For Overland, I wrote about how I’m over being the only one in the room, or trying to change things from the inside – and how our media regulations are broken when it’s easier to publish something racist than to call it racist.
Mutual obligation is ritual humiliation
I wrote a quick opinion piece for The Guardian about going on the dole and navigating the confusing, punitive mutual obligations system. Shout out to the Australian Unemployed Workers Union, who have been a huge support in this time and one of few groups consistently advocating to raise the rate and suspend mutual obligations.
Yellow peril isn’t what it used to be
My Meanjin piece from the Summer 2019 issue is now online if you’re interested. It’s a review of The Chinawoman, a book about a white woman sex worker who was murdered in 1856 Melbourne, and it’s also a reflection on Chinese-Australian history, Aboriginal deaths in custody today, who is worthy of protection, who is disposable, and how that’s shifted.
The Baby-Sitters Club: the perfect PG escape for millennials and their kids – or anyone, really
Ann M Martin’s series was a staple of my childhood and luckily the Netflix reboot is excellent. I wrote about it for The Guardian.
Still life
Earlier this month I was one of several artists-in-residence for Assembly for the Future, an incredible project that saw visionaries like Claire G Coleman, Scott Ludlam and Alice Wong address us from the end of this decade, and other respondents and participants theorise how to get there. Here’s my creative response, a poem remembering 2020 from 2029, available below in both audio and text (best viewed on desktop, tablet, or phone in landscape mode).
You’ll find all the provocations, artworks, and dispatches from the future on the BLEED festival website and the Things We Did Next website.
Continue reading “Still life”Genderfeels in nomads’ land
In urban, western settings, I’m usually read as a woman, albeit a queer sort. In the country, I more often pass as a boy. There’s a tangy pleasure in that, in being called sir and shuaige and brother.
As a genderfluid, nonbinary person, being clocked as one thing in the morning and another in the afternoon feels like the closest I will get to recognition. This havoc can be a delight, but also a complication. A liability.
Jinghua Qian, Genderfeels in nomads’ land, Them
My essay on traveling through Central Asia as a nonbinary person is out today in Them, edited by none other than Meredith Talusan, a writer I’ve been following for years. I’m so thrilled with this one – go read it now!
Chinatown Melbourne is a one-way street that took a turn
‘Between Australia’s hunger to spin its immigrant communities into a simple, palatable narrative, and the PRC government’s mission to absorb the accomplishments of overseas Chinese into its own national history, the richness and complexity of Chinese Australian life can get lost.’
Read my feature on Chinatown and Melbourne’s Chinese communities in Culture Trip.
On immortality and kindness
‘Sinophobia never went away in Australia. Colonisation never ended. Racists might sometimes shift their focus but it’s the same lens. Maybe now it’s our turn in the crosshairs again. But we’re in all the water, treading furiously while trying to turn off the tap, here, there, and everywhere.’
In April, Emma Thomson from Correspondences asked me to be part of a project reflecting on escalating racism against Asian Australians and the themes of Lisel Mueller’s poem, ‘Immortality’. I said yes and I wrote these reflections in May and June. Now they feel like time capsules as every month of this year introduces another world entirely. You can read or listen to my pieces at the link above or visit the viewing room for the whole project here, which includes work by Kuang Zai, Selina Lo, Eileen Chong, and Ouyang Yu.
It doesn’t work like that
‘Artists are in a constant state of precarity and crisis. For many of us, there’s nothing to return to, nothing to recover. The status quo is already broken. It’s an empty bowl – with a smear of racism, sexism and ableism to boot.’
I wrote about unemployment and the pandemic for the Victorian Council of Social Service’s #MyCorona series.
Sex, life: The fundamental queerness of ‘Vida’
‘Neither sex nor solidarity is automatic. It doesn’t just emanate, naturally, from the body.’
I’m in The Monthly today with a piece about sex on screen in Tanya Saracho’s series Vida.
Jinghua Qian 