Plight of the stranger

I was born a refugee, in 1950, when my family, along with hundreds of thousands of other Chinese people, was making its way from China to Hong Kong. My father, a self-made man and a major landlord in his village, lost everything practically overnight.

As a child growing up in Hong Kong, I experienced poverty, but not the feeling of being a refugee - in the sense of feeling far from 'home' and an outsider in society subject to discrimination and hostility - probably because there were so many like us. Also, my family had remained largely intact. In 1969, I left Hong Kong and went to Canada to study.

As a university student, I did not spend much time thinking or writing about the life of a 'stranger' and his or her encounters with society. I was interested in sociological theory, social thought and philosophy on the one hand, and literature, drama and creative writing on the other - or, to put it another way, ideas and emotions and their role in human conduct and society.

My interest was abstract and theoretical. I simply wanted to acquire the tools of my trade, to learn the theories and ideas that would help me become a sociologist. As a foreign student in a cold, unfamiliar, faraway land, who lived among other Chinese students in a kind of ghetto, I led a stranger's life. But I was not aware of it at the time and I certainly was not interested in examining the plight of the stranger in an intellectual manner.