Where did the idea for Growing up Asian in Australia come from—whose was it and how did you come to be involved?

My editor at Black Inc, Chris Feik, emailed me this wonderful idea, and from there we brainstormed the scope parameters of the anthology. We concentrated on the period of ‘growing up’—because that’s the period where most of life’s ‘firsts’  happen—and also we wanted the definition of Asian-Australian to be as diverse and inclusive as possible.

What was your criteria for selecting these works/authors?

I selected pieces that reflected a broad range of Asian-Australian experience, so we have stories from Jenny Kee about her adolescent awakening, to Tony Ayres about blowing a kiss to a racist skinhead, from Khoa Do changing the life of young disadvantaged Australians through his mentoring, to Ivy Tseng, a high school student who wrote about her experiences learning Chinese from her dad. We have stories of new arrivals and family departures. I wanted this anthology to encompass as much diversity of experience and insight as possible.

In reading these works, did any common themes emerge and if so what were they? Or were you surprised at the variety of experience?

The pieces in this anthology—like Asian- Australians—are so diverse, and the beauty of this book is that it shatters all stereotypes people may have had about Asian-Australians. We have eminent Asian-Australians like Melbourne Lord Mayor John So revealing that he came to Australia to follow the footsteps of the Chinese Nobel Physics Prize winners, to stories about Asian-Australians surviving different types of racial-orientated bullying throughout the decades, from Asian-Australians ‘coming out’ to their parents to the experiences of Joy Hopwood, the first Asian presenter on Play School—and everything in between. What moved me was the resilience of our writers, their creativity and insight— sometimes against severe racism, personal illness, familial pressure and pressure from society to conform.

Did you notice any differences in the experiences of writers of different ages/growing up in different eras?

We have writers like Kylie Kwong and Ken Chau whose ancestors came from the gold rush days in the 1860s and lived through the White Australia Policy, to more recent arrivals who lived under the era of Multiculturalism. We have writers who are Eurasian, adopted, and migrants. Our younger contributors have a wonderful freshness of voice, but I was also especially honoured to have stories from Asian-Australians from different, older generations, because they could reflect back
on their growing-up years with the wisdom of experience. We also have quite a few stories about how different generations dealt with their parents, and I only wish I had the insight in this book when I was growing up!

Your own memoir has been extremely popular and has certainly whetted Australians’ appetites for greater insight into the subject of this collection—‘growing up Asian in Australia.’ What did you read growing up, was there any writing that you identified with by Asian-Australians?

My reading was never censored when I was growing up—mainly because my mother could not read. So I read a lot of young-adult fiction that was perhaps the literary equivalent of Neighbours—for example, Dolly fiction— and which gave me the idea that I probably needed extensive plastic surgery. So I stopped reading them and turned to John Marsden and Robert Cormier instead. I found their books so honest and raw in their intensity. I don’t recall reading many Asian-Australian authors, but I do remember loving the ‘Babysitters Club’ series because one of the characters, Claudia Kishi, was Asian-American, good at art and bad at maths!

In editing this collection, did you have a particular audience in mind?

Although this collection is titled Growing up Asian in Australia, I wanted to bring out the common humanity of our authors, so that any reader could pick up the book and be amused, amazed, moved and heartened. There is often the stereotype of Asian-Australians as the ‘model minority’ (and before that, we were considered the Yellow Peril). What this anthology
aims to do is dismount all these stereotypes and show the incredible diversity of experience of our lives, the humour and insight, the struggles and achievements—these stories should be very much part of the Australian narrative, because they are
also very Australian stories.

This article from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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