Ken Chan’s current writing focuses on the short story. He is a keen observer of people, the relationships we share and the oddities that arise. While he writes about a range of people in many different places and different times, his most significant body of work is a treasury of short fictional stories about growing up Chinese in the 1950s and 1960s.

A treasury of short fictional stories about growing up Chinese in the 1950s and 1960s. The stories focus on the ups and downs of one community, focusing on one extended family. While the stories each stand as individual tales they have interconnected reoccurring characters. As a collection, they create a rich tapestry of cultural and personal understanding. These stories are full of insight about human weakness, have moments of sadness and disappointment interwoven with the quirky, whimsical and funny.

These stories enrich what is understood as the Australian experience.

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My uncle Leo escorted me to school on my first day, telling me that I should expect some jibes from the other kids. Why, I’d asked, why would they say things about me?

We’re different Sam, he said, how we look and everything.

Now I had something to figure out: there were all these other kids who were obviously strange looking. I tried to imagine what they faces were like, whether their bodies were an odd shape, whether they walked and ran in an unusual way. As we entered the school grounds I peered in every direction, searching for the mysterious kids but I couldn’t see anyone who looked any different.

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A marquess is a nobleman ranking just below a duke and boxing is the noble art involving the use of your dukes. In the limited corridor behind the serving counter of a grocery store in Coogee two brothers are fighting. Only one of them, however abides by the rules of the nobleman ranked just below a duke. “Fight fair, fight fair”, says Harry, his body crouched, leaning left, right cocked in imitation of some screen lightweight like Kirk Douglas. Charles, the Shanghai warrior, who mastered half a dozen forms of lethal kicks in China, measures the distance between them, props and punts his right boot venomously.

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And the girls: Charlotte, Gwendolyn, Hester, Phoebe. You heard or read those names and expected to meet a quartet of English ladies, fair-skinned, lightly flushed cheeks, what was the expression, yes, “peaches and cream”, but the girls, young women actually, are burnished to the hue of seasoned teak. The sun, so vigorous here in the north, has stolen the blackness from their hair so that it hangs, fine and shiny, but cedar brown. They are when seen together, a handsome family.

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