For me, different local languages and cultures were the sites of all first border crossings, all forays into the territorial unknown. When my father and then my mother — as was the custom in those precarious days — left me with extended family in Singapore as a baby to make a new life for us in Warwick, Queensland, in the early 1970s, their islands winked out of existence for the space of several (possibly confusing) months and new island connections were formed, new borders crossed.
When I was flown to Australia on the lap of my paternal grandmother, not only did I find myself physically on a new island, a contested land, but also in a new realm of culture and language without any linkages to any known archipelagos.
Some, like my Chinese-language educated parents, cross physical and metaphysical borders to come to this country because they choose to. Others do so because they are forced or impelled to by circumstance. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, just about everyone in Australia knows this. And yet many of us harden our hearts, or turn a blind eye, to those who have crossed those physical and metaphysical borders just to be here. And the very worst of us tell these people — who have left the known behind, who may arrive without language, without friends or any point of real bearing and who may have endured the worst atrocities a human being can face — to Fuck off back to your own country.
I see my life in this country as a series of new islands, new playing fields; all constantly shifting, occasionally startling.
Resolutely raised in a Mandarin-speaking household that insisted on a weekly visit to Melbourne’s Chinatown for a meal and groceries, I recall spending my entire first year of kindergarten in silence as I desperately worked out what the coloured tin bowls and cups were for (cut apples and milk), why it was bad when kids wet their pants (the blonde teacher lost it and sent them home) and what being asked to sit on the grey oblong of carpet meant (story time). I supplemented my puzzling sessions at kindergarten with learning English from re-runs of Skippy — starring a talking kangaroo — The Aunty Jack Show — which inexplicably featured a hirsute, moustachioed, singing transvestite in a Victorian-style gown and boxing gloves — Countdown, televised VFL matches and endless repeats of the ABBA Arrival album given to us by a white Australian boyfriend of my father’s female cousin who was studying in Australia.
I didn’t feel like a ‘right one’ in the 1970s when Asians clustered together socially for safety and were the butt end of fatuous word jokes, and I never felt like a ‘right one’ in the 1980s when little kids who were perceived as weak or different at my school were being shoved into lockers or toilets by big burly Caucasian girls who wouldn’t otherwise speak to them. Somehow I managed to parlay all that Countdown, Aunty Jack, ABBA, Skippy and social manhandling into a law degree and working life that gives me access to ‘privileged’ islands and playing fields — like courts of law and corporate boardrooms — that were probably never made, tailored or intended for people like me.
I’ve written before about how intersectional women like me rarely think of ourselves in terms of ‘privilege’. We might be ‘lucky’ enough to be able to occasionally access privileged playing fields by virtue of our training or employment.
But we are not necessarily welcomed there, nor are we synonymous with those privileged jobs, situations or places. Even after all these years of speaking and working in English, I still wonder how the sole ESL kid in the kinder class, who could never pronounce the words hypotenuse or hyperbole properly, got here. The sense of dislocation, distance, separation, sheer impostorship, still sometimes flashes up; is still jarring. That sense of being at a slight remove from everything around me — I don’t think that will ever go away. I am always outside, even when I am ‘inside’.
The old islands are still there. But they are distant in more ways than mere physical distance — the linkages have corroded. I have forgotten the words, the signifiers and signals, the customs. To my Singaporean relatives I am huá qiáo or huá rén: a person of Chinese heritage living abroad or away, cut off from my original islands by all the accretions piled upon me by my life in the West.
I am not a ‘whole’ creature in relation to any of the languages I speak nor any of the cultures I live in or move across now — no longer fluent in Chinese dialect, I will always look Chinese; relatively fluent in English, I will never pass for the white person I sound like over the phone. (Is that Limb with a ‘b’? No, it’s Lim without a ‘b’.)
I have an aunt with frontal lobe dementia who is losing the ability to communicate. She is moving out of the realm of speech and facility with English, back through the realm of facility with Chinese dialect into the realm of pure silence and immobility. She is undergoing a kind of casting off, or recession, from the outlying islands of her adult life in Australia back through the islands of her childhood in China. She is returning to her own Island of Sensory Feeling, the first island.
Perhaps, John Donne should have said: Every person is islands.
We are the sum total of all the islands and playing fields we have taken upon ourselves, like Atlas, like tortoises, throughout our lives. The intersectional in the west, in a sense, are more island than those that inhabit the main. To simply survive in the west, we must sometimes do more, suffer more, be more (at what cost?), just to be recognised, just to live.
* MEDITATION XVII, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624)
Contributor biographies
Graham Akhurst is an Aboriginal writer and academic hailing from the Kokomini of Northern Queensland. His creative nonfiction and poetry have been published widely. Graham received an Australia Council Grant for the creation of new work to complete his debut novel Borderland, which will be published with Hachette in 2019. Graham was valedictorian of his graduating year and completed his writing honours with a first class result. He is currently enrolled in an MPhil of Creative Writing at the University of Queensland with an APA scholarship, where he is also an Associate Lecturer in Indigenous Studies.
Michelle Aung Thin was born in Rangoon the same year as the coup d’état (1962) and brought up in Canada; she now lives in Melbourne. The Monsoon Bride, her first novel, was shortlisted for the Unpublished Manuscript Fellowship of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2010 and is the product of her PHD in creative writing under the mentorship of Brian Castro. She is the 2017 National Library of Australia Creative Arts Fellow for Australian Writing, supported by the Eva Kollsman and Ray Mathew’s Trust. She is writing her second book, which is about returning to Burma, the country of her birth. She currently teaches at RMIT University.
Wendy Chen is a Sydney-based writer who has appeared as an artist at the Emerging Writers’ Festival, National Young Writers’ Festival and Noted Festival. She is a co-host of the book blogger collective Lit CelebrAsian, and has been a subeditor and contributor for the literary magazine Pencilled In. She has a particular interest in diasporic stories and historical fiction. Find her on Twitter @writteninwonder.
Kelly Gardiner writes historical fiction for readers of all ages. Her latest novel is 1917: Australia’s Great War, recently shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Young History Prize and the Asher Award. Kelly’s previous books include the young adult novels Act of Faith and The Sultan’s Eyes, both of which were shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and Goddess, a novel for adults based on the life of the seventeenth-century French swordswoman, cross-dresser and opera singer Mademoiselle de Maupin. She teaches writing at La Trobe University. Kelly is also the co-host of Unladylike, a podcast about women and writing.
Rafeif Ismail is a third culture youth of the Sudanese diaspora. Rafeif sees all forms of art as mediums for change and is committed to creating accessible spaces for young people of marginalised backgrounds in the arts. She is the winner of the 2017 Deborah Cass Prize for writing with the story ‘Almitra Amongst the Ghosts’. Rafeif’s short story ‘Light at the End’ was published in the anthology Ways of Being Here (Margaret River Press, 2017). She is committed to writing diverse characters an
d stories in all mediums, is currently working on her first novel and hopes to also one day write for screen. She can be found exploring twitter @rafeifismail
Jordi Kerr is a writer, youth literature advocate, and support worker for queer young people. Their thoughts about books have appeared in such places as Archer, Books+Publishing, Kill Your Darlings, and Crikey. They were a recipient of one of the Wheeler Centre’s Hot Desk Fellowships in 2017, and they’ve worked as a judge for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and the Aurealis Awards. Their favourite book awards, however, will always be the Inky Awards, which are judged by Australian teens.
Ambelin Kwaymullina is an Aboriginal writer and illustrator who comes from the Palyku people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. She is the author/illustrator of a number of award-winning picture books as well as the YA dystopian series, The Tribe. Her books have been published in the United States, South Korea and China. Ambelin is a prolific commentator on diversity in children’s literature and a law academic at the University of Western Australia.
Ezekiel Kwaymullina is from the Palyku people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. He is an author of picture books — most recently Colour Me, illustrated by Moira Court (Fremantle Press, 2017) — and novels for younger readers.
Mimi Lee is an emerging writer who was born in Sydney, but spent the majority of her childhood in Shanghai, China. She is a follower of Jesus, and a university student who often wishes her textbooks were thinner. Other than writing stories on themes that are close to her heart, she enjoys reading, singing, bushwalking and watching movies, and is currently praying that her novel manuscript will be published. Say hi on Twitter @MimiR_Lee.
Rebecca Lim is a writer, illustrator and lawyer based in Melbourne, Australia. Rebecca is the author of eighteen books, most recently The Astrologer’s Daughter (A Kirkus Best Book of 2015 and CBCA Notable Book for Older Readers), Afterlight and Wraith. Shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award, Aurealis Award and Davitt Award for YA, Rebecca’s work has also been longlisted for the Gold Inky Award and the David Gemmell Legend Award. Her novels have been translated into German, French, Turkish, Portuguese and Polish. She is a co-founder, with Ambelin Kwaymullina, of the Voices from the Intersection initiative.
Kyle Lynch belongs to the Wongi people of the north-east Western Australian goldfields region. In 2014 Kyle starred in the film Wongi Warrior (2014). Most recently, Kyle took part in the 2017 Kalgoorlie Youth Project ‘Guthoo: We are One’.
Olivia Muscat has just completed her Bachelor of Arts at the University of Melbourne. She majored in creative writing and Italian and is currently contemplating her next move. She occasionally blogs about life with her guide dog, Jemima, and spends her days reading, writing, and imagining her life as a musical.
Amra Pajalic is an award-winning author, an editor and teacher. Her debut novel The Good Daughter (Text Publishing, 2009) won the 2009 Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Civic Choice Award, and was also shortlisted in the Victorian Premier’s Awards for an Unpublished Manuscript by an Emerging Writer. She is also the author of a novel for children Amir: Friend on Loan (Garratt Publishing, 2014) and is co-editor of the anthology Coming of Age: Growing up Muslim in Australia (Allen and Unwin, 2014) that was shortlisted in the 2015 CBCA Book of the Year awards. Her memoir Things Nobody Knows But Me will be published by Transit Lounge in 2019.
Alice Pung is the award-winning author of Unpolished Gem, Her Father’s Daughter and Laurinda, and the editor of Growing Up Asian in Australia and My First Lesson. Her latest book is Writers on Writers: John Marsden, and she is an Ambassador of Room to Read, the 100 Story Building and the Twentieth Man Foundation.
Melanie Rodriga is a film-maker and academic. She has directed and executive produced eight feature films, the most recent, ‘Pinch’, won the best film at the 2015 WA Screen Awards. She has a PhD in screen from Murdoch University, is currently embarking on an MA in Literature and is working on a queer YA novel.
Omar Sakr is an Arab-Australian poet whose work has been published in English, Arabic and Spanish. His poetry has or will soon feature in Griffith Review, Meanjin, Island, Overland, The New Arab, Mizna, Antic and Circulo de Poesia. He has been anthologised in Best Australian Poems 2016 and Contemporary Australian Poetry, and his debut collection These Wild Houses (2017) was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe award. He is the poetry editor of The Lifted Brow.
Ellen van Neerven is a Yugambeh writer from South East Queensland who now lives in Melbourne. She is the author of the poetry volume Comfort Food (UQP, 2016) and the fiction collection, Heat and Light (UQP, 2014) which won numerous awards, including the 2013 David Unaipon Award, the 2015 Dobbie Award and the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Indigenous Writers’ Prize.
Yvette Walker is an Australian writer of Irish ancestry. Yvette has a BA (Honours) and a PhD from Curtin University. She was a writing fellow at Varuna, the Writer’s Centre, in 2009 and again in 2011. Her debut novel, Letters to the End of Love (UQP, 2013) won the 2014 WA Premier’s Book Award (WA Emerging Writer) and was shortlisted for the 2014 NSW Premier’s Book Award (Glenda Adam’s Award for New Writing). Her short fiction has been published in Review of Australian Fiction and The Nightwatchman. Yvette is currently working full time on her second novel.
Jessica Walton is a picture book author, teacher, parent, daughter of a trans parent, and proud queer disabled woman. She wrote Introducing Teddy: a story about being yourself to help explain gender identity in a simple, positive way to her kids. Introducing Teddy began as a Kickstarter project, but has now been published in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia by Bloomsbury. It has also been translated into nine other languages. Jess lives in Pakenham, Victoria with her wife, kids and cat.
First published 2018 by
FREMANTLE PRESS
25 Quarry Street, Fremantle WA 6160
www.fremantlepress.com.au
Copyright introductions © Rebecca Lim and Ambelin Kwaymullina, 2018
Copyright contributions © individual contributors, 2018
The moral rights of the creators have been asserted.
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Cover image Ambelin Kwaymullina
Cover design Rebecca Mills
Printed by McPherson’s Printing, Victoria, Australia
Meet me at the intersection
ISBN 9781925591705 (paperback)
Fremantle Press is supported by the State Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries.
Meet Me at the Intersection Page 16