Writing Transcultural Memoir: Ganyu - Moving Encounters in Early Post-Mao China

Transcultural engagement is life changing. Encounters with people, places and events influence the sojourner student in unexpected and enduring ways. This doctoral project explores self-transformation captured in a creative memoir about my experiences as a young Australian woman at Nanjing University in early post-Mao China, 1979-1981 and 1983. The semi-chronological stories, reflective essays and poems, written in stages since 2002, deal with multilingual encounters (in Chinese and English) that have had lasting emotional and cognitive influences on my experience of the world. The dissertation component explores key literary features of this creative memoir.