AustLit

Framing her reading by Moira Gatens' examination of difference (in Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality) Jaobs explores the three novels, seeing that in each of them, identity, sexual and familial love, and cross-cultural encounters are interrogated and complicated by an inability to forget the past which over-shadows the business of survival. The refutation of history's domination in these texts represents a powerful re-claiming and re-articulation of identity and individual prerogatives, speaking of reasons to live and love, beyond narrowly prescriptive collectivising narratives of time, people or place.

Lyne notes that the literature industry, by its need to sell books, responds to a 'free market' by using superficial 'exotic Asian woman' constructs, both on and in books. She argues that this raises familiar but unwelcome ghosts of racism, neo-colonialism and exploitation.