“‘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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“The main question I wanted to address in The Burrow was: how does a family who have suffered an unthinkable tragedy, go on?”
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“First and foremost, The Sunbird is a work of activism. It is art as activism, necessarily brief to counter the argument that the question of Palestine is complicated.”
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“[…] all these labels and myths about Western Sydney only restricts us as artists; frankly I’m tired of caring how we’re perceived. Like me, this work just wants to exist.”
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“I’ve always had a dispute with narration, since it traps the reader in immersion, like a drowning dragonfly. (Are writers part of the entertainment industry? Are books pastimes?)”
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“I am interested in what people will do to propel themselves into wealth, luxury and excess—especially if you possess none of it but believe it to be your birthright.”
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