Dimensions
154 x 234 x 25mm
An evocative memoir of a young Chinese girl growing up in conservative Tasmania in the 1950s.
Ching Chong China Girl portrays four generations of Tasmanian Chinese and canvasses changes from White to Multicultural Australia. Helen Chung grew up in Hobart in the 1950s where she and her sister were the only two children with black hair. In that world of fair-haired girls from nice homes with Holden cars, Helene's family kept a shocking secret. Her mother, Miss Henry, was a nude model, lived in sin with a foreign devil and drove a red MG. Helene was also a former ABC Beijing correspondent, the first non-white reporter on Australian TV and gives us an amusing expose of the off-air antics inside the once-chauvinist ABC. In the tradition of Amy Tan, Ching Chong China Girl gives an hilarious and bittersweet account of growing up different in a very eccentric but traditional Chinese family.