Katherine McCaughan

Moving to Hong Kong in 1993 was magical for me. It took me back close to my birthplace, China, a country that my Russian family had to flee when I was five. We settled in Australia, where I grew up, graduated from The University of Sydney, and married. When our children were starting school, we relocated to Chicago where we lived until the move to Hong Kong.

In Chicago I began writing down family stories, stories of danger and tension from the time of the Second World War, with China under Japanese occupation. My uncle was a 'displaced' person, just disappeared, and my grandmother never accepted he had been killed. I grew up listening to her attempts to contact her son, making my father follow every lead to where he might be, as she herself was barely literate.

Then the character of Natasha emerged in my mind. A young girl trying to make sense of the changes she had to face, the only non-English speaker in her school, watching her parents themselves almost overwhelmed with the tragedies in their lives and trying to cope. Although the story is fiction, the feelings of being an immigrant are real and universal - being different from the wider community, wanting so badly to be accepted, watching your parents suffer indignities that they do not even understand. It's amazing that so many of us survive and even thrive on all the challenges.