Interview #220 — Kim Ho

by Claudia Young

Kim Ho is a playwright and screenwriter whose work explores genre subversion, magic realism, and stories of cross-cultural encounter. They have written on The Newsreader and NCIS: Sydney, as well as several award-winning plays.

Kim is currently developing two theatre commissions and an original series with SBS. They are a passionate advocate of marginalised voices.

Kim spoke to Claudia about their first short film about Asian masculinity, the enduring trauma around Chris Lilley, and the weight of it all.

Your 2013 short film The Language of Love got a lot of attention online and was your first big foray into the screenwriting industry. A decade (!) on, what does it mean to you now and how have your feelings about it changed?

That little film changed my life! The experience of having the trust and resources of a major theatre company (Australian Theatre for Young People)—as well as the support of an amazing team of mentor-collaborators—gave me the confidence to seriously pursue a career in dramatic writing. It set me on the path I’m following now. It was a really formative and transformative experience.

I wrote The Language of Love before I’d had any formal writing training, and in some ways it’s still the most emotionally grounded and honest piece of writing I’ve produced. I’m quite a cerebral writer: tending to focus on themes and ideas first, rather than characters and emotions. Thinking back to that short, and the clear connection between its simplicity and warm reception, I’m reminded to allow myself to lead with heart over head.

I love playwriting because unless (or even after) you publish a manuscript, it remains mutable—there’s a comfort in knowing it’s unfinished. But with LOL, there’s not much I’d change about it. When it came out I used to joke that I’d peaked at seventeen, and part of me still feels that way …

You [also] starred in The Language of Love. Would you ever return to acting?

I had originally planned to become an actor, not a writer. But I came to the realisation that I’m too self-conscious to be a Proper Actor™—too aware of and uncomfortable with being perceived. As I’ve progressed [in my career] I began to find the actor’s process increasingly tedious, and the writer’s process increasingly beguiling. I’d maybe perform again in something just for fun, entirely separate from ‘my career’. I really love broad comedy, which I guess requires awareness of the audience for comedic timing.

We’re both half-Asian and have spoken before about how it’s somewhat rare for our Asian parent to be our dads. How do you think this has informed your relationship to masculinity, especially as an enby?

Masculinity has never sat comfortably with me. I remember feeling a sense of inferiority to white classmates at high school; an internalised racism that was hard to unlearn. When I started questioning my gender identity, I was held back for the longest time by a perceived obligation to embody a healthy, proud Asian masculinity: how dare I experiment with more femme presentation when Asian men have been ‘feminised’ and degraded in the West? I see now, of course, how unfair a burden that is to place on myself, and I’ve learnt to let it go. My dad is quite a stubborn man, incapable (as he keeps reminding me) of being anyone but himself, in ways that I find alternately inspiring and infuriating. I suppose he laid a blueprint for me, in that regard.

I can definitely relate to having a stubborn father. I often wonder about my dad’s experiences with racism growing up in 1970s Brisbane and how his perception of what he experienced is radically different to my perception of those stories; what he sees as a funny anecdote I see as an example of gross racism and I often wonder if the generation before us (both in terms of their age and their being first-gen immigrants) had to adopt an individualistic neoliberal mindset which deflected racism in order to just survive. Does this ring true to you? And how do you square your dad’s lived experiences with your own?

My dad, like so many other immigrants to Australia, worked incredibly hard and endured great hardship to achieve financial security. Fairness is really important to him (though I’d say we sometimes have very different conceptions of what’s ‘fair’), as is fitting in and not rocking the boat. Like your dad, he’s told me stories of far worse racism than I’ve ever experienced, but often treating it as ‘water off a duck’s back’. That’s something he often criticises me for: I’m ‘too thin-skinned’, I need to learn to let things go. I’ve always seen myself as so sensitive and soft, especially compared to him (which is partly why my gender identity doesn’t necessarily shock people when I tell them). But recently I’ve been wondering if we aren’t actually similarly sensitive people, except that his lived experiences have forced him to develop these coping mechanisms, a [kind of] teflon coating.

You’ve been very outspoken about the importance of diversity both on-screen and behind the scenes in TV and film. Did you have a formative experience of first recognising yourself in the media that influenced your perspective on this?

I joke that Chris Lilley as Ricky Wong in We Can Be Heroes was the first time I saw myself represented on Australian television, but it’s not really a joke. It’s true. The experience of loving that show as a kid—Lilley’s early work did have a great deal of heart—then slowly developing the political language and awareness with which to critically appraise it, was profoundly galling. As Lilley kept portraying Black, Asian, Pasifika and disabled characters, it became increasingly clear the joke was never on prejudiced or bigoted people; the joke was on us. That betrayal was worse than outright racism. Though I’m sure hearing Monty Python’s song ‘I Like Chinese’ as a kid did deep psychological damage too.

But my advocacy around increasing representation [in media] goes deeper than counting how many people of X background are featured in a given show. Working in telly, it’s astonishing how much writers’ rooms feel like the engine rooms of cultural production—whose stories we [decide to] tell determines whose humanity we value. I think the centrality of cis straight white characters in our major narratives facilitates a grave dearth of empathy in this colony.

You’re currently working on two yet-to-be-announced works with climate themes. How have you found tackling that subject matter?

During those early months of pandemic lockdown, when the world ground to a halt, those images of dolphins returning to the canals of Venice, elephants moving into townships etc., became etched in my memory. Even though the ‘nature is healing!’ narrative was inaccurate and problematic, and of course came at a time of great pain and suffering, I believe that this ‘Anthropause’ made it easier for the average person to imagine another world less impacted by humans. That was what sparked my interest in trying to tackle the climate emergency in my work.

I’m very wary of climate fiction—or rather, how slippery climate crisis is as subject matter in fiction. As soon as audiences get a whiff of the ‘We should do something, everyone!’ rhetoric, they switch off. The climate crisis is just such a massive, decentralised and amorphous problem, and humans are so good at mental gymnastics that it’s incredibly difficult to curate a space to honestly confront this problem. Equally alarming for me as a writer is Amitav Ghosh’s argument in The Great Derangement: that the way we tell stories—especially in novels—is fundamentally ill-suited to portraying the realities of climate change. Have a cyclone tear through your protagonist’s town, for instance, and it would almost certainly be dismissed as ‘unbelievable’.

[So] for all these reasons, I’m more interested in exploring the emotions that climate crisis engenders in us—for example, what it feels like to be alive at this make-or-break moment in human history—than treating my work as some kind of call to arms. I’ve found myself using genre to explore climate from more oblique angles, and abstracting notions of hope, resilience, pain, healing, loss that are far easier for audiences to grab onto and thus consider.

Beyond climate catastrophe, a lot of your writing deals with some pretty heavy themes and topics: from reckoning with Australia’s colonial legacy to the AIDS epidemic to the Hoddle Street massacre. On top of that, we seem to be living through an especially dark time as we helplessly witness a genocide [happening on our screens]. How do you cope with the weight of it all?

Honestly, I really struggle to cope with this weight. I don’t feel like I have enough resilience in that regard.

When I was studying, one of my favourite mentors insisted that forcing ourselves to make capital-I Important work is too much pressure to put on ourselves as writers, which may also risk your work becoming intolerably didactic. But for the life of me I cannot unshackle myself from that responsibility—the belief that every work has to be, if not Important, then [at least] useful. Like, I have rationalised writing horror by saying that in an increasingly frightening world, creating safe and cathartic fear experiences is a kind of public service. It can’t just be because I dig horror and I want to explore the genre. Writing is how I process and try to understand the world, so it often feels like a productive outlet through which I might channel my anger and overwhelm—though that in turn stokes my worst workaholic tendencies.

In my climate projects, I’ve been trying to cultivate a hope for our future that’s grounded not in naïve optimism, but a belief in humans’ capacity towards changing for the better. But that kind of hope is sorely tested whenever I read distressing news stories of humans at their worst. My despair at the genocide of Palestinians, the global rise in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, our colony’s rejection of the most innocuously-worded referendum on Indigenous self-determination, were all compounded by and fed my climate depression.

Writing on The Newsreader was a double-edged sword in terms of this weight. Season 1 came out during the lockdown in Melbourne, and I think it was quite reassuring to see characters in 1986 going through ‘unprecedented times’—even as the episode focusing on the AIDS epidemic brought traumatic resonances of disease and its politicisation. My Season 2 episode on the Hoddle Street massacre also brought some degree of relief that Australian gun control had brought an end to mass shootings here—although of course tragically not in the US.

On the other hand, it’s been incredibly demoralising seeing how little progress we’ve made on other fronts. Season 2 built towards the 1988 Bicentennial celebrations and the massive corresponding protests, and those episodes aired in the lead-up to the Voice referendum. It was crushing to see that we are still debating the same talking points—and in fact, it even seems we’ve regressed—some thirty-odd years later. [As such] I found that comparison of past and present quite hard to bear.

Do you have any advice for emerging screenwriters/playwrights?

‘Writing’ is a really unhelpful word for what we do. Sitting at my desk typing dialogue into Final Draft constitutes a regrettably small percentage of my day-to-day work. [I’d say] ‘Story design’ is more appropriate, and that encompasses writers’ rooms, development workshops, brainstorming on the back of an envelope, exploratory and targeted research, journalling, creating playlists, daydreaming in the shower, going for a long walk, people-watching, etc. I suspect a lot of people who struggle with writer’s block are going straight into drafting before they’ve built enough narrative infrastructure to help guide them.

That holistic conception of writing makes it really hard to keep a healthy boundary between work and life. I think it’s vital that artists identify what’s important to them outside of professional achievement in order to have a chance at building a sustainable career. (Although this is a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ scenario; I’ve been grappling toward better balance for years.)

If you ever feel that you can’t switch off from work when watching cinema/TV/theatre, I’ve found it’s super useful to engage with media that aren’t your chosen form. Go to art galleries, read poetry, prose fiction and non-fiction, play video games. I suspect it allows for artistic cross-pollination, but obliquely enough that it still feels like leisure.

Who inspires you?

The author/filmmaker/activist/academic Toni Cade Bambara had this amazing provocation: ‘The role of art is to make revolution irresistible’. I think about that quote probably more than any other. Correspondingly, I really admire artists who galvanise their anger and pain into a fierce clarity of vision. People whose work is inextricable from their politic, and/or who have cultivated creative and activist branches of their practice which mutually nourish one another. Meyne Wyatt, Nakkiah Lui, Bobuq Sayed, Toa Fraser, Roseanne Liang, Carmen Maria Machado, Jordan Peele and Arundhati Roy immediately come to mind. Reading Robin Wall Kimmerer for the first time felt like shedding blinkers I never knew I had.

Craft-wise I’m really inspired by Joe Barton’s body of work—each of his films or series (Giri/Haji, The Bastard Son and the Devil Himself, The Lazarus Project, The Ritual) plumbs a different genre, subverting them in fresh, twisted and urgent ways.

What have you been listening to/reading?

I can’t write while listening to anything that has lyrics in English, so I’ve been playing a lot of soundtracks and ambient albums. Scores for Arrival, Prey, Andor, Foundation, Princess Mononoke. I’ve also been enjoying Empress Of and Georgia Lines.

I’m a very chaotic (and slow) reader so I usually have like 800 things going at once. I’m reading Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night (magic realist horror set in Argentina under dictatorship), George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (also magic realism), my friend Alli Parker’s beautiful historical novel At the Foot of the Cherry Tree. I’m also struggling through [Edward] Said’s Orientalism. It’s a cliché to talk about a work’s ‘enduring power’ but perhaps the painful relevance of his writing speaks just as much to the enduring power of western colonialism. In the context of the dehumanisation of Arabs and Muslims—this month, this century—his argument that ‘Orientalism and modern anti-Semitism share common roots’ is as mind-blowing as it is heartbreaking.

How do you practise self-care?

Don’t attack me like this!!! As you know, I’m really bad at self-care. Right now my hobby is buying books I’m excited to read one day ... at some future time when I have oodles of time. Maybe in retirement. I live down the road from a Book Grocer so I’m forever getting like $10 Elena Ferrantes, then waiting years to read them …

I can totally relate to buying books being a self-soothing mechanism, but I wonder what about it is self-care to you? Is it the process of wandering around bookshops that you enjoy or is it the latent potential an unread book holds that is inspiring?

If I dig deeper into it, I will step into my two local bookshops each time I pass by them (without fail, even if I know they have no new stock) in a way I won’t with my local library. Knowing there’s a loan window stresses me out. I also seldom buy a book that I begin immediately. I suppose the pleasure of browsing is about selecting one for Future Kim’s enjoyment. This is going to sound so tragic but I wonder if it’s also about entertaining the fantasy of a well-balanced life, one in which I’d have time to read as widely and prodigiously as I’d like to.

What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?

My experience of Asian identity in this country has been so dominated by the accumulation of a million little humiliations, degradations, moments of awareness of Otherness. From the time I saw my friend in kindergarten pull the skin of his temples back and loudly proclaim ‘I have Chinese eyes!’ to the delight of our class, to being mistaken for waitstaff at my friend’s wedding last month, even though the staff and I were dressed nothing alike. The time my Year 9 English teacher marked down my short story, an autobiographical piece about my father, for ‘lacking verisimilitude’.

What you say about the accumulation of humiliations and degradations reminds me of what Cathy Park Hong refers to as ‘minor feelings’. Even though her book is on the Asian-American experience, did her book resonate with you?

For sure! I read Minor Feelings alone in a hotel room while interstate on a weeks-long work trip. It was such a privately affirming, intimate and—heh—liminal experience. The way Hong writes about racialised emotions made me think of a dynamic contextually distinct, though structurally comparable, to [W.E.B.] Du Bois’ notion of double consciousness. To be Asian in the west is to be invited (pressured, forced) to see oneself as you are seen: small.

I’m very conscious, though, that my experience is contingent on class. I went to a private school and grew up very comfortably middle-class. Despite moments throughout my life of being made to feel outside or less than, I was still encouraged to succeed within the hegemony of whiteness, and equipped with resources and support to do so. I can’t stop thinking about how casually Australia has come to accept a kind of racialised subclass of people: it feels weird when our Uber driver’s white, for example, and we’re subconsciously more comfortable with Asian servers (I say ‘we’ because I think these insidious forms of racism affect affluent people of colour too.) I’d like to think that my ‘minor feelings’ outweigh the lure of assimilation—that my identity has instilled in me a lifelong allegiance to the subaltern.