried very hard to look for difference, so I could write original stories to send back home to my editor. I did not understand then that to write about a place is not to simply pick out points of difference, but to search for the things that make us commonly human, that this was the difference between an anecdote and a story with a heartbeat.' (Introduction)

'For centuries Macassan traders zigzagged across the waters between the Indonesian islands and Australia, fishing for trepang, or sea cucumber, and exchanging goods and culture with Australia's Aboriginal nations — songs and stories, art and language. Among all the thousands of communities in South-East Asia and Australia, there has been a constant to and fro of people, animals, plants, and objects, exotic, precious, and mundane. Borders have been made and remade, foreign armies suffered and driven out. In this most hybridised of regions, everything is interlaced, whether on the surface or below. We share the same winds and the same ocean currents. ' (Introduction)

'First reading: For a couple of months after, it seemed every plane fell out of the sky. I was safe - around six thousand kilometers away.' (43)