Essays

Trapped inside my house, I exist in multiple worlds at once: the shocked writer with the shortlisted first book; the absent academic with the unfinished manuscript; the aunty who reads her latest manuscript to her nieces and nephews every night, and revels in their excitement. I feel trapped in a waved-tossed dinghy: Can I write? No, I can’t! Maybe I can? No wonder I feel nauseous.

As public awareness of the virus grows, the media dictates new territories of knowledge, airing the collective voices of isolation and helplessness in the face of rising human losses. In the charting of statistics and updates, a new hyper-present emerges in which the writer’s task of imagining new worlds feels awkward, subject to a field of speculation shaped by cycles of news, all vying for the best truth, the most profitable predictions. I come to rely less on reading and believing, and more on observing metaphors and making notes on transmission and contagion like a scientist whose detachment still allows for curiosity and the possibility of change.

Poetry, I had surmised, could do so many amazing things for nonfiction – technically, stylistically, spatially. Why couldn’t it be recognised as a valuable mode to challenge and expand nonfiction?

Names, in general, matter. But how much, and why, exactly, does an author’s name matter? And how much does it matter if one or more of the names you write under isn’t the one you use for dentist appointments and phone bills? I ponder these questions on my own account, but also because I’m so often asked about my multiple writing identities. This hasn’t happened only at writing festivals and book events (back in the days when they were still a thing), but also at parties (ditto) when I was one margarita down and minding my business over by the guacamole.

One of my main self-appointed tasks was tidying Mum’s room, a perpetual mess filled with sewing material and teaching resources and our school newsletters from kindergarten. I told myself I wanted her to be able to use the room now that she finally had time. I oscillated between my own rubric for what to keep and what to throw out and what I supposed Mum’s rubric to be. Sometimes Mum would stand watching me, rescuing the papers I put in a recycling pile. Turns out I wasn’t practising care or spending time with Mum; I was further wresting control away from her. Eventually I shut the door and left the room only slightly less messy than before.

Growing up, I saw negative media depictions of Asians and migrants and I didn’t want to be lumped into the same category as them. I didn’t want to confront questions of race and belonging. I didn’t want to examine my identity and culture, particularly how I inhabited both a problematic settler culture and the Chinese-Cambodian culture of my family. I was sure that meaning and purpose was not to be found where I came from in western Sydney. When I got older, I longed to be part of the middle-class north shore of the city where my sociology lecturers came from, or the cultured and hip crowd in the inner west, or the white beach-life of Manly. These places seemed to offer possibilities of other worlds where I could finally be other than what I was. People from these places didn’t seem to have deal with questions of belonging and identity.

Perhaps media saturation is making me impatient, irrational – turning an unknown object into a widespread conspiracy. There is always literary non-fiction, literary journalism. Whatever the case, I have less time for commentary, for the assertion of opinion and the confirming of priors, for attempts to circumscribe socio-cultural and political realities. Less time for my own knee-jerk tendencies towards these. At times it all feels so close, so heavy, when there is so much space to look around.

I suppose my ambivalence about scholarship actually comes down to a fear that, not only will I spend my life in scholarly pursuits rather than living it, as if living were an uncomplicated thing one does instinctively and without thought, but that I will spend it, like the protagonist of John Banville’s The Sea, with myself unsaid.

We are the wordsmiths of the world; we spoke seven to ten languages and used long and complex words in all of them to explain long and complex philosophical statements. We should not apologise for being good with words and their use – it is our heritage.

How can we tell the story of places where families with limited means came and went and made a living of sorts, places that act as meeting points between the old and the new, the long established and the newly arrived, where each generation is given the opportunity to understand itself as different from a previous generation and, hence, able to break away?