In 1992, Fang Xiangshu collaborated with Trevor Hay, a mandarin-speaking Melbourne academic, on a non-fiction book, East Wind, West Wind, an account of Fang’s escape from China to begin a new life in Australia.

Fang, who had met Trevor Hay in Nanjing, first came to Australia as an exchange scholar in 1984, was recalled for reasons which remained mysterious but clearly threatening, and spent a nightmare period being slowly enmeshed in the coils of Chinese bureaucracy. He had left his young wife in Melbourne, and this, as well as obvious signs that his own future did not look promising, gave him enough ingenuity to find a risky way out of the country. After a good deal of tangling with the Australian bureaucracy, he became an Australian citizen, and now lectures in Chinese language and culture at Deakin University.