Leila Yusaf Chung's book Chasing Shadows flies against the stereotypes of middle-eastern women

Their efforts included providing her with Chinese-speaking officials, based on assumptions about her last name (in fact, adopted from her husband, Brian).

Which for a native French speaker from Lebanon was not a lot of use.

“Everyone was so polite but my English wasn’t very good,” she says. “Every time I went to the immigration department they would send me a Chinese doctor or official with a very strong accent and then we would sit there struggling to try and understand each other!”

She laughs mischievously as she recalls the confusion unwittingly caused simply by speaking French while bearing a Chinese-sounding name. At the heart of her novel, Chasing Shadows, lies a similar confounding of expectations and stereotypes.

This has also long been a theme of her own life, as far back as her upbringing in 1950s and '60s Beirut, when the city was known as the “Paris of the Middle East”.

“It was beautiful,” she recalls. “I went to small, private schools and changed twice. I think one school was run on Christian principles and the other was run on Muslim principles. Both were mixed and basically I did not know who was what religion. Everyone was together and everyone was respectful. It was very inclusive.”

There were other, practical advantages for a child growing up in a multi-faith society – someone, somewhere always seemed to be celebrating.

Be it Eid or Easter, there were always sweet treats and holidays to be had. There were even two Christmases.

“We shared the Armenian Christmas, too,” says Yusaf Chung. “We had public holidays for all of them – that’s how I remember my childhood.”

Then the civil war erupted and suddenly the emphasis switched to difference and separation.

“My first memory was when militiamen encircled a camp that had a lot of gypsies in it and people there died of starvation,” she says. “And that was when people started figuring out from the way you say certain words which part of Lebanon you’re from and then from your name what religion you were.”

Happily, her father had proved unusually prescient when it came to choosing names for Yusaf Chung and her sister years previously.

“He chose secular names for us because he never wanted us to be identified with a particular religion,” she says. “Leila is a very neutral name.”

Since then, Yusaf Chung, who for the past 15 years has worked in Sydney with migrant women and their children, has been at pains to avoid being pigeonholed.

“I don’t play that game,” she says.

Chasing Shadows is her first book and draws on her background and experience to tell an intergenerational tale of love and loss set in Palestine and Lebanon.

In her deceptively simple and elegant prose style, Yusaf Chung introduces Lavi, a middle-aged Jewish man, who converts to Islam and marries a Palestinian girl. And from that unusual choice the drama unfolds down the years.

“Once I created the characters they just guided me,” she says. “They take you on their journey.”

Time and again she returns to her favourite theme – all the things that unite humanity in the face of a world that chooses to emphasise division and difference.

“There are commonalities in all religions,” she says. “They all came from the same roots. Reading about the Jewish and Islamic religion there are so many similarities.”

But in the face of so much mounting evidence to the contrary, it must be difficult to maintain a focus on the possibility of bringing people together across ethnic and religious divides?

“I think if we keep working on it, we will get there,” she says. “You have to be hopeful.”

Chasing Shadows is published by Vintage Books, $32.99