5 Questions with Yen-Rong Wong
Yen-Rong Wong is an arts critic and award-winning writer working between Yugambeh and Jagera and Turrbal lands.
She won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer in 2022, and the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award in 2020. She has been a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk fellow and writer-in-residence at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre. She is a frequent contributor to The Saturday Paper as a theatre critic, and her work has appeared in many print and online publications, including The Guardian, Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin, and Griffith Review.
Me, Her, Us is her debut book of non-fiction.
No.1
The book’s sentiment is established firmly in the first sentence of your Author’s Note:
‘It is upsetting and shocking (though not surprising) that very little work about sex and relationships from the perspective of an Asian Australian woman has been published in Australia’.
One can see that Me, Her, Us was conceived as a result of this dearth. In your point of view, why do you think this is the case?
I think Australia has been quite a socially conservative country for a while—we’ve been slow(er) to acknowledge that openly talking about sex and relationships is beneficial and not a reflection of immorality. Add to that the conservatism inherent in many Asian cultures and that gets you a smaller pool of women to begin with.
However, I think the bigger issue is that many of the gatekeepers in Australian publishing have been (and still are) white, and had something specific in mind when they were thinking of the ‘Asian narrative’. This meant that anything that didn’t fit into this narrative wouldn’t be commercial enough, that it’d be too risky. I think the increasing number of small and indie presses in Australia is helping to turn this tide, and I hope this book can be part of it too.
No.2
Much writing by second-generation Australians expresses a certain ‘in-between’, of having to toe the line between ‘private’ and ‘public’: the culture at home and with family, and the wider society in which the person moves around in. Often there is a disconnect. What do you think your book does in bridging this, if at all?
For me, bridging this disconnection looks like learning how the two can coexist and build on each other to make me a better, more rounded person. I hope that doesn’t sound too cheesy!
In terms of what I hope the book can do, I hope it reaches people who were or are in my situation to know they’re not the only ones who experience these feelings—that it’s okay to be confused, resentful or angry. I also want to bring [these experiences] to the fore for those people who don’t or haven’t come up against them, because I know how tricky it can be to articulate to partners and friends.
No.3
Many years in the making, Me, Her, Us is a very vulnerable essay collection, yet fierce in the way it asserts the self as well. As you were writing the book, what did you discover about the ways vulnerability functions within writing?
When I first started writing, I often unconsciously conflated being vulnerable with revealing everything about myself, and one of the most important things I’ve learned through this journey is that I don’t have to do that to get people to listen or care. It’s okay to leave some things for yourself and by doing so you’re not making the writing ‘worse’; in some cases, it’s an act of self care.
No.4
Many life writers grapple with this: what is it like to write about the people in your life? Do you tell them? Do you care to?
It’s always fraught when you make a conscious decision to write about real people. I don’t want to misrepresent anyone or anything, but at the same time, I don’t think writing with the taste of fear in the back of your mouth necessarily leads to good work, either. I find it easier to write first and then pare back afterwards—it’s part of my reviewing and editing process.
When it comes to this book, it is, in part, a way for me to express feelings and thoughts to my parents that I couldn’t when I was a child, or would find exceedingly difficult to do now as an adult. In that vein—and for this book—I haven’t checked with them or really told them about it. When it comes to many others, particularly those who are still in my life, it’s a careful consideration of how much I think they’d be happy about me revealing about themselves, and then letting them read and veto anything before it goes to publication.
No.5
What buoyed you while you were writing Me, Her, Us? And what books (or other forms of art) did you turn to for comfort?
The unwavering support from my Brisbane writing family, everyone who said the book sounded interesting and that they’d read it when it was finished, my cats, knitting unnecessarily complicated jumper designs.
In terms of art, Larissa Pham’s Fantasian, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Lang Lang’s Dragon Songs, anything released by Sheku Kanneh-Mason.
(Credit: Declan Roache)
Find out more
Raised by strict, religious, Malaysian Chinese parents in Brisbane’s southern suburbs, Yen-Rong Wong internalised an idealised image of a Chinese-presenting girl at a young age. As she grew into young adulthood, she began to bristle against the weight of these expectations and the pressure to conform to cultural notions of family and future.
However, she couldn’t find any stories to help her forge her own path—so she decided to write one for herself. In this compelling collection of essays, Wong blends memoir and cultural criticism to interrogate perceptions around sex, racism, and familial dynamics. Laying bare her own life, she examines the joys and difficulties that lie at the intersections of her identity.
Brave, unflinching, and with a dash of wry humour, Me, Her, Us is a provocative book for our times.
Get it from UQP here.