She can see the irony.
The Chinese background Fiona Swee-Lin Price rejected at school as a way of coping with playground racism led her to set up a flourishing consultancy and write a book to help those teaching and working with Asians.
'I rejected the whole Chinese identity as a child because it was seen as such a bad thing,' says the 34-year-old daughter of an Anglo-Australian father and a Malaysian-Chinese mother. 'I tried to maintain that my middle name was Lin, not Swee-Lin.
'Going to primary school in the 70s in Melbourne, I was the only child with Asian blood. I got all that, 'Go back to your own country', 'ching-chong Chinaman' stuff. You see all that in books, but don't think about it until you experience it. I didn't even want to walk with my mother.'
Then she was sent to a private girls' secondary school and was suddenly one of a group constituting a fifth of the school enrolment, and 'it ceased to be an issue'. When her mother began taking her to a Chinese church, Price was among solely Chinese people for the first time - and it felt right. 'I hadn't thought of myself as Chinese, but I gravitated to them quite quickly,' she says.
Progressing to Melbourne University to study for an arts degree - a shock to her mother's friends, who assumed that, because of her marks, she would become a doctor - Price was thrust unawares into the Anglo-Australian culture of 17-year-olds.