The reasons I wrote this book are many. For one, I am the product of cross-cultural identity. My grandparents, apart from my paternal grandmother, were migrants who escaped poverty from the south of China and settled in the south of Thailand, where I was born and raised. Throughout my childhood, I was constantly made aware of my ‘alien’ status within the local Thai community. It was not only my ‘ethnicity’ but also my ‘poverty’ that continued to plague my childhood. We were misunderstood about so many things, and often people would look down on us – the alien and the poor family. I survived all of this and I have always vowed to myself that I would write something about cross-cultural issues when I had the chance, and that chance has arrived. This is the reason for the birth of this book.

Second, because of my own cultural identity, I have great interest in the lives of ‘cultural Others’ who are also marginalised in society. In particular, I have been touched by writers who come from non-Western societies or those who have been marginalised due to their race and ethnicity. The story that I found most touching was when the tennis star Arthur Ashe announced that he had AIDS, a People magazine reporter asked him: ‘Mr Ashe, I guess this must be the heaviest burden you have ever had to bear, isn't it?’ Ashe said: ‘It is a burden, all right. But AIDS isn’t the heaviest burden I have had to bear … Being black is the greatest burden I've had to bear’ (in Ashe & Rampersad 1993: 139).