Ditched the post I had for this month (admittedly, it’d been languishing in the draft pile for a while) thanks to:
the release of Gourmet Traveller’s LNY edition;
Jessica Au winning the Victorian Prize for Literature at this year’s VPLAs with her novella Cold Enough For Snow; and
Angie Kang’s graphic essay on the limitations of linking Chinese-diaspora representation to food/ food related stories (in Catapult Magazine, sadly now discontinued).
They’ve got my attention wandering away from the heat, offering a pause from the red notification dots, red packets, ping of emails and the back-to-the office slump.
They’ve got me excited about storytelling again.
After a year where shit hit the fan, this feeling of curiosity feels particularly precious.
Delicate, even.
Gourmet Traveller’s LNY Edition
A huge thank you to Lee Tran Lam for reaching out and giving me the opportunity to pitch for Gourmet Traveller’s LNY edition.
It’s surreal to see it in print.
I’ll add my name to the long list of people who are grateful to Lee Tran Lam for championing diversity in food media, and for opening my eyes to this incredible community.
I’m stoked to be printed next to Diem Tran, Harvard Wang, Kevin Cheng, Hetty McKinnon and Hannah-Rose Yee, together with local champion Max Veenhuyzen (hometown pride).
To me, stories about Lunar New Year were anecdotes between friends and long texts/logistical nightmares in family-chat threads. It’d be my sister and I rolling our eyes at being ordered into the car to visit another distant family friend’s place. It’d be me, honking with laughter in front of the lockers as a friend recounts the force-feeding/ mini cross-examination/ family torture they went through at family dinner before rushing off to first period maths.
It’s the “soz cant make it - reunion dinner”, “best place to find diy yee sang??”, “what’s that white coconut biscuit thing called again?”, “ahaha another asian aunty moment”, messages we’re all texting each other as the responsibility for LNY celebrations slowly trickles down to our generation.
Things in the private sphere.
So to see those stories in print now? In public? To be shared?
It’s so surreal.
It means so much.
And, as editor Joanna Hunkin explains in the post above, (whole other convo), publications take ‘risks’ when commissioning these special editions. So if you enjoy it, please support it with your cold, hard, well-earned cash.
Make LNY 2024 edition a reality.
VPLA, Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow and Eda Gunayadin’s Root & Branch
I read Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow last year and fell in love with it. Eda Gunaydin’s collection of memoir essays Root & Branch, sits on my bedside table, and I tackle it with enthusiastic bursts and the determination of someone trying to make way on their Goodreads reading goal of the year.
Look, I’m not articulate enough to provide any meaningful analysis, criticism or review. I am not well-read enough to write about the different themes that each of these brilliant authors weave into their work; nor can I dissect the storytelling techniques and the historical, social and political links that makes both of their books seems so necessary and urgent to me.
I am not a ‘literary’ person.
What I can say is that when I read Root and Branch, I gasped, I laughed and I swore. Loudly. With the type of violent enthusiasm I greet an old friend I haven’t seen in years (“where the heck have you been?”).
I hated reading the so-called “classics”. I found them difficult - they spoke of a world I could hardly relate to, where I had no agency.
But the ideas and the stories contained in these two books have opened up a whole new raft of ideas and research and scholarship that have made me go wow.
Angie Kang’s Graphic Essay on Food + Chinese Diaspora Representation
In her graphic essay in Catapult, Angie Kang says, “I’d like to see more Chinese Stories that aren’t explicitly linked to food. We don’t stop living in between meals.”
She continues:
I don’t discount the importance of food as a part of culture.
Food and Language are two forms of intimacy in the same mouth, and the former might be a more accessible option for some people.
Language and art require time to understand, but food can be eaten tonight.
…
These new stories shouldn’t be expected to represent the diaspora as if it were a monolith nor should they be told for the sake of expanding a Western Audience’s worldview.
I’d like diasporic creators to be able to finally center themselves.
I recognise the irony of me loving this message, as a writer whose work has centred around food, who loves to eat, who regularly explores my identity through food/ food related content.
And I love writing about food. Because in many ways it made my own history and culture accessible to me (a westerner in the eyes of my extended family).
I also, unashamedly, love to eat.
So it’s very much the balance of both worlds.
In saying that, I see myself expanding my writing beyond food in the future too. There’s an incredible range of works and artists featured by creative organisations such as Liminal and 4A.
Like this line in Gok-Lim Finch’s piece The Island Beside the Boat in 4A’s latest paper:
Dang finds home in the family that he has, and the constellation of different stories we travel through, the way in which this constellation of happenings in our past is swept up into a moving ongoing making of the present.
Maybe I’m an optimist, but I hope things are trending in the right direction. So that the generation after me has a richer range of stories to choose from. That when my ESL teacher acquaintances or my family friends ask for recommendations for books centred around the diaspora for their reading lists, I can give them a comprehensive list of works at all levels- rather than a mere page.
The importance of stories and storytelling is a whole separate post.