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The same awkwardness applies to my situation. The other problem that I have is my lack of theoretical training in China, which may result in a more critically informative than highly theorised study. Living in Australia, I must try to interpret Australian perspectives under Australian supervision and on the strength of Western theories, such as Edward Said’s Orientalism, something that was very late coming to China30 and that I had not heard of before coming to Australia.
All of this sounds nonsensical from today’s point of view as I wrote those passages under an Australian supervisor. Now that I am a naturalised Australian, writing creatively as a novelist and poet within the literature, I certainly am in an advantageous position to offer Australians my perspectives by interlacing the work with my own writings as a challenge to their reading. ‘Their’, of course, refers to my fellow white Australian men and women, as well as Australians from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
One thing I should clarify is that in the representations of both China and the Chinese, I am inclined to concentrate on the people, rather than the place for two reasons. First, detailed discussions of the images of China are legion, the most recent Australian example being Colin Mackerras’s Western Perceptions of China.31 Secondly, the Chinese as a people warrant more attention than hitherto people have cared to admit. The treatment of the Chinese people in Australia and China in Australian fiction is most problematic, least abstract, and more relevant to the present reality, as compared with the image of China as a nation. In this, more can be revealed about the ways in which the Chinese people are ‘othered’ and stereotyped. However, my emphasis on this does not preclude the possibility of making references to the Australian image-making process of China wherever necessary and whenever possible.
Lastly, I have organised this book in four major parts. I reserve Part I for histories and theories, as these will provide a sound basis for a full discussion of literary texts. Like the foundation of a building, without them the structure of the book would have no support. I provide a parallel outline of the important historical events over the one-hundred-year period both in China and in Australia that affected the Chinese in Australia, and then proceed to a discussion of various theories, mainly Orientalism as propounded by Edward Said, racism, and ethnocentrism, which I have employed to analyse and critique the problematic representation of the Chinese in Australian fiction.