Hello everyone,
I hope you are having a swell Autumn. The season seems to bring on more reflections, or maybe I’m just an overthinker haha.
Recently I went to a few Mid-Autumn festival celebrations here in Prague, and that made me ruminate again on ‘identity’.
I’ve always been conflicted, and confused, about my identity - of not only growing up as a migrant in Australia, but the fact that I didn’t even have a single, coherent, cultural identity within my own family. We are Chinese-Vietnamese-Cambodian from Cambodia.
Growing up, I heard Teochew, Vietnamese, Khmer, Mandarin and Cantonese from my parents and extended family to varying degrees. With my parents, they only spoke Teochew with us children because that was the language they wanted to pass on to the next generation. Teochew is a language from mainland China, and has been described as a Chinese ‘dialect’ even though it is a language in its own right since it is almost completely different from Mandarin and we can’t understand each other.
To complicate things even further, I also went to Mandarin classes every Saturday as a kid for years, even though my parents never spoke in that language to me. They said it would be a very useful language for us in the future, especially in business, which is true. Sadly, I hated the classes and retained very little Mandarin, though I’ve recently started lessons again as an adult! And discovering that the muscle memory is still there…
Heritage is a living, flowing, changing river
I’ve always focused on the losses of my incoherent cultural identity - not feeling like I belong anywhere, no one tradition to go deeper into, but this Substack post by themodernmigrant.substa… made me rethink it as actually an act of creation:
Diaspora is often described through distance: from a homeland, a language, a past. But it is also a form of creation. People in diaspora do not simply preserve what they inherited. They translate it, adapt it and build identities that could only have emerged through movement. Diaspora is not culture carried unchanged into another place. It is what culture becomes when it learns to travel.
I was reminded of this recently during Mid-Autumn Festival. Here in Prague, the Taiwanese community celebrated it with an event, as well as the Vietnamese community. I went to both. And at both, elements resonated with me because I grew up with Chinese and Vietnamese culture in Australia. In the past I might have looked at it as belonging to neither cultures, but this time round I felt delighted that I could relate to multiple contexts, especially as I’m always hungry for home in the Czech Republic, where there are very little opportunities to connect with my roots (there’s no other Teochew speaker or community that I know of in all of Central Europe).
So instead, I see being in diaspora as a creative process. I’ve focused so much in the past on loss, which is real, but I’m starting to see that something is also gained, something is created that also becomes part of my heritage, which I can then pass on to my daughter. I was anxious about how to raise her as a Czech-Chinese-Vietnamese-Cambodian-Australian, how to give her a coherent sense of her identity and how I could explain her background. But if anything, this is what I want to pass on to my daughter - the feeling that she has a rich cultural heritage, which is complex, yes, but which also means that she can feel a resonance, a sense of belonging, in a multitude of places, and that they belong to her.
We are the embodiment of the reality that heritage is a living, flowing, changing, river…
My birthday in Sapa
I went to Sapa market for my 46th birthday. Sapa is on the outskirts of Prague and is also known as ‘Little Hanoi’ because all the markets are run by Vietnamese migrants. It’s where you go for Vietnamese food, groceries and cheap clothes. I went to Sapa because I wanted to touch my roots on my birthday. Or part of my roots, because my background is so specific, shaped as it is by war, colonialism and migration.
I grew up with some Vietnamese culture around me and in the home, with extended Vietnamese family members and living near Cabramatta, Sydney’s ‘Little Saigon’. So Sapa’s smells and sounds are familiar, and bring me home a little, which I appreciate so much because there’s little chance for me to connect with my roots here in Prague.
As I was waiting for them to prepare our banh mi, I found myself weeping.
It was taking me back. But I realised what was missing - it was not just a place that I wanted to go back to, but a time. My childhood. When my mum and brother were still alive. A very, very difficult time - but still a huge part of me that I rarely get to connect with nowadays, from which I’ve been disconnected from for so long. I was crying because it was the sadness of knowing that even if I went back, I cannot go back to a place where my mother and brother will be. I cannot travel back in time.
It reminded me that heritage is so much about the people we love, perhaps above and beyond anything else. That it is about people - being shaped by them, our memories with them, our love for them.
Update on longlist
I wanted to give an update on the Australian Fiction Prize that I mentioned in my last newsletter, because so many people reached out to congratulate me. Unfortunately, I didn’t make the shortlist…this manuscript has been shortlisted twice before in other prizes - always the bridesmaid, never the bride! Of course, I was disappointed. The idea for the novel came after my mother’s death six years ago, when in the aftermath I got caught in a whirlwind of creativity. Interrogating deeper what was underneath my disappointment, there is the need for external validation especially in this season of my life as a mother of a young child, yes, but also wanting the infrastructure that prizes and institutions provide…it’s damn lonely out here, and the kind of support that I would’ve gotten from this prize, both financial and literary, would have been so helpful.
New book review
In other news, I’m really proud to have published my next review essay in Sydney Review of Books. It is a translated book titled ‘Fruto’ and is about the disproportionate burden of care work falling on women, especially in parenting. It gave me a moment to reflect on my own experiences of motherhood while still being in the thick of it with a toddler. You can read it on the Sydney Review of Books website here.
Zines
I’ve also been getting into zines lately. Or rather, getting back into them. I used to make zines as an angsty teenager in my bedroom in the 90’s, before internet, and when everything went through the postal service. Getting zines in the mail was a delight that I looked forward to every afternoon when the mail was delivered. It’s incredible that I’m now making zines again, albeit digital ones, and that they are becoming popular again! You can download my zines here:
Mama Writer zine: a zine I wrote for myself as a mother, and for other mothers, using writing as a way to reconnect with ourselves.
I love you, Friend: a zine honouring the unique and singular relationship that is friendship.
Writing Mentoring
I recently finished some writing mentoring with a client, and she gave me some lovely feedback (see below).
Do you have a writing project you want to work on, or want to simply start writing but don't know where to start? Let me be your guide through the forest of writing. One-on-one mentoring. More info here.
"I wholeheartedly loved our conversations and felt a gentle shift in me from the moment we began working together. I also really valued the gentle push you gave me to complete a cycle of writing, rather than leaving the work perpetually unfinished…I loved having a weekly touchpoint to talk about writing, and I noticed that this connected in valuable ways with broader patterns in my wellbeing practices. What I’m coming to realise is that writing is a basic need for me. It’s essential to being well, just like getting adequate sleep and nourishment. There’s something so vital for me in the practice of reading and writing. Establishing a daily journaling practice has been such a potent micro-practice - a touchpoint for checking in with myself each day…”
Book review mentoring:
I’ve also started to open slots for book review mentoring. Having done years of book reviewing, including being awarded fellowships to write them, I feel there are some things that I can share with others. Book reviewing is a vital bow in many writers’ portfolio; it is one of the most reliable and accessible ways of getting published. If you would like to try your hand at writing book reviews/essays but don’t know where to start, I can be your guide this one-on-one mentoring. More info here.
New website
Lastly, I have a new website! With the help of a template I got from Nabiu Studio, I’ve redesigned my website. I am hoping to utilise it as a living digital garden, where I will post regular works-in-progress, kind of like an open creative diary, to share and welcome you into my creative world.
Books/Music/Art: things I’ve been inspired by
Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers: this novel blew me away in its exquisite rendering of quiet feelings, that are no less intense. What an utter pleasure this was to read.
Digital Abundance by the amazing Kening Zhu: this course resurrected me from my postpartum/motherhood inertia. It’s the reason why I restarted the newsletter and many other things.
Sweet Bean: a Japanese movie that surprised, delighted and moved me. Quiet and deep, a sweet balm in this crazy, digital world where we’ve forgotten how to just be. Just beautiful, though I was weeping in the cinema.