Growing Up Asian in Australia
Page 33
BENJAMIN LAW is a senior contributor for frankie magazine. In 2008 he completed his PhD in screenwriting, which involved developing an original six-part television series called The New Lows. He is one of five children, and lives with his boyfriend in Brisbane.
MICHELLE LAW was born in 1990 on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. She is currently studying for a Bachelor of Creative Writing in Brisbane.
SIMONE LAZAROO won the Western Australian Premier’s Award for all three of her novels: The World Waiting to be Made, The Australian Fiancé and The Travel Writer. Her short stories have been anthologised in Australia and England. She was a judge of the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2006, and lectures at Murdoch University in Perth.
HAIHA LE graduated from the University of Melbourne with a BA in cinema studies and Vietnamese literature, and studied acting at the HB studio in New York. Her acting credits include Kick (SBS), Bed of Roses (ABC), The Elephant Princess, Macbeth, Stingers and many independent film and theatre projects. She lives in Saigon.
FRANCIS LEE OAM worked as a civil engineer and as a translator before becoming a full-time journalist and broadcaster. Until March 2008 he was the executive producer of the Chinese Cantonese group at SBS radio. He is the founding chairman of the Asian Media Council of Australia, vice-president of the Sydney Chinese Writers’ Association and former president of the Australian Chinese Forum of Australia.
JASON YAT-SEN LI is a lawyer and political activist. He now lives in Beijing, where he runs his own business advisory firm.
GLENN LIEU was born in Sydney in 1985. He studied finance and computer science at the University of NSW and now works in IT. In his spare time he writes, plays the guitar and is an avid fan of country and folk music.
UYEN LOEWALD was born in Hai Duong, Vietnam. In 1962, while a student at Saigon University, she was detained without trial for her political activism. She married American diplomat Klaus Loewald in 1964; they moved to Australia in 1970. She has worked as a chef, a community worker, a teacher and an interpreter, and is the author of the memoir Child of Vietnam (1987).
LIAN LOW has written theatre and spoken-word performance pieces and has performed at events including Tranzlesbian Gendermash, Dykeworld, Flow and Hello Kitty. Her articles have been published online and in print, including in Arts Hub, MCV and Peril.
XERXES MATZA is of Filipino-Turkish descent and lives in Sydney. His work has appeared in the Spiny Babbler Anthology, Campus Review and UNSWeetened. His novel-in-progress, Gentle Warriors, is about Filipino comfort women during the Second World War. ‘The Embarrassments of the Gods’ is not the story of his life.
DIANA NGUYEN is a Melbourne-based actor. She performed at the 2008 Melbourne Comedy Festival and the 2007 Melbourne Short and Sweet Festival, where she was nominated for Best Actress for Death by 1000 Cuts. She works as a community-liaison officer and volunteers with community radio and theatre groups.
PAUL NGUYEN studied at Monash University and is now an intern at a major country hospital in Victoria. He comes from a small Vietnamese family whose members are scattered across Australia, the US and Vietnam. This is his first publication.
PAULINE NGUYEN was born in Saigon in 1973. In 1975 her family fled Vietnam by sea and, after a period in Thailand, arrived in Sydney in 1978. After studying communications at the University of Technology, Sydney, she worked in film and television. She now runs, with her brother and her partner, Sydney’s award-winning Red Lantern restaurant.
THAO NGUYEN was born in a refugee camp in Thailand; her family arrived in Australia in 1980. She has co-ordinated community projects in theatre, literature and multi-media, and was a member of the NSW Ethnic Communities Council and of Australia’s non-government delegation to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva. She now works in Vietnam as an inter national lawyer.
CINDY PAN is best known for her appearances on television programs including The Glasshouse, Sunrise, The Panel and Sex Life. As a doctor, she has over a decade of general practice experience. She is the author of the bestselling Pandora’s Box (2001), as well as Playing Hard to Get (2007), co-authored with Bianca Dye.
HOA PHAM is an award-winning author and the founding editor of Peril, an online journal devoted to Asian-Australian issues.
OLIVER PHOMMAVANH is an Australian-Thai writer for children, a primary-school teacher and a stand-up comedian. ‘Hot and Spicy’ is his first published story. He grew up in western Sydney.
CHIN SHEN is a media and communications student from Melbourne.
SIM SHEN is a 36-year-old general practitioner and poet. Born in Malaysia, he has lived in Adelaide for over twenty years. He has been widely published in Australian and overseas literary journals. His first poetry collection was City of My Skin (2001).
ANNETTE SHUN WAH is a writer, broadcaster, producer and actor. A fourth-generation Chinese-Australian, she was born in north Queensland and grew up north of Brisbane.
JOHN SO is the Lord Mayor of Melbourne.
RUDI SOMAN was born in Singapore to Indian parents. When he was six he and his family moved to Australia. He has written for newspapers, magazines and websites. Recently he worked as a scriptwriter for ABC Asia Pacific and co-created an SBS multimedia project. His first novel, Brother Nation, was short-listed for the Varuna Award for Manuscript Development. He lives in Sydney.
EMILY J. SUN has led a peripatetic life but is currently back home in Perth raising her son. A high-school English teacher, she has also worked as a waitress, photographer’s assistant, office temp, New York nanny and curriculum writer. Her work has been published in Wet Ink and Island.
SHAUN TAN is an award-winning author of picture books for older readers.
PHILLIP TANG is an Australian writer with Saigon–Sydney roots. He has worked as an ESL teacher, travel-guide editor and freelance writer. His fiction has appeared in Westerly, Peril and Visible Ink. He is writing his first novel, The Night We Vanish, set in Vietnam and Australia, for which he was granted a Varuna Fellowship in 2007.
CAROLINE TRAN presents the Australian music program ‘Home and Hosed’ on Triple J, the ABC’s youth radio network.
OANH THI TRAN was born near Bac Lieu in Vietnam. She came to Australia with most of her large family in 1983, with a twelve-month stopover in a refugee camp in Malaysia. She grew up in Brisbane and is now a lawyer living in the UK.
SIMON TONG works in IT and is studying editing and communications part-time at the University of Melbourne. He is the father of a spirited three-year-old girl.
IVY TSENG lives in western Sydney and is currently studying for the HSC.
DIEM VO was born in Vietnam and migrated to Australia with her family in 1981. She grew up in Melbourne’s western suburbs and graduated from RMIT University with a Bachelor of Nursing. She works with mentally disordered offenders at a forensic psychiatric hospital.
CHI VU was born in Vietnam and arrived in Australia in 1979. Her stories have been published in Meanjin, the Age, Refo, and various anthologies, and her plays have been staged in Melbourne and Sydney. In 2000 she received an Asialink writer’s residency to Vietnam, where she wrote the critically acclaimed Vietnam: a Psychic Guide.
RAY WING-LUN has worked as a storeman, fettler, kitchen hand, childcare worker and restaurant manager. He studied education and philosophy and now works as a strategic planner, helping people to do their jobs well. His wife and three sons provide support for his continuing education.
VANESSA WOODS is an award-winning journalist and author. She has written three children’s books and is the author of the travel memoir It’s Every Monkey for Themselves (2007), about her experiences chasing wild capuchin monkeys through the Costa Rican jungle. She currently lives in North Carolina.
QUAN YEOMANS is the lead singer of Brisbane-based rock band Regurgitator.
Acknowledgements
A special thank you to Denise O’Dea of Black Inc. for her invaluable input, support and experience in editing, Chris Feik for his insight as always, Clare
Forster for her skilful and generous assistance, Tom Deverall for the perfect cover, Anna Lensky and the staff at Black Inc., Alexander Pung and Alison Pung for their special help and insight, and my family and friends for their love and support.
Above all, thank you to each of our contributors, who have enriched this anthology in so many ways, and our ‘Tall Poppies,’ who kindly responded to my interview requests. Thank you to all the Asian-Australians who submitted their writing and shared their stories – it was such an honour to read them all.
Alice Pung