5 Questions with Shirley Le
Shirley Le is a Vietnamese–Australian writer from Western Sydney. She is a member of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement and holds a BA from Macquarie University.
Her short stories and essays have been published in SBS Voices, Overland, The Guardian, Meanjin and Another Australia.
(Credit: Tyler Aves)
No.1
As far as I know, Funny Ethnics has been in the works since 2018, following a mentorship program offered by Affirm Press and Sweatshop. How did you maintain the momentum over that time period, and what did conceptualising and writing the novel look like for you?
Creating a work like Funny Ethnics had been a goal of mine for about a decade, and I’ve gotten there slowly. It started with contributing shorter pieces of writing, often to Sweatshop anthologies or literary journals. Those were valuable opportunities to build on my writing skills and work with different editors. Over the years, characters like Tammy Tran stuck around. She was always strolling around in the back of my brain, smacking gum. The mentorship gradually solidified the vision of an episodic coming-of-age novel. Along the way, the essays I’ve written on the politics of representation have also helped me flesh out why I wanted to write a book like Funny Ethnics.
How did I maintain the momentum of writing the actual thing over such a big span of time? Truth is, I just wasn’t ready to do the work for many years. I didn’t have the discipline and the drive to take on such a big project. If writing a book is like running a marathon, I kept veering from the track, loitering around the nearest ice-cream truck. Being lactose-intolerant, there’s the negotiation between eating the ice-cream and knowing I have to recover from it later. I wasn’t ready to face myself.
Putting together the first draft took nearly twelve months and I went into it unprepared. After the first few months of doing absolutely nothing, I was confronted with the prospect of another year passing by with no manuscript. This was when I realised that I had to turn up for myself every day. At first, that meant simple things like getting enough sleep, not being hungover and actually getting out of bed. In my 2018 Liminal interview, one of the questions asked was ‘how do you practice self-care?’ Back then, I said self-care meant queuing up at Lord of The Fries for poutine. I didn’t have the faintest clue. Four years later, I have some clues.
2022 was the year I cut the crap. All the stuff that had been holding me back got the Marie Kondo treatment: the limiting self-talk, the b-hhhadddd relationships, the imposter syndrome, the people-pleasing habits, the sedentary lifestyle, the social media diet that was like a punch in the face every time I opened that shit, and so on. Cutting the crap wasn’t easy but for the first time in my life, I took responsibility for my own well-being. I was also there for myself on the days I didn’t make it to the laptop, and on the nights I lay in the dark doubting that I could write the first sentence of a chapter, let alone a book. But I slowly built the discipline and drive to finish the marathon.
Did I ever cut out the hot chips though? No.
No.2
You are a very humorous writer, in that you manage to give usually dull, everyday experiences a certain levity. It’s not easy writing about so-called ‘heavy’ subjects such as race and class with such candour either. How did you grow to develop this style of writing?
Literature is about a play on language and hey, I am down to play. In Vietnamese we call this ‘ham chơi’. Each word, each sentence, the rhythm of the words put together—I love it all. And why did I make the novel funny? Because if I’m going to sit down every evening after work and write, I may as well have a cackle in the dead of the night. To offer you a more literary answer, the use of humour in Funny Ethnics is a political choice. People of colour, ‘ethnics’ in the White Australian mind, have often been ridiculed in popular Australian media. The title Funny Ethnics refers to this marginalisation. In the book, the floodlight of humour is turned away from the supposed ‘funny ethnics’ and back onto so-called Australia. In my personal life, humour has been a salve, a coping mechanism and a way to fight back. A smart mouth is a weapon.
The reason why I chose to focus on the mundanities of everyday life is because it’s a response to my formative years, where I didn’t think I had any ‘interesting stories’ to tell. I thought the Vietnamese experience in Australian literature was limited to a few narratives: the war, the boat journey, the trauma. I assumed that was my place in Australian literature even though I didn’t dodge any bullets and neither was I on the boat with my parents in February 1983. I was so fixated on what I wasn’t that I couldn’t see who I was.
When I joined the Sweatshop Writers’ Collective, I remember hearing the most validating thing from some of the other writers of colour in the workshops—that they also felt like they didn’t have any ‘interesting stories’ to tell. And yet when we asked more questions, we realised that no two houses are the same, no two families are the same and no two arguments between parent and child are quite the same. It’s not so much about ‘what happens’ but more about the perspective through which we view what happened. I believe the key to great storytelling is in articulating the uniqueness of that perspective. As my peers at Sweatshop say, let’s make an original contribution to knowledge, let’s pull words apart and dig deeper.
No.3
Funny Ethnics clearly wants to dismantle the image of the ‘model minority’, which can be rampant in many books by authors of colour. Instead of being a high achiever who keeps their head down and strives for perfection, your protagonist Sylvia wilfully under-performs in many aspects of her life. Can you speak more to this? What were you trying to express?
I wanted to express how all stereotypes—‘positive’ or ‘negative’—are limiting and dehumanising. In the 90s, representations of Vietnamese Australians centred on drug-related criminal activity in Cabramatta. In the same time period, Pauline Hanson’s rise to political power saw the vilification of Asian Australian communities. We were perceived as a threat to the White Australian way of life.
Funny Ethnics is about growing up in that context, but also from seeing the stereotypes shift. In the early 2000s, representations of Asian Australians, particularly those in Sydney, focused on Asian adults’ parenting skills and Asian children’s academic abilities. Asian Australian parents were perceived as ‘tigers’: pushy and brutal in their methods and their children portrayed as compliant and over-achieving but soulless. I wanted to drill into the emotional truth of that experience. For me, it’s about complexity and nuance. That’s what we deserve in our storytelling.
No.4
How do you edit your own work? What happens after you finish a first draft, and when do you know it’s ‘done’?
Editing my own writing has never worked for me. I have used it as an excuse to either censor myself or to stall.
When I catch myself reading the same paragraph over and over or picking at words, sentences, commas and ellipses, I know it’s because I’m not ready to continue writing; I’m not mentally or emotionally ready to keep pushing. That’s when it’s time to hit the off button and do something else: baking a bright green pandan cake, walking to the river, checking on the portly brown rat who lives behind the Band-Aid section inside my local Chemist Warehouse. I need a reset of sorts before getting back to the page.
Because my writing process can be so bloated with procrastination and avoidance, it takes me a long time to finish anything. I know when something is done when the story has reached its conclusion plot-wise, it’s a minute past the deadline and I’m too embarrassed to ask for another extension.
Editing begins once the editor is involved. One of my favourite parts about writing is the dialogue I have in the margins with an editor. I have tremendous respect for any editor I work with and take all of their notes seriously. Shoutout to Ruby Ashby-Orr and Camha Pham who waded through the early iterations of Funny Ethnics. They have been through a lot.
No.5
What is something you wish someone told you when you first started writing fiction?
There are readers who read to confirm what they know and there are readers who read to challenge what they know. As a writer, it’s good to be aware of this but not to be swayed by either opinion. Trust in what holds true to you.
Find out more
Funny Ethnics catapults readers into the sprawling city-within-a-city that is Western Sydney and the world of Sylvia Nguyen: only child of Vietnamese refugee parents, unexceptional student, exceptional self-doubter. It’s a place where migrants from across the world converge, and identity is a slippery, ever-shifting beast.
Jumping through snapshots of Sylvia’s life – from childhood to something resembling adulthood – this novel is about square pegs and round holes, those who belong and those on the fringes. It’s a funhouse mirror held up to modern Australia revealing suburban fortune tellers, train-carriage preachers, crumbling friendships and bad stand-up comedy.
In Funny Ethnics, Shirley Le uses a coming-of-age tale to reveal a side of Australia so ordinary that it’s entirely bizarre.
Get it at Affirm Press here, or at all good bookstores.