Interview #178 — Eugene Yang

by Mell Chun

Eugene Yang is a Chinese-Australian writer, academic and audio maker based in Melbourne/Narrm on Wurundjeri Land. He’s currently an audio producer, and a PhD candidate at RMIT.

His work has been published in Peril, All the Best, The Feed, ABC News, and The Suburban Review. He is a fierce advocate of spicy fried green beans with minced pork.

Eugene Yang spoke to Mell Chun about journalism, a disastrous ABC cadetship and his visions for the future of audio storytelling.

You told me that when you were, in your words ‘an arrogant teen’; you wanted to write fiction, but chose to pursue journalism. What was that about?

The arrogance came from feeling like because my writing was really good for me, it was objectively good, or it was important to somebody else. I can see that arrogance now because I realised the limitations of my perspective, and I want to acknowledge that in my work.

My family is not one of the families that uproot everything, move over, and sacrifice a lot. My dad stayed in Singapore to run what was a successful business, that kept us really afloat and comfortable. Sometimes it makes me feel ‘inauthentic’ because I feel like things have been quite easy for me. Recognising my arrogance is realising that the ability to write and create things is a huge privilege in the first place, and to do it in a self-serving way is not as impactful to me, as sharing that privilege with other people.

Was that the point at which you decided to go into news journalism?

When I started to get into, and I'll use air quotes, ‘journalism’, it was writing memoir, autobiographical stuff that you find online a lot. I had a pretty good run of publications that explored things like racism, identity, dating, relationships with parents and stuff like that. Those were all the big things that I had struggled with growing up. I've personally processed them and for whatever it's worth, I've got money for writing about them.

I think that was a really crucial point because—to be blunt—I felt like the trauma kind of paid itself off for me. After that, I didn't want to keep doing that kind of work because that would have felt disingenuous. I didn't want to follow that memoir narrative into areas that I felt would get published, but didn't actually relate to my life.

So, then I thought—where else can I go? Can I write fiction again? Or is there more room to try and explored journalism in a way that I can work with other people and tell stories from other lives and other communities?

Tell me about your media cadetship with the ABC. It’s a coveted head-start for emerging journalists, but you ended up quitting after six months. Why was that?

I thought, for what I want to do, this is where I want to go. And this is what I can learn. I am—and I was back then—confident in my ability as a writer and storyteller, but it was reporting and working with people that I was really clueless and anxious about.

My first pitch—they were spotlighting two hundred years since the first documented Chinese immigrant into Australia—I said, ‘okay, what about an Indigenous perspective?’ I was interviewing Zhou Xiaoping, a Chinese painter, who had really close friendships with Indigenous painters like Johnny Bulunbulun, and then I interviewed Uncle Jack Charles and Jason Wing. So that article was written up, and it was performing as well as stories produced by full-time journalists.

I also got really into this story about Chongryon, which is a Korean diaspora in Japan, who are described as stateless—but it's more complicated than that—and I was lucky to be able to speak to a person from the Chongryon community. I wrote an article about them, but because I was using references from historical Japanese perspectives, I used a term that is essentially—I don't know if it's equal to like a slur—but it's a very offensive term to them. The person I interviewed was understandably very upset and unhappy with how it turned out, which I recognised as a huge mistake. I was trying to help tell a vulnerable person’s story and amplify them and give them a platform, but instead I used language that invoked violence. I brought this up with my editor, who told me, ‘that's just somebody who's too into their own story.’

And for context, you hadn't studied journalism, and you hadn't been given training in the newsroom? So, you really had no background in the ethics of interviewing?

No, I'd received no training in the newsroom; I’d had none of that run through. It was basically just freelancing in a newsroom.

I remember you saying the newsroom itself felt sort of segregated as well. How did your Asian-Australian identity play into your experience at the ABC?

When I arrived, the first people I met were in the foreign language teams, and I felt like it was a very diverse newsroom. But I realised that there was only one other person of colour in the actual English language news team. Towards the end, when I was having a lot of problems, I kept asking for help; my manager kept saying ‘no, it's fine. Don't worry, you're doing great.’ And then, in one of those conversations, she said, ‘Well, maybe you can go back and help out the Chinese team.’ And I thought, I can't, because I don't know any Mandarin.

I was born in Singapore and I am a Singapore citizen still. So, when I was eighteen, I was supposed to complete national service. But when I was sixteen, seventeen I had barely anything to do with Singapore, I'd only lived there like four or five years and I had a really negative association with Mandarin, because it made me feel so out of place. Being a teenager, the idea of going back to that was horrifying. I didn't do it. And now that means that I still can't go back to Singapore, without meeting a prison sentence or a fine, or both. When I was at the ABC, my dad, who was living in Singapore, was undergoing cancer treatment. I couldn't go back to see him. So, my heart wasn't in it in the first place. You know, I could have managed the family stuff if the job was okay. I could have managed the job if the family was okay. But I couldn't do them both at the same time.

I felt really, really invisible there. And for me, that's a big thing in general that I found about being Asian Australian. I have to be an amplified version of myself just to be noticed. I kept wondering, ‘what am I doing here?’ At the time, I understood that question to be about my inadequacy. I blamed myself for that mistake and my invisibility on my inability to do the job. Now I understand that the question was really about me understanding it wasn’t a safe place for me to be in, let alone learn and work. That escalated into a whole lot of unpleasantness over there and even as I get more closure on the whole experience now, that question still follows me around. Dad did make a full recovery though, which was amazing.

I feel like when you were talking about not joining the army, you were trying to justify it and explain it in a way that was almost like apologetic, so I’m wondering how does that choice play into your Asian-Australian identity now?

That’s a really good point, because it’s changed a lot recently. I don’t regret that decision because I don’t know how that would have impacted me mentally. But I think what I’ve contemplated more recently is how that decision links to the aggressively assimilationist identity I wanted so badly when I was seventeen.

I remember getting my Australian passport and walking around the airport with it and being like fuck yeah, I’m one of these guys now. It brings up a question I’ll really never have an answer to—if I was more connected to my Asian identity at the time—whether that be Singaporean or Chinese—would National Service have weighed so heavily on me? Would I still have been like fuck the army and defaulted anyway, or could I have seen it as a chance to reconnect with that part of me for a couple of years? So that’s a question that I’ve been sitting with a lot lately, which I probably won’t be able to answer. But I think it’s an important one to just sit with because it does remind me of how far I’ve moved; that there are different ways of trying to re-establish that relationship or identity.

How did it all end with the cadetship?

I was trying to find a way to work in a different team, without saying it was because I was unhappy. I said something like, I don't think my interest is really here. You know, I made it about myself. Yeah. And that ended up getting taken very personally by my boss. I feel like it was very much a knee-jerk reaction. Suddenly it went from, ‘you're doing fine, everyone loves you, you're doing great work’, to ‘you're wasting this huge opportunity, I can't believe how ungrateful you're being for it, you're slow, you lack communication skills, and you're low on ideas’. It changed very quickly.

So, I resigned halfway through the cadetship, an opportunity that supposedly everybody fights tooth and nail for, because I didn’t feel safe anymore. And again, to acknowledge my privilege, I was secure enough to do that, and to get myself out of a toxic environment.

So now you’ve come full circle, you’ve started making audio stories for you PhD, and for places like All the Best. Why do audio stories feel important to you at this stage in your career?

One thing that really annoyed me at the ABC was that they always called the articles ‘stories’. And in my head, being somebody who had wanted to be a writer growing up, I was like, these aren't stories, these are articles. These are just facts copied in a pyramid. There's no characters or plot, or anything that invokes feelings. There's a huge difference because there's a place for both. But if you want to engage somebody in something that you think is important—or allow them to empathise with something that felt unrelatable or too abstract before—you need to use a story.

I'm teaching a class as well now. And it's about story and narrative. One thing that's been really uplifting about doing teaching these past couple of months is the degree to which the students use the word storytelling. Especially early on when I was trying to ask them ‘what do you want to learn? What do you want to get out of this?’ and some of them said, ‘I want to develop as a storyteller’. I think that reflects to me that, at least with this slightly younger generation than me, they are acknowledging storytelling as a really valuable skill.

What are you aiming for in the next five years?

So, I want the project of my PhD to have legs when I'm done with it. I’m using my PhD to create a podcast. I want that to be a very simple—but at the same time sadly ground-breaking concept—which is storytelling by people of colour over audio. That's the concept. I just can't reiterate enough how bizarre it is. Those two things are so simple, but as far as I know it doesn't exist.

I’ve done a lot of research into travel writing through my PhD, and how it is a genre of writing that’s kind of tied to the colonial machine, and how it set the standard for writing the world through a white, Eurocentric lens. The criticism around travel writing often considers the idea of a vantage point—where settlers stood on top of hills and mountains to write out the world they saw, and in doing so, erasing or overwriting the culture and history of anyone else on that land.

Challenging that history is kind of the narrative of my PhD and the show I want to make. It’s called The Summit, and I want it to be a vantage point for people of colour to view and share our worlds. And then from that same summit we can feel safe to share it through stories. I want it to be a place that can pay people for their work as well, which would be really valuable.

I think part of what I’m trying to get my head around is journalism and objectivity being a bit crap and being more transparent about the sides you’re taking and the perspective and position of the makers. Basically, journalism as activism—most of it is anyway—just some activism points are invisible because they are so normal in a colonial system. I think I want this show to be something that can connect people to causes more directly though storytelling.

Ibram X. Kendi—in his book How To Be An Antiracist—writes a section about rallies versus protests, and how we conflate protesting with rallies now. But a distinction is that rallies are gatherings of people, more like demonstrations, and protests are more active interventions. I was thinking about how that could apply to journalism as well, if there’s a distinction you can make between media that’s passive and media that’s more direct and more engaged in some way, and where we can sit in that system.

Another discomfort I have being a journalist is the idea of ‘holding power to account’—the debate about whether or not it does that is not for here now—but I think as a really anxious non-confrontational person I cannot ever imagine myself trying to do that to a politician or a person in power in any way.

But I think a power I want to hold to account or challenge is actually cultural power—where it’s about challenging an internalised view that a listener has. I think that is a really significant kind of power that largely goes unquestioned.

So much challenging, personal work that I think people should be doing is let slide in a lot of journalism, often framed as certain powerful individuals and institutions having certain problems. If there’s a broader toxic or dangerous culture at play impacting the story, it’s often too easy for the ‘power’ to be a scapegoat for that culture. For the audience processing that story, it also leaves the individual emotional labour out for them, because maybe they can just see it as someone else’s problem.

I’ve written about myself as an Asian-Australian—and a few other Asian-Australian people I know—having to basically deconstruct and reconstruct myself once I realised how far toxic assimilationist narratives had impacted me when I was younger. It’s a really painful process, and it never really ends. I think a similar emotional labour needs to come from White people, as the problems with their lived and cultural narratives unravel. But I think communicating that and issuing that challenge is really unexplored in journalism.

In your article ‘Why White People Need To Stop Lecturing Me About Racism’ for SBS, you mention that reading James Baldwin was a comfort to you during the BLM protests. Why does Baldwin resonate with you?

If you’re experiencing racism or marginalisation, it’s really easy to just respond with anger. I was reading The Fire Next Time, and what stuck out to me was how Baldwin felt sorry for the people who had been cruel to him. One of the main points—at least how I interpreted it—was that the hatred that he saw Americans placing onto Black people made them a collective scapegoat for America’s problems, their suffering, and the false promises of the city on the hill and the perfect society. As a nation, nothing that they were promised had come true—and it couldn’t have been because they were lied to—it would have had to have been because of someone else. So, resentment and repression finds a target.

I think about Australia the same way as well. There is just so much general unhappiness and lack of promise, loss of meaning, undelivered expectation. It’s always easier to take it out on something or someone else than to reconsider where it’s coming from and why it may be necessarily to reconstruct yourself—whether it’s your individual identity or your family or your town, your culture, your country. I think that’s a lens that is important to me because it relates to journalism holding culture to account. Maybe it does have to be ‘outsiders’ who can point out those problems. It also helps me to not feel angry all the time because I know that any shit I get dealt from someone is just a very toxic kind of coping mechanism for a deep, collective pain in this country.