writer & thinker
I have a little piece titled ‘In praise of laziness (portrait of my grandma in the frozen section)’ in a new limited edition publication called Feast of Resistance. Curated by Priya Pavri, with contributions from artists Moorina Bonini, Aida Azin, Lara Chamas, Sancintya Mohini Simpson, Shamen Suku and Nikki Lam, it’s launching this Saturday at Seventh Gallery.
Liminal Vol. II is sickening in chartreuse with 200 pages of Asian Australian excellence across art, writing & conversations. And it features my first collage: six pages of archival treasures and commentary on Chinatown from the 1800s to the 1980s. Buy it here.
In case you missed it, my poem ‘Still life’ appears in Best of Australian Poems 2021, the Australian Poetry anthology edited by Ellen van Neerven and Toby Fitch. Ask for it at your local bookstore or library or order it online.
For The Guardian, I wrote about the migrant workers behind the ‘made in Australia’ label and how their winning campaign for equal rights might be instructive for other gig economy workers today.
I talked to Emma Do and Kim Lam, the writer and illustrator of Working From Home, a graphic narrative about Vietnamese outworkers in the garment industry, and Nguyet Nguyen and Beth McPherson, veteran manufacturing workers and organisers in the textile, clothing and footwear union.
‘The novel toys with the frame of a feminist revenge fantasy but Yannie makes an atypical heroine. Her rage is not sexy or witty or glamorous. It’s curdled resentment, sour and hard, obsessive and cracked.’
Read the rest of my review of SL Lim’s Revenge in The Saturday Paper today.
Jinghua Qian 