Leaping the Cultural Great Wall

I was born in the Chinese port city of Tianjin in 1990 and grew up in Beijing. I arrived in Sydney in July 1998. My mother had already been to Australia a couple of times and my uncle had been living here for nearly 10 years. Mum decided we should come to Australia because she wanted me to be educated in an English-speaking country. She thought this would help me in my future career.

Within three weeks of our arrival in Sydney, I started attending an inner-city public school. The environment was very different from the one...