Writers from China's diaspora
Beth Yahp felt most Chinese when she lived in Australia. It wasn't that she felt part of a thriving community that plied her with dim sum and offered magnificent networking opportunities. She felt Chinese because of the hostility some Australians expressed after she arrived in 1984.
'When I got to Australia there was a big debate going on about Asianisation,' she says. 'Immediately you're tagged based on what you look like.' With dry humour, she recalls a man spitting at her car. 'That kind of stuff doesn't have to happen often. It only has to happen once to give you a kind of paranoia.'
In 1998, Yahp, now 41, headed for Paris for five years. She puts her tendency to wander from country to country down to her origins. Yahp is part-Hakka. 'I come from a family of migrants,' she says.
Her great-grandparents lived in Guangdong and Chengdu before settling in Malaysia at the turn of the last century. Now, she's on the move again - back to Sydney.
She refuses to commit to either Australia, Malaysia or her other love, France, because she doesn't want to abandon the social and family networks she's established in each country. 'I feel like home is divided,' she says.