Interview #198 — Lian Low
by Jinghua Qian
Lian Low writes across spoken word, fiction and creative non-fiction. For many years, she was at the heart and helm of Peril, a magazine of Asian Australian arts, culture and writing that was founded in 2006.
She was one of the inaugural recipients of The Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter scheme, mentored by Rebecca Lim. She’s also famous for orchestrating her first kiss in a short film project.
Lian spoke to Jinghua Qian about the queer, the monstrous, and the last thirty years of Asian Australian arts and culture.
What are you working on right now?
I’m cobbling away at a novel that is a paranormal romantic twist on a migrant coming-of-age story that traverses Footscray and a fictional town in Malaysia. In the work, I interrogate presumptions about queers being a ‘perversion of nature’, reworking Malaysian folklore on pontianak (vampire is close but not the best translation of this femme monster). The shape of it keeps changing—I want it to have this beautiful intergenerational community vibe that is in Alice Wu’s Saving Face but the aesthetic is a cross between Marjorie Liu’s Monstress, Miyazaki’s Spirited Away and the Revenge of the Pontianak. I watched Revenge of the Pontianak in a cinema in Kuala Lumpur in 2019 and I don’t think I was the only one crying at the end.
I grew up hearing pontianak ghost stories and I think these monstrous spirits are representative of those who have experienced harm, who are marginalised and discriminated against due to not fitting into society’s status quo. The novel-in-progress was part of the Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter scheme, where Rebecca Lim was a mentor. I’m also working on a couple of short stories that grapple with horror and grief using a magical realist/speculative fiction framework.
That sounds really amazing. What’s attracted you to horror and paranormal romance?
I want to find a way to tell a story of hope. Hope sounds contradictory, doesn’t it when paired with horror and paranormal romance? But because everything is so bleak, I want to find a way in to deal with monstrous themes but work with a transformative story. Also, Malaysians love horror stories! When I watched Revenge of the Pontianak, there were probably three other horror movies playing in mainstream cinema at the same time.
Growing up in the 80s in Malaysia, there was a weeknight US series on TV called Beauty and the Beast: a love story between a monster who belonged to an underground community of homeless human outcasts, and a beautiful woman. In a way, it was the perfect type of acceptable Western love story, because Malaysian censors didn’t have to work too hard to snip out any tongue kisses, because there weren’t any. There was only mournful and lustful eye gazing, a lot of dreamy shots overlooking a balcony from a city high-rise, and unconsummated love. I identified strongly with the Beast, because I related to this idea that love would not be possible for me. It saddens me to reflect on how as a young person, I believed that love would always be unrequited. However, the sad truth is that for a lot of queer people, young and old, that’s still very real, very current. Ironically, a few years ago, there was controversy around Disney’s live action Beauty and the Beast film. Malaysian censors wanted to snip out a 4-minute ‘gay moment’ but the Disney filmmaker disagreed, and it was only after the tourism minister stepped in to say that the ban was ‘ridiculous’ and much public outcry that it was eventually screened without censorship.
I often wonder, what would it be like if my family hadn’t migrated to Australia? Here in Melbourne, I’ve worked in occupations where being openly queer doesn’t matter; in fact, I’ve worked in jobs where being queer was beneficial for the role. In one role I was able to deepen my understanding around state and federal legislation, rights and discrimination. But I feel this contradiction, this paradox strongly—for example, in my mother’s birthplace in Terengganu, two queer Muslim women were caned in public for the first time a few years ago. To my knowledge, there had never been a public caning against the queer community in Malaysia prior to this event. It was not only humiliating for the two women, but also a collective public humiliation that reinforced the stigma, shame and discrimination against Malaysia’s queer communities. Finding a way to tell a story of this paradox is the weight of the work for me.
Authors often talk about the divide between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction— is that something you’ve experienced?
A few years ago for the OzAsia festival, I was invited to host a contemporary fiction panel featuring Julie Koh, Dorothy Tse and Jingfang Hao.
I recall Dorothy Tse reflecting that there’s a perception in the West that Asian writers are expected to write about identity, or about place. However, she believes that to really gain insight into another culture, readers can’t just read ‘realistic stories’ but also need to read stories through their form. This insight resonates deeply with me, because in terms of my current work, I don’t see a divide between literary and genre. Writing spec fic and horror connects me to a sense of who I am, my roots and psyche where the world of the real and the world of the unreal isn’t so binary. However, I am still emerging as a fiction writer, I’m still finding my voice, and finding the best form to express the story in.
How has the mentorship process been for you? You’ve sort of been on both sides.
I asked for Rebecca Lim as a mentor because I loved her paranormal novel Afterlight, and also she has authored over 20 books! Bec is a generous mentor, who has an incredible amount of knowledge and experience in the young adult and children’s writing and publishing industry. One of the great outcomes of working with Bec is that I have a finished full draft manuscript. However, it feels like it’s just the beginning, because it’s an incredible amount of labour, and I think as creative people we tend to forget that just because we love doing something so much, once we’ve gone through that producing/writing process, we need a break to recharge. I feel a bit of relief that I’ve shifted focus to working on short stories now and I think the work that I’ve done with Bec has also helped me build confidence in writing fiction.
In my year of the mentorship, the Wheeler Centre was so generous with what they could offer, but keeping in mind too that this was prior to the pandemic. On top of the prize money and the actual formal mentorship, mentees could also ask for professional development workshops and books. We were flown to Varuna for a residency, and then again to the Sydney Writers Festival. To future mentees, don’t be afraid or shy to ask the Wheeler Centre for help, show up for yourself, keep on asking for help, and if something can’t be provided, I’m sure an alternative can be set up. I really felt that the Wheeler Centre were trying their very best to have all the mentees’ interests at heart, and to ensure that we achieved whatever goals we set out to achieve.
In terms of being on the other side of the mentorship process as a mentor, and reflecting on my roles with Peril, it is about believing in someone, giving them a foot in the publishing door. As a collective voice, it’s about community capacity building, about having a seat at the industry table and being an active and critical contributor to Australian arts, culture and literary conversations. I arrived into an incredible community set up by Hoa Pham, Tseen Khoo and Tom Cho. I loved that I could work with artist-editors like Owen Leong and Nikki Lam. I left Peril just as Mindy Gill arrived as editor, and it’s so amazing to see what Mindy brought to the publication, supported by Eleanor Jackson’s creative labour and vision that has sustained the publication over the past few years. And supporting their work is the team of incredible people behind them, including yourself.
We both arrived in Australia in 1991. Looking back over the last 30 years, what’s changed? For you, for the arts, for the communities you’re part of, and for the country. Sorry, it’s a big question!
I view 1991 as the year when Australia still held a legal fiction of terra nullius. It’s the year before Mabo, before Paul Keating’s Redfern speech. It’s the year that my life as I’d known it changed forever, migrating from KL to Melbourne with my family.
The 90s in the arts though had this sense of optimism and abundance and possibility. In 1996, I won a competition that had a play reading at Arts Centre Melbourne in the city—not a suburban community hall! The short play was auto-fiction: a translation of my diary entries and talking to a VHS-C video camera and trying to come to terms with an infatuation with kd lang that wasn’t just a phase. It was also trying to make sense of being ‘Asian’ in Australia and my gender identity. It was like a 90s version of a vlog without internet access. At the time, I didn’t know that two years prior, Victoria Police had strip-searched and detained over 400 patrons during a raid at a queer nightclub, for which they’ve since issued a formal apology. The arts for me was a platform to push status-quo narratives, to find a voice, to find a sense of self, when that self is not reflected in mainstream narratives. But the conservatism that chipped away from the late 90s has ramifications now for sure, in the gradual erosion of funding to the arts sector and the focus on privatisation. In terms of the arts and literary sectors, I reflect on the Australia Council of the Arts 2020 sector consultation Re-imagine: What next?, Diversity Arts Australia’s Shifting the Balance report and Writers Victoria’s State of the (Writing) Nation addresses by Tony Birch (2018), Maxine Beneba Clarke (2019) and Maria Tumarkin (2020) which cover where we’re at now. I’m looking forward to Alice Pung’s State of the (Writing) Nation address.
In terms of Asian Australians, a reference point too is Peril’s Edition 26, a collaboration with the Asian Australian Studies Research Network celebrating the network and Peril’s ten year anniversaries from a scholarly perspective on diasporic Asian studies.
From a personal queer lens, I have a memory of marching with YellowKitties in early 2000 and being gawked at by people who snapped photos like we were a zoo exhibit. But I also remember meetings hosted in Red Rice on Brunswick Street with a group of queer Asian-Australian women, a regular catch-up. The restaurant was co-owned by Jerry Mai, who is now super-famous! And in 2010, law reforms resulted in the Victoria’s Equal Opportunity legislation explicitly listing sexual orientation and gender identity as protected attributes, however religious organisations and schools can still lawfully discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation, gender identity or marital status. Yet the early 2000s was also a time of queer arts & possibilities in Melbourne. I’ll always remember drag king LeeBruceLee in this seedy Collingwood nightclub on Hoddle Street performing to Sudirman’s ‘Balik Kampung’. That memory is so strong because I was hearing a popular Malay song in a queer nightclub in Melbourne, about going home to family. A few years after, it was also incredible to see you, Raina Peterson and Loretta Mui perform in LOCA and I loved that I could interview the three of you in Peril.
I think the 90s was a time where a vocabulary or language was emerging to talk about our sense of self and the intersections of our identities, and how different types of contextual experiences of discrimination can occur simultaneously. When I think of Asian Australians now, I think that this vocabulary and language is now part of the lexicon in all its fierceness. So, for example articulating settler-colonialism, being savvy and nuanced in terms of our belonging/unbelonging in so called Australia, but how can we (and just acknowledging the problematic ‘we’ in Asian Australian and its limitations) then take responsibility of this knowledge, what do we do with this privilege in respect of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ sovereignty? From a literary perspective, it’s exciting to see these conversations in Liminal, Peril, Mascara, Southern Crossings and Djed Press.
I had the profound honour of interviewing and meeting Lisa Bellear in 2001. At the time I was trying to freelance as a writer, I was writing for Melbourne queer street presses and volunteering at a lesbian magazine. I remember talking to the editor of the lesbian magazine, and being so excited about the interview, then she made this offhanded racist comment about Aboriginal people, and I was so shocked. All the way up to my late 20s, I was painfully shy, so I didn’t have the tools to call her out or hold a conversation with the editor. Instead, my act of resistance was to stop volunteering for her and to choose to publish the article elsewhere ... another lesbian magazine! It wasn’t that I wanted to just have my work published in queer spaces, I didn’t know how to navigate nor have the confidence to pitch to ‘the mainstream’. I shared the interview with Timmah Ball, and it was an honour to have this interview mentioned by her in ‘Imagining a Black, Queer Aboriginal Melbourne’ in an extraordinary tribute to Lisa Bellear.
What’s one hope you have for the next thirty years? Or maybe just for next year.
One thing that I hope is that Pauline Hanson doesn’t return as a terminator-like cyborg in 2051. This is also such a big question, but a really good and difficult one, Jinghua! I always circle back to living in paradox—I live freely as a queer here in Melbourne, but I’m fearful of holding my girlfriend’s hand in public in Kuala Lumpur. I hope in thirty years, Malaysia’s queer rights equals Australia’s, without the rhetoric about Asians adopting ‘Western values’. I think it’s important to defend hard won gains, because imagine if all those rights were lost in the future? In terms of living in Narrm, I think a good reflection is the Arts House Refuge provocation, ’What can we learn from Traditional Owners and First Nations who, over 120,000 years, have already survived many climate changes?’ And in reflecting on this, how do we ensure that as non-Indigenous Australians when we do the learning, that we're not contributing to the continued history of dispossession still experienced by Indigenous Australians?
Do you have any advice for emerging writers?
My advice is to keep your heart open, but find that balance to not spread yourself thin, so that you don’t burn out. I had the opportunity of creating work at the Melaka Art and Performance Festival a few years ago and I experienced the most challenging and rewarding experience in my creative arts practice over the three years. The collaborations and meetings I had in particular with other Malaysians at the festival changed me profoundly. I was able to collaborate and perform spoken word back to elders in my wider community that I would never be able to otherwise.
I love Raina Peterson’s advice for this section, that resonates very strongly, and I’m also grateful for my friendship with Raina. It is important to have people that you can lean into. Outside formal mentorships, the informal mentorships and conversations that I’ve had with wonderful friends have kept me sane.
Who inspires you?
My parents, Leh and Seng, both Peranakan-Chinese hailing from Terengganu and Melaka in Malaysia.
My father Seng passed away in February this year, during the Lunar New Year from another major stroke. In late 2016, he suffered his first major stroke which turned him from being able bodied to living with different disabilities, including major paralysis on the right side of his body. It devastated him—he couldn’t write, drive or walk anymore and was reliant on carers to help him undertake activities of daily living. As a family we never gave up on him, and my relationship with Seng also changed, it became tender and intimate. Connections had to be pared back to very small gestures. I’d be the one he looked forward to seeing to cut his hair, when there weren’t a lot of words to share.
In 2020, my dad was in hospital for two months, admitted on 2019 Xmas eve and discharged 20 February 2020. There was a period of alarm when we found out that the first Covid-19 case was admitted into Monash Hospital around the same time. It was with so much relief that he was discharged from hospital after recovering well. But the emotional cost was huge: I wrote a complaint to the hospital because there was a period where it felt like they were stuffing him around because he was an older person with a severe disability. I’ve written so many complaints on behalf of my father since his stroke and I’ve since learnt that writing and gathering evidence into a complaint can have good outcomes.
With Seng, I never knew how much he moved so many people in his life until his death, partly because he was so unassuming. As a high school teacher, he taught in a low socio-economic area in Kuala Lumpur. When we migrated here, he struggled to find work teaching again because we arrived during the Kennett era, and all the teacher transitioning courses were being cut, so my parents who were both trained in teacher colleges had no opportunity to re-skill. That meant that in their late forties they had to make do with whatever jobs they could get. For my dad, it was as a station barrier officer at a train station. And he would do kind things like let people in even if they didn’t have a ticket. One day while working, he bumped into one of his students, and from there was connected with a community of his ex-students, some based in Australia and some overseas that he taught from over forty years ago. At his funeral, it was incredibly profound to hear tributes to him from his ex-students, that his work and generosity still touched them after forty years. I think this connection is such a rare gem in someone, and I’m incredibly honoured to know this of my father.
What have you been reading?
I’ve been seeking out vampire stories, and two works that I’ve read that have stayed with me are Carmen Maria Machado’s edited version of Irish Gothic writer J. Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla and Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling. I only read Butler’s Kindred not too long ago, and the way the novel works with time-travel and sci-fi to grapple with the history and experience of African-American slavery created brain fireworks. Trying to read as widely as possible, I’ve tried reading Twilight, but couldn’t get past the first few pages. Then when I read Renni Eddo-Lodge’s analysis, ‘The Anti-Feminist Character of Bella Swan, or Why the Twilight Saga is Regressive’, it crystalised in my mind why I was having so much trouble reading the book. I’d love vampire story recommendations!
Because I’m trying to immerse myself in writing fiction, especially understanding short story, I’m re-reading works by authors that I find inspiring: Maxine Beneba Clarke’s Foreign Soil, Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light, Roanna Gonsalves’ Permanent Resident, Tom Cho’s Look Who’s Morphing, Melanie Cheng’s Australia Day and Julie Koh’s Portable Curiosities. And, I also love Adam Thompson’s Born into This because it feels exciting to be a small part of Adam’s journey and see the inner workings of his writing process as a fellow Next Chapter recipient.
In terms of young adult and children’s work, I’ve loved reading Maxine Beneba Clarke’s When We Say Black Lives Matter, Leanne Hall’s The Gaps, Alice Pung’s One Hundred Days, Rebecca Lim’s Tiger Daughter, Jeanine Leane’s Purple Threads, Tiffany Tsao’s The Oddfits, Hoa Pham’s Wave, Cath Moore’s Metal Fish, Falling Snow, Gary Lonesborough’s The Boy from the Mish and Ambelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina’s Catching Teller Crow. I’m profoundly moved by this body of Australian literature, as I’m reminded of an academic unit that I was undertaking that examined the racist history of children’s literature in Australia. For example, Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians is canonised as the first authentic Australian work for children, yet it promotes the ideology of white racial superiority in relation to a ‘young’ Australian nationhood. Unfortunately, the legacy still lives on: the NSW Premier Literary Awards has the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature. Surely this literary legacy must change.
How do you practise self-care?
I’m slowly piecing together a type of scrap book of my experience with endometriosis. In 2017, the year after my father fell ill with stroke, I had an emergency laparoscopy due to an ovarian torsion, and from there was diagnosed with stage IV endometriosis, with adenomyosis. I’ve had to learn how to manage chronic pain and also an erratic menstrual cycle. Thankfully I have a very matter-of-fact partner, who is also trained as a nurse and midwife. I remember just before the emergency surgery, after a whole night in hospital of intravenous antibiotics (not fun at all trying to go a dirty toilet with an IV bag stuck to you!) and painkillers, a doctor arrives by my bedside to tell me the bad news that I might have to have my right ovary removed. Kylie just shrugged and said, ‘you’ll be right, you still have one other ovary’. Thankfully during the laparoscopy, they could zap away all the endo cysts, so I still have both ovaries. I used to shrug off having sharp stabbing pains that immobilised me, as the normal part of having my period—I thought, oh maybe I’ve drunk too much coffee. Endo operates when the misplaced endometrium-like cells cannot leave the body during menstruation and hence bleeding happens within for eg the pelvic floor and causes cysts. Endo can only be diagnosed with a laparoscopy, as it’s not possible to detect it from any scans. This journey with endo is still ongoing.
Even though I had a procedure under general anaesthetic for a Mirena late last year, I experienced long bouts of bleeding over different months this year. The Mirena was meant to stop the ovulation cycle, but my body was resisting this treatment. After a blood test, and a diagnosis of iron deficient anaemia recently, I’m now on iron supplements and on a low dose of oestrogen and progesterone to manage the bleeding, and it’s working okay thus far. I wanted to mention this because I also know that it’s not uncommon for assigned female at birth people to have endometriosis. I like reading about Eugenie Lee’s work with endo, for example ‘Breakout My Pelvic Sorcery’, to make sense of this experience.
I try to walk everyday by the Maribyrnong River. In autumn this year, we scattered my dad’s ashes in the river. Usually, as I head out for a walk, I feel stormy in my head, and always no matter what my internal monologue is, after a walk, I feel better. Even if I find it hard to be present, I try to find joy in experiencing small things—whether it’s watching the ripples of current in the river, listening to wind rustling in the leaves in the river red gums, or listening to what I imagine to be pobblebonks in the wetlands (I’ve still yet to see a frog, but I’ve seen a little water rat, jumping into the river for a swim!). Some tension relaxes and eases into the realisation that everything is all just breath and energy.
What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?
It means keeping an open heart, being brave, and holding strong to your truths about who you are, from the everyday, to the relational, to the bigger picture. It means finding voice and persisting in that pursuit to articulate meaning and using it with kindness for a greater good.
Find out more
Interview by Jinghua Qian
Illustrations by Viet-My Bui