How can I speak in ten minutes about the bonds of women over three generations, about how the astonishing strength of those bonds took hold in the life of a four year old girl huddled with her young sister, her mother and her grandmother for five days and nights in a small boat in the China Sea more than 30 years ago, bonds that took hold in the life of that small girl and never let go. That small girl now living in San Francisco and speaking to you today.

This is not a finished story. It is a jigsaw puzzle still being put together. Let me tell you about some of the pieces. Imagine the first piece, a man burning his life's work, he is a poet, a playwright, a man whose whole life had been balanced on the single hope of his country's unity and freedom. Imagine him as the communists enter Saigon, confronting the fact that his life had been a complete waste of words for so long.

His friends now mocked him. He retreated into silence. He died broken by history. He is my grandfather. I never knew him in real life. But our lives are much more than our memories. My grandmother never let me forget his life. My duty was not to allow it to have been in vain. And my lesson was to learn that, yes, history tried to crush us, but we endured. The next piece of the jigsaw is of a boat in the early dawn, slipping silently out to sea.

My mother my was 18 when her father died, already in an arranged marriage, already with two small girls for her life, had distilled itself into one task the escape of her family and a new life in Australia. It was inconceivable to her that she would not succeed. So after a four year saga that defies fiction, a boat slipped out to sea disguised as a fishing vessel. All the adults knew the risks. The greatest fear was of pirates, rape and death.

Like most adults on the boat, my mother carried a small bottle of poison. If we were captured first, my sister and I, then she and my grandmother would drink. My first memories are from the boat. The steady beat of the engine, the bow dipping into each wave, the vast and empty horizon. I don't remember the pirates who came many times, but were bluffed by the bravado of the men on our boat. Or the engine dying and failing to start for six hours.

But I do remember the lights on the oil rig off the Malaysian coast and the young man who collapsed and died, the journey's end, too much for him.

And the first apple I tasted given to me by the men on the rig, no Apple has ever tasted the same.

After three months in a refugee camp, we landed in Melbourne and the next piece of the jigsaw is about four women across three generations shaping a new life together. We settled in Footscray, a working class suburb whose demographic is layers of immigrants, unlike the settled middle class suburbs whose existence I was oblivious of, there was no sense of entitlement in Footscray. The smells from shop doors were from the rest of the world, and the snippets of halting English were exchanged between people who had one thing in common.

They were starting again. My mother worked on farms, then on a car assembly line, working six days double shifts. Somehow she found time to study English and gain it qualifications. We were poor. All the dollars were allocated an extra tuition in English and mathematics was budgeted for regardless of what missed out, which was usually new clothes, they were always second hand, two pairs of stockings for school, each to hide the holes in the other, a school uniform down to the ankles because it had to last for six years.

And they were rare, but serious chance of Salieri and the occasional graffiti, Asian go home. Go home to where? Something stiffened inside me, there was a gathering of resolve and a quiet voice saying, I will bypass you. My mother, my sister and I slept in the same bed. My mother was exhausted each night, but we told one another about our day and listen to the movements of my grandmother around the house. My mother suffered from nightmares all about the boat.

And my job was to stay awake until her nightmares came so I could wake her. She opened a computer store, then studied to be a beautician and opened another business, and the women came with their stories about men who could not make the transition angry and inflexible and troubled children caught between two worlds grants and sponsors. Resort centers were established. I lived in parallel worlds in one I was the classic Asian student, relentless in the demands I made on myself.

In the other, I was enmeshed in lives that were precarious, tragically scarred by violence, drug abuse and isolation. But so many over the years were held, and for that work when I was a final year law student, I was chosen as the Young Australian of the Year and it was catapulted from one piece of the jigsaw to another and the edges didn't fit. Timely, anonymous Footscray resident was now tumbly refugee and social activist, invited to speak in venues she had never heard of and into homes whose existence she could never have imagined.

I didn't know the protocols. I didn't know how to use the cutlery. I didn't know how to talk about wine. I didn't know how to talk about anything. I wanted to retreat to the routines and comfort of life in an unsung suburb, a grandmother, a mother and two daughters ending each day as they had for almost 20 years, telling one another the story of their day and falling asleep. The three of us still in the same bed.

I told my mother I couldn't do it. She reminded me that I was now the same as she had been when we boarded the boat. No, had never been an option, just do what she said and don't be what you're not. So I spoke out on youth unemployment and education and the neglect of the marginalized and disenfranchised, and the more candidly I spoke, the more I was asked to speak.

I met people from all walks of life, so many of them doing the thing they loved, living on the frontiers of possibility, and even though I finished my degree, I realized I could not settle into a career in law that had to be another piece of the jigsaw. And I realized at the same time that it is OK to be an outsider. A recent arrival new on the scene and not just OK, but something to be thankful for, perhaps a gift from the boat, because being an insider can so easily mean collapsing the horizons can so easily mean accepting the presumptions of your province.

I stepped outside my comfort zone enough now to know that, yes, the world does fall apart, but not in the way that you fear possibilities that would not have been allowed were outrageously encouraged. There was an energy there and implacable optimism, a strange mixture of humility and daring. So I followed my hunches. I gathered around me a small team of people for whom the label it can't be done was an irresistible challenge. For a year we were penniless.

At the end of each day, I made a huge part of which we all shared. We worked well into each night. Most of our ideas were crazy, but a few were brilliant and we broke through. I made the decision to move to the US after only one trip. My hunch is again, three months later I had relocated and the adventure has continued. Before I close, though, let me tell you about my grandmother. She grew up at a time when Confucianism was the social norm and the local Mandarin was the person who mattered, life hadn't changed for centuries.

Her father died soon after she was born. Her mother raised her alone. At 17, she became the second wife of a Mandarin whose mother beat her with no support from her husband. She caused a sensation by taking him to court and prosecuting her own case and a far greater sensation when she won.