Few writers have pursued their ethnic roots with such single-minded seriousness as Lynn Pan. Every one of her five books has been about China. None have been novels. All have been meticulously researched; her Sons of the Yellow Emperor has become a classic of popular scholarship on the Chinese diaspora. And the most autobiographical of her books, Tracing It Home, is a detailed tapestry of life in Shanghai in the 1940s and 1950s and of the travails of her family, which hailed from the pre-revolutionary Shanghainese elite.

She has now embarked on what is perhaps her biggest project ever. As director of the Chinese Heritage Centre in Singapore, she is compiling an encyclopedia of the overseas Chinese.

A composed, diminutive woman who speaks almost in a whisper, Ms Pan is by nationality British and sounds impeccably so. But by identity she's more complicated. Born in Shanghai in 1945, her family left in the mid-1950s and eventually settled in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia.

At 15 she went to England and lived there, studying, writing and teaching, for the next 20 plus years. After brief teaching spells in Geneva and Helsinki, she moved to Honkong in the late 1980s, where she worked as a journalist. And now she's in Singapore.

We are sitting in her book-filled office on the top floor of the temple-like building on the campus that houses the Chinese Heritage Center.

"Well, I'm Shanghainese first," she says with little hesitation. "When my parents left Shanghai, they carried it with them to East Malaysia. They re-created the Shanghai of the heydays in this jungle. I didn't realize it till I started writing Sons of the Yellow Emperor and began to look into identity and attachment to the homeland.

"I lived in a completely insulated Chinese-Shanghainese world until I became an adult. My mother kept a Shanghainese kitchen in Sabah; I never discovered Nonya cuisine until I was a grown-up; I never ate at hawker stalls. We spoke Shanghainese. My parents had a clique of friends and they were all from Shanghai; they didn't mix with the local Chinese.

She also remained largely cocooned from the wider Malaysian culture. "I discovered Malaysia /Singapore culture in London from a university friend. She introduced me to this overseas Chinese culture."

Life changed for Ms Pan when she went to Hongkong. "For the first time ever, I felt a sense of identification. I became emotionally involved. I felt I had a stake in Hongkong. and I've never felt that about any place I'd been. Hongkong was like me. It was Chinese yet it had this western veneer. That's what I liked."

"Chineseness" and what it means is one of Ms Pan's hobby horses, and she seems to be something of a purist on the issue. Language, she believes, is a crucial test; indeed she has been quoted as suggesting that if somebody doesn't have sufficient command of the language to understand T'ang poetry, they would not be able to appreciate what it really means to be Chinese.

"When I read Maxine Hong Kingston or Amy Tan I think to myself: they're Americans, not Chinese. Why is that? It must be the language."

Are the overseas Chinese increasingly looking to explore their ethnic roots?

"Yes,'' says Lynn Pan, emphatically stretching out the word.

Why are they doing it?

Partly, it's a generational thing, she explains. "In some countries -- America, for instance -- the first generation of Chinese were poor immigrants. They cleaved to the fatherland and continued to live there, psychologically. The second generation lost the links because they desperately wanted to be American. Now you have a third generation, and there's been a revival."

"Like most things, it got going first in California, as part of the ethnic preservation movement. But its real origins lay in the American civil rights movement -- Martin Luther King, black pride, et cetera. That aroused ethnic consciousness in many groups, including the Chinese. And so the attempt to revive, to stake a claim to this lost heritage.

"And then of course, there was the opening up and reform of China, starting in the late 1970s," she continues. "That had an enormous impact on Chinese throughout the world."

In Southeast Asia, the opening up of China altered the political landscape. "In some countries, it wasn't kosher to be Chinese, politically, because if you were Chinese, you were dubbed a chauvinist. But the context has now changed."

East Asia's economic success might also have helped revive interest in heritage, says Ms Pan. But she feels that much more needs to be done in these societies: "They need culture, some kind of historical consciousness, some sense of self."

She sees Singapore as a particular case in point. "It's a showcase. It's beautiful. But it's not enough," she suggests. "I feel that Singaporeans are often very ... prickly. Why is that? Because I think there's some cultural insecurity."

How so?

"Well, compare a Singaporean with a China-Chinese," she says. "The China-Chinese, they have this great cultural confidence. Sometimes, it's overweening and really gets my goat. Because I think to myself ..." Here she breaks into an angry tone, almost spitting out the words. "That's all in the past, this glorious civilization and all that. You don't cherish it. You don't preserve it. It's all in the past. Now, you're one of the poorest countries in the world. So you'd better get going and build up something to show.

"But there is this confidence," she adds, reverting to her usual near-whisper. "And that's a head start, that's half the battle." Still, she's hopeful for Singapore, because it has begun to do the right things to revive its heritage. "I admire what Singapore is doing in many respects," she says. "I mean conserving buildings, planning more museums, all that. The setting up of the Chinese Heritage Centre is part of it. It's terrific.

"I don't see it being done anywhere else: not in Hongkong; not in Shanghai -- they're tearing down old buildings there by the day. I suppose it's part of the dash for prosperity; it's the price that has to be paid. And I suppose Singapore can afford to spend money on conservation and so on, because Singapore has made it."

But much more needs to be done, she says. "Singapore needs to nurture historians. I look around and there're only a handful. I think a whole generation has been lost. The emphasis in education has been technocratic to a huge degree. So the infrastructure that Singapore is building, that's a start, that's the hardware. Now, Singapore needs to nurture the software.''