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.
I first began to think about what it meant to be a stranger when I became a practicing sociologist in 1978 and was doing fieldwork on Asians in Canada. My respondents and informants confided in me, giving details of racial discrimination and the anguish it caused them. I became interested in the stigma attached to racial characteristics, which, whether real or imaginary, are manifestations of 'difference' and 'otherness'. I also became curious about how people coped with the damaged sense of self that resulted from discrimination. This personal concern led, quite naturally, to a series of studies of Chinatowns. Feeling themselves to be strangers, migrants tend to gravitate towards each other, forming their own close-knit communities as an institutional defence against the hostility of outsiders. In that sense, Chinatowns are a self-defence strategy - migrants band together, keeping their distance from the outside world to avoid its racism.
Working with diverse groups such as miners, elderly women, community leaders and refugees, I pieced together a sociology of social response to racial discrimination, which is certainly a central aspect of being a migrant and a stranger.