I’ve known since I was a little kid that I have Chinese ancestry; it was never a secret. But I have no memory of being sat down at Grandma’s kitchen table with a glass of Milo and a Chips Ahoy! choc-chip bickie (one of my childhood favourites), and being told the nitty-gritty of it. I had to wait until I was a grown-up before discovering that my great-grandfather arrived from China in the early 1870s and spent his life cabinet-making, shopkeeping, and market-gardening his way around New South Wales until he died in 1942.
I mention Grandma because she – a white Australian woman from an Anglo background – was the one who married my three-quarters-Chinese grandfather, and it was around her kitchen table that my mum, my brother and I would sit during school holiday visits and chat (having our latest school report scrutinised, and presenting her with
