OzAsia Fest & Open State present Writing China curated by the wonderful team of Nicholas Jose and Sam Prior where I was thrilled to be invited to facilitate two events: Growing up Asian in Australia and Reimagining. Growing up Asian in Australia featured the wonderful team behind Pencilled In - founding editor - Yen-Rong Wong, art editor Rachel Ang and the very real & irreverent (as opposed to the fictional!) Julie Koh. The panel grappled with conversations about writing and working as writers and artists ten years on from the publication of Growing up Asian in Australia. 10 years from when Alice Pung was advised by an industry person that her “heavy introduction” which detailed the invasion and dispossession of Australia’s Indigenous peoples, the White Australia policy, including information about the racist violence towards the Chinese during the 1850s and 60s, would scare away Border bookshop customers. Reimagining featured acclaimed experimental fiction writer Dorothy Tse, Hugo award winning author Jingfang Hao (who beat Stephen King to the award for her work Folding Beijing) and 2017 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist Julie Koh. This panel traversed topics such as writing contemporary fiction - what it means to write satirical, experimental or sci-fi works; how form and content informed each author's fictional worlds. It was thrilling to be part of a panel featuring authors of Asian descent, and to be able to frame our conversation based on their writing and work. In an interview with the Director of the SOMA project’s Hong Kong Atlas initiative, a project which aims to support the translation and publication of Hong Kong literature, Dorothy Tse said that “for Chinese, Hong Kong or mainland writers, we face the problem that when the West see us the first thing is that of our identity as an Asian writer, Chinese writer or Hong Kong writer, where we have to tell a story about place”. My reading of this is that there is a consumption of narratives by white Western readers wanting to gain insight and translation into another person’s culture, where writing becomes an Ethnic-town tour. However, as Dorothy Tse asserts that to really gain insight into another culture, readers can’t just read the realistic stories, but also need to read stories through their form.
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