I am a student from Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. What does Overseas Chinese mean?
In China they used to refer to Chinese people who have left China to live in another country as Overseas Chinese. However the term has become all Chinese from another country. So my wife – Chinese born in Malaysia and Australian – was an Overseas Chinese when visiting China. And also our Australian-Chinese daughter – she’s the girl on the cover. I wrote Adrift after my wife, Agnes, found a news story about four Lebanese boys and a dog being found in a big crate in the Mediterranean Sea. They had been playing with the crate in a Beirut beach and had accidentally become adrift. Why don’t you base a children’s story on this?, Agnes said. Before I wrote it I had to make adjustments. Mediterranean became my local patch of the Pacific and the four kids had to be cut down to tighten the story. Flynn was a little of me, Sally was my daughter, Lynne, then aged 5, who was giving me a terrible time (so I gave her a terrible time in the book!), and the dog became our arrogant cat. I don’t spend a
