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Margin calls

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THE MIGRANT daughter of a Singaporean mother and a Malaysian father, Hsu-ming Teo knows she could go to writers' festivals and talk about being alienated and marginalised.

'There's always an audience for that kind of thing,' she says. 'But I just don't want to do that. I think it's really important that I don't slide into some kind of victim mentality of poor Asian immigrants.'

Instead Teo, 35, who moved to Australia with her family at the age of seven, wants to be thought of as an Australian writer, one who both draws on her own family background and documents the world in which she lives.

That desire moulded her second and most recent novel, Behind the Moon, a story of three Sydney friends and their families, each from a different background: Tien Ho came by boat as a refugee from Vietnam; Justin Cheong, a closet gay, is the son of Singaporean migrants; and Nigel 'Gibbo' Gibson, a character based on a friend of Teo's brother, is an Anglo-Australian outsider who wishes he was Chinese.

The narrative follows them from school, where they were inseparable, into adulthood, documenting the forces that both unite and divide as they grow older and apart, then draw close again.

'I didn't decide consciously to make it multicultural,' says Teo, who grew up and still lives in the ethnic melting pot of Sydney's western suburbs. 'I just wanted to write about the Australia I knew.'

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