Extract from The China Coin

The Village

Leah … frowned at the mirror and the girl with the long black hair, the brown eyes, the sniffy nose and the freckles frowned back at her. Dad’s nose, Dad’s freckles …

‘You’re not Chinese. You don’t even look like them,’ she told herself …

Dad never said you were English, or Chinese, or Australian. It didn’t matter. You were just the kid, his kid and you knew just where you were. You lived in an old house in the Sydney suburb of Chatswood, went to high school, played hockey and had a few friends … – and even a sort of boyfriend, Ben. Dad came from Ipswich; Mum came from Singapore … It was more important to know how to fix a puncture on your bike …

Chatswood was home, where you never made Andy feel Greek outside of soccer matches and they never made you feel Chinese, except when they passed one of those stupid ‘Asians Go Home’ wall scrawls …

Or rather, Chatswood had been home. Oh, that it could go back to that! Even back to after the coin, back to Dad trying to speak putonghua and watching Chinese movies without reading the subtitles, back to everything before the Cough …

After that, when it was all over, Mum had become ‘Joan’ and the coin was all hers. Her lost Ancestral Village deep in southern China, with her half-Chinese daughter tacked on.

The China Coin by Allan Baillie; p 23

Instructions

Roll over the text. Note the highlighted features as Leah continues to explore her identity.

Note the way the language features help the reader to imagine her search for where she belongs. She looks back over her past. Look for language techniques such as italics, flashbacks and a change of narrative voice.

Flashbacks are representations of events or scenes which occurred at a previous time.

A monologue is a talk by a single speaker. An internal monologue is the thoughts of a single speaker. The reader is allowed to know what the speaker is thinking.

Look for more examples of these techniques in the novel and think about why they are effective.

Sense of belonging

Leah notes her own English appearance.

Paragraph one is written in the third person point of view. The narrator is talking about Leah at first and then moves into first person narration. Leah is talking to herself, trying to make sense of her past and her background. This allows the reader insight into her thoughts about belonging.

Leah notes her own English appearance.

Leah expresses her sense of belonging by relating her feelings about places, people, customs and traditions. She voices her feelings through internal monologue. This allows the reader insight into her thoughts. There is also reference to not belonging (‘Asians go home’) which Leah thinks is stupid.

Cultural references to belonging in the community reinforce her ideas.

She refers to the past. Leah’s sense of belonging has changed over time after the death of her father. She admits to being ‘half-Chinese’. Leah’s relationship with her mother is strained.

Italics emphasise the ideas and thoughts (his, her)

Flashbacks (Even back to after the coin, back to Dad trying to speak …)

Internal monologue (paragraphs 2–5)

XXX

© NSW DET 2008