Writing home from China: Charles Allen's transnational childhood

This essay explores the experiences of Charles Albert Allen, a young Anglo-Chinese Australian living in China in the early 20th century, by employing an approach that combines biography and microhistory. Four letters that Charles Allen wrote home from China in 1910 and 1911 provide a rare entrée into the emotional world of an Australian boy whose personal circumstances saw him travel between families, countries, cultures and languages. They are intimate family letters, between a homesick son and his heartbroken mother, yet by themselves the letters only tell us so much. Around them sit various circles of meaning – of personal identity, of family relationships, of migrant life, of cross-cultural encounters, of transnationalism, of belonging and not belonging – which only become clear when the letters are read within the wider context of the lives of Charles Allen and his mother, Frances.