“Being who I am, namely Australian Chinese and female—two distinct drawbacks in mid-20th-century Australia, especially in the small apple isle of Tasmania—I grew up totally outside the norm in white assimilationist Australia, when those with non-Anglo-Celtic backgrounds were expected to merge with the majority and forget their own cultural backgrounds.” 

“Writers seem to come into their literary prime, so to speak, later than other artists because it can take time and long years of lived experience to create something fresh and moving on the page.”

“Art is expressed in so many different ways and forms—you’re wearing a piece of art when you’re wearing my silk, but I see it as more of a design that’s made from pieces of art.”

“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.”

“So much of what we live is complicated or conflicted, and based in feeling, and not in words. Language allows us to get very close to saying what we mean, but to me it always falls just short.”

“This is why I always urge emerging writers to enter as many competitions as they can. I think competitions are a great entryway into the industry.”

“I think oftentimes … small details can be overshadowed when not openly discussed.”

“Neoliberalism has generalised this tendency by accentuating the ideology of ‘new beginnings’, and thus the self-made social subject that goes hand in hand with it: someone with brilliant ideas that come to them as if from nowhere and who is always ready to initiate something original and ‘revolutionary’.”

“… once people started talking in that type of us-vs-them language, I understood that I was always going to be one of ‘them’.”

“Be critical—of your own work and others’ work. ‘En vogue’ isn’t a synonym for ‘good’.”

“The fact that my parents were refugees—who took enormous risks and sacrificed so much—made me feel as though I have no excuses. […] Given that I’ve had a relatively comfortable life, I should be willing to take risks. The least I can do is pursue the things that I want to pursue.”

“There was never really a moment when I realised I ‘could’ do it; I just did the thing because it was survival and I didn't feel like I had much of a choice.”

“For me, the role of the artist in the political conversation is to challenge and test the limits of ideology…”

“I used to worry about managing or balancing all the things I’m interested in… Creativity takes time; ideas take time.”

‘Just like music, writing can help give a rhythm to things that are difficult to quantify and measure.’

“In summary, I do the best I can. And the best I can is sometimes ‘not too bad’, sometimes ‘not much’, and sometimes ‘nothing’.”

“If our picture of Australia is as diverse as the reality, then that will stop this delusion people have about us being a ‘white’ country. It's a wake-up call that is long overdue.”

“There’s often pressure from publishing to tell a particular kind of Asian or immigrant story, but I wanted to show an ambivalence to the specific culture I came out of. In some respects I'm proud of it, and in others, it stifled who I actually was. How do we sit with that?”