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531pp. ISBN: 978 1 60497 516 1 US $139.95 http://www. cambriapress. com/cambriapress. cfm? template= 24&bid= 192 Ouyang Yu's book Chinese in Australian Fiction 1888-1988 is a substantial critical survey. It begins with 1888, the year the Second Intercolonial Conference decided to exclude the Chinese from Australia, and a very low point for depiction of Chinese in Australian fiction. Yu asks what has happened since then to Australian attitudes and as far as fictional representations of Chinese, what has changed? Although this study stops at 1988, the bicentenary year of white settlement in Australia, it provides a solid foundation for studies of more recent Asian-Australian literature that has ‘written back’to colonial discourses that have consistently treated the non-Anglo Australian Asian subject as the eternal Other, against which Australia's own identity as a racially and culturally superior white nation could be contrasted. Most importantly the study points out how stereotyping and othering of Chinese people operates by omission as much as by commission. Because the Chinese were mostly voiceless subjects throughout Australia's colonial history, writers have assumed that the Chinese could never speak for themselves, but had to be represented.

Yu's Mainland Chinese heritage gives him an advantage of being able to test depictions of the Chinese against his own experience, and from this position he mercilessly critiques the way Australian fiction has fulfilled it ideological functions by demonising the ‘heathen Chinee’and idealising the domesticated version of the stereotype, namely the ‘Chinese with white hearts’. While Australia's anti …