“I don’t think it’s worth making something beautiful at the expense of people’s wellbeing, and therefore building the team meant I was looking for people who possess certain morals over their level of experience.”
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“Towards the end of drafting, I had a note to myself that I looked at almost every day: Write like a daredevil. It’s earnest and slightly manic—but in the end, it was the only way to do it.”
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“Writing criticism, editing and composing poetry are all different variations of playing with words, but each one flexes a different muscle. I am a better editor and critic because I am a poet and vice versa. “
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“We don’t have to excel by being the best for our voices and stories to be validated. I find it much more interesting seeing what I can create by a more compassionate and open approach. That doesn’t stop me from giving it my all when I can.”
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“I imagine my published stories and essays having their own lives in the world, and their own encounters with discerning and generous readers that enable them to grow and take on new meanings. This is the beauty of art—it’s a living, breathing, growing thing.”
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“‘Chineseness’ as object of derision—and relatedly, source of mirth—still has currency [today]. When slurs and dehumanising stories are repeated, they sustain an undertow that keeps both speaker and target moored to their histories.”
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“I am not quite the children of migrants, so my time is always fleetingly in the present. I generally want to document the shift in this experience, one that is not working towards a legacy, or an external archive, but a document that only connects temporarily.”
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“Narrative work is resistance—we know that words and stories matter because even now, these stories are being suppressed. […] What more proof do we need that the last defence of a powerful but crumbling hegemony is censorship?”
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“It’s important to me to show that even if you come from a certain cultural background that you are not all expected to act the same. We are not all one big monolith. We are as diverse as any Australian mainstream community. “
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“Legacy matters, if only for the simple reason that, when I was coming up, there were no Asian women artists in my world. Part of my legacy is to show that it is possible, because at the time, the idea was considered absurd. Legacy is important but it is not about the legacy of my ego, but an example of a path that people may choose to follow.”
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“I read all my work aloud as I redraft because the way it sounds is important to me, but voice isn’t just about style. It can also be a mode, a novel’s way of thinking, like in Beckett’s The Unnameable.”
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“That constant replacement of the immediate past with ‘the new’ is a dissociative tendency—a psychological condition that negates empathy or melancholic mood states. Modernism and settler-colonialism both engage in similar dissociative practices—it’s conceptual territorialisation.”
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“Part of the beauty of poetry, for me, is that I can let go of the desire to be understood. I can let go of accuracy and clarity in favour of a more nebulous, emotional truth in a playful space that is rife with possibility.”
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“I adore the camaraderie that comes with acknowledging that life and specifically womanhood is meant to be messy and chaotic, and it’s at that intersection where you find beauty.“
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“It’s important that this project remains malleable and joyful, not exhaustive. Otherwise why do it?“
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“If it’s not my story to share, I won’t share it. I only share my lens, the impact on me, my take on the world. I hate trauma porn so I’m not going to exploit my people’s history in order to make a bunch of white audiences feel something.”
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“Grief is the other side of love; we grieve because we love. I don’t think I would have it any other way.”
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“Self-publishing makes it possible for anyone with an internet connection to hold a copy of their own book in their hands. It also makes it possible to disseminate that book throughout a community, a society, and the world.”
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“I find it important to have a period of downtime in the studio between projects. To be kind of aimless and spend time reading or drawing—things that form a baseline for the bigger ideas to grow.”
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“I’m unashamedly a political writer—some people (and writers) think writing shouldn’t be political or polemical, and I have no idea who came up with that rule. Who benefits from such a rule? Not minorities.”
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