The Good Girl of Chinatown by Jenevieve Chang. Penguin. $32.99. I had given up on my parents' approval of any of my life choices long before that moment. But if I was to be honest, there was a sliver of hope that after all that had been said and done, my falling in love and finding happiness would collapse their barriers of hate. But it was not to be. If anything, I became more aware than ever of the depth of their prejudice. My father's guide to dating when I was a teenager followed more or less along these lines. "I expect you to date a Chinese man. If you must date a white man, I'll think about it. Jewish men are acceptable. If you date a black man, I'll kill you." I've battled racism my entire life. And half of that battle has been waged with my own people, with my own parents. It's made me think a lot about the contributing factors to racism, the kind of fear that entrenches itself in the mind to boil hate down to something as innocuous as skin colour. "Race," writes the historian Nell Irvin Painter, "is an idea, not a fact." And therefore racism does not come in a one-size-fits-all model. The way it exudes its toxicity is a product of a specific time and place and set of experiences.

My parents – knowing all too well the pain and subjugation of living life with a marginalised identity – found it convenient to project that same social prejudice onto others. They bought into the narrative that blackness implied greater poverty, less privilege, poorer education. Likewise, that "whiteness" (although traitorous to marry into) denoted a kind of roughshod dominance, and was therefore acceptable. The Jewish preference was purely because my father worked at a firm where the upper echelons were occupied by wealthy, Jewish men with zappy business skills, and he felt this experience must be representative of the "quality" of the entire culture. But the most noble race of all was naturally our own. Maintaining our ethnic purity and cultural solidarity was priority No.1. Though – it should be noted – there was also a hierarchy to be observed here. What Ali Wong refers to as the difference between Fancy Asians and Jungle Asians. My parents prioritised their convoluted construction of race over other, more intrinsic, qualities of existence: kindness, compassion, love, empathy. They did not attend my wedding. My father refused to acknowledge my husband's existence, and ceased to acknowledge mine. When we came to Australia to visit, my mother would only deign to meet my husband in the covert darkness of night. If my father's prejudice was characterised by a fear of difference and need for control, my mother's prejudice was the manifestation of a different but equally primal need: to be accepted by her community. I've battled racism my entire life. And half of that battle has been waged with my own people, my own parents.

In her mind, her friends (other Baby Boomer Chinese migrants with a precarious foothold in the wider Anglo-Australian culture) would shun her, mock her, reject her if they found out the truth to this…this "scandal". She was utterly convinced that her world operated on such rigidly held lines. We might have been only a generation apart, living in the 21st century world, but our psychological realities couldn't have been more different. I – the beneficiary of my parents' sacrifices to provide a better life and education – could only observe their bigotry with horror. The world I'd grown up in had been a late 20th century Australia conscientiously embracing multicultural values followed by culturally fluid London, then three tertiary arts qualifications. For me, racism was – and is – the most ignorant type of hate, an opinion vindicated by everyone else in my life, except my parents. Even my grandparents accepted my husband with open arms. They had lost parents to famine, children to war, generations of wealth to revolutionaries. On the day I introduced them to my husband, they gifted us with calligraphy scrolls with wishes of happiness and marital longevity. Perhaps they had seen too much not to recognise that the concept of shame was as useless a construct as race. It was the last time I saw my grandfather. He passed away three months later. That last memory of his gift, his smile, his open arms in defiant opposition to my parents' disapproval says so much about the man I'm glad my husband had a chance to meet. My marriage lasted seven years. In the end, communication breakdown, moving to a new country and my own insecurities eroded its fabric. I walked away as things got hard, the imaginary, incessant sound of my parents' "I told you so's" greasing the wheels of my retreat. I was heartbroken, but I told myself that it was for the best. We would remain friends. And perhaps I could repair the relationship with my parents that had caused me so much pain. Pain that I had inadvertently brought into my marriage, like a fraying backpack full of bitter angst. I returned home, and I made myself available to the family I had run away from. I engaged with the good and the ugly, and tried to stand my ground. I wrote a book, and reflected and built bridges, and then came to accept that some divides are just too wide to bridge.

Two years ago, my sister married an Italian (Caucasian) man. They held the ceremony at a luxury resort in Bali – a scenic geographical compromise for our family flying in from Sydney and his family flying in from Milan. It was a beautiful wedding. My father walked her down the aisle. My mother wept. My sister had invited my ex-husband, who happened to be in Bali at the time. After 10 years, my father continued to act as if he didn't exist. Later that night, as both sets of parents laughed and danced with the bride and groom, my ex-husband stood beside me. "Do you think if we'd had half the support and love your sister got today, we might've lasted?" I couldn't answer him. And at that moment, under the silvery sky of my sister's happiness and the celebration of two families coming together, the stark contrast of our alienation a decade earlier was just too much.

And yet, there was a brief moment last year with my father that I'll hold onto. It was a warm evening in Sydney's Chinatown. We had just enjoyed an unusually amiable family dinner and were walking down Sussex St. Loading My mother was ahead with my brother and sister. My father and I had just settled the bill. As we walked side by side to catch up with the rest of the family, my father said, "I'm sorry I opposed your marriage, it was wrong of me." Then he turned away, and quickened his step as if he hadn't said anything at all. Jenevieve Chang is an actor, writer, movement geek and recovering showgirl.