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Abstract
Before I started writing this chapter, I read the drafts of each of the others in this book. Then, as so often happens in my early-career-academic life, other things came up before I could put fingertips to keyboard: end of semester marking and admin and busyness. So it was several weeks before I sat down to write my 'theory' chapter, this chapter, for the book. 'How much of the other chapters can I remember?' I wondered. So I decided, before re-reading them, to brainstorm what I recalled. The results, like the stories, are telling. I remembered six-year-old Mircea looking at leaves, his dismay at school where the party cadres' kids won all the prizes, and his description of the privations of Ceausescu's Romania, in which ordinary citizens could buy neither thermometers nor maps so that the government might manipulate basic 'facts'. I remembered Siti's dizziness at the choice of library resources, and the cold she felt on arrival in Melbourne, and the effects of moving country on her personality: In a week she went from easy-going extrovert to blue and gloomy. I thought of Novi negotiating community and aloneness, Ahmad developing interculturality, and Minh Hue's son waking in the night terrified and sobbing. Pen described her growing intellectual confidence, a metamorphosis from 'dunce' to good-time-girl, to scholar, and this stuck in my mind, too. Many of the chapters recount family stories, and personal stories, and stories of loneliness and of newfound communities. There are stories of gradual understanding and sudden culture shock, of negotiating policies and procedures and of making friends. Gender comes up a lot, too: Many of the women authors speak of the expectations and assumptions that others make about them. Small details and big stories; these are the stuff of life itself.
