Book excerpt: In June 1985, a symposium, Changing Identities of the Southeast Asian Chinese since World War II was held at the Australian National University in Canberra. This volume includes many of the papers from that symposium presented by ANU scholars and those from universities elsewhere in Australia, North America and Southeast Asia. Participants looked at the current thinking about the parameters of identity and shared their own research into the complex issues that overlapping categories of identity raise.Identity was chosen as the focus of the. symposium because perceptions of self - whether by ot.