The Gates Are Now Open
By ALICE PUNG
We invited writer Alice Pung to respond to The Liminal Festival and reflect on all that has changed since she edited the 2008 anthology, Growing Up Asian in Australia.
In March this year, Leah wrote to me with exciting news about the inaugural Liminal festival and chapbook:
I keep coming back to your piece published in Peril, shortly after Growing Up was released. The book, and the rejected introduction, were such an important milestone in Asian Australian literature. It would be an honour to have you open the collection of work responding to the festival by reflecting on the shifts you might have noticed since.
Peril magazine was founded by Hoa Pham, in her house in North Melbourne, on a miniscule budget dependent on arts funding every year, and relied on technical support from her partner Alistair. Hoa invited the Asian Australian arts community to be board members, editors and contributors. It was so named because only a few decades back we were considered the Yellow Peril, but also because it was publishing dangerous art, the pieces mainstream publishers would not touch.While the literary establishment in the mid-2000s was busy herding in a young writer like myself who dabbled in family stories, it was also excluding or overlooking other diverse writers who were more experimental, innovative and courageous; that is, writers who wanted to write beyond memoir.
My original introduction to my second book Growing Up Asian in Australia mentioned massacres, colonisation, and other unsavoury things that were not particularly palatable for the Dymocks and Borders book-buying public in 2008. The new one was edited to ensure that the book would become a bestseller, and indeed it did, making it into school reading lists and even HSC and VCE exams. Peril published my original introduction a year later. I am indebted to my first mentors Hoa Pham and Tom Cho, the true pioneers. Tom was a mentor to many of us at the Footscray Community Arts Centre. His debut book, Look Who’s Morphing, was longlisted for the Miles Franklin. So for this introduction, I planned to write about the progress our community has made in one and a half decades, the blossoming of so many Asian-Australian voices and alliances, and the joy of no longer feeling the eerie isolation I felt in those early years at festivals, which were mostly events to sell books.
But to have a Liminal Festival focused on ideas! What a dream. Hasib had kindly given me the coveted weekend pass, but my health had deteriorated from a winters’ worth of colds and Covid, and my children were also ill. I couldn’t make it to the festival in person, and really doubted whether I was the right person to write this introduction. Then I watched the entire festival online, and I realised that I had been thinking in terms of dichotomies—the language of passing and failing at writing this introduction, when this was a festival about passages (literary passages, and the passages of time) and fallibilities (personal and political). Because I wasn’t part of an audience, there was no self-consciousness about being there—it was just me, present with the presenters, without interruption. I could rewind passages of striking truth or clarity.
True writer’s festivals are rare, and this was a true writers’ and readers’ festival. Each panellist took their task seriously and with great respect for the audience. None of the presenters at the Liminal Festival had to talk about their ethnicity, if all they wanted to talk about was craft. None of the presenters had to bring up pain, unless they decided it was time. In these sessions, ideas had time to breathe. When Hasib was part of his panel, his generosity with granting time to his co-panellists meant that I wish I heard more poetry from him, so I went to find and read his poems. Without realising it, I’d held my breath for ‘How to Hold Your Breath’ until his crushing last line.
This was a festival that made me explore ideas, inspired me to delve deeper into the artistry of form and interrogate my own practices. Bella Li discussed the em dash, novelist Jessica Au spoke about her joy in accumulating ‘more and more language of a different kind of lineage to follow’, Evelyn Araluen read her poem ‘Acknowledgement of Cuntery’, and Lucy Van told shit as it is: ‘Some places feel fucked up, because of things that have happened there.’
The literary titan Brian Castro—whose works I had studied when I was at university over twenty-five years ago—said that he found it very disturbing how we link a novel to a national project, an attempt to ‘Make the Australian Novel Great again (acronym MANGA).’ He noted that ‘the novel is plastic and can change, has different empathies.’ In his response to the festival, André Dao writes that ‘the best kind of national novel does not tell you what the nation is, but what it might be,’ and ask us to read Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy with this thought in mind.
These different empathies fuel the responses in this collection. And what responses! So funny and cheeky and scatological, whether they are Shastra Deo inspired by Jenny Zhang to write an ode to the ‘goopy poops’ of felines, Tara Kenny’s endearing and vivacious fangirl scene report, Kim Lam’s funny, gentle cartoons of opening night as well as her pictorial mind-maps of the panels, or Viet-My Bui’s contemplative portraits. So full of rage and thought-full-ness and depth, like Micaela Sahhar’s devastating inventory of loss—of language, of life, of love.
I was in a hospital room with my son a little while ago, very late at night and in my foggy-minded state, I thought about all my commitments dissipating because of the immediacy of illness. I also remember the different urgencies in the waiting room, and how suffering doesn’t necessarily make a person more empathetic—evidenced by how some people can give you an understanding quiet nod while others barge forward for their children to be seen first despite their position in triage.
Perhaps that’s the same with voices and entitlement, too. The philosopher William Hazlitt: The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings. I think about Micaela’s piece in this chapbook, and about how words don’t bring people back to life, and how words may fail time and time again and be misconstrued or deliberately misunderstood. And yet how we must keep trying. Andrew Brooks writes, ‘The poem, unlike the argument, is able to undermine itself, to hold an impossible contradiction without resolving it, to insist on life as the condition for confronting death and disappointment and defeat.’ My least commercially-successful book was a project that took me ten years to research and write. Despite its ‘critical acclaim,’ the sales demonstrated to me that the general book-buying public don’t want to read about the Cambodian genocide. Published a decade and a half ago, it is what they call in the industry a ‘slow burner’, in that it’s still in print and people are buying the odd copy here and there.
What I am saying is, parallel to Peril and Liminal, we all know there is a literary world that is built upon making money and capitalising from ‘diverse’ voices in an industry that rejects those too angry and/or radical. It wants to vicariously feel our pain but it doesn’t want to pay the price of admission. But it is always important to write with urgency about the things that matter, because even slow burns are created with fire and leave a mark. And when the time is right, things might reignite. As I learnt from Andrew Brooks and Elena Gomez’s Writing Utopia, to build the beginnings of a utopia, the real material you need is time.
I think about how Hasib signs off all his emails with ‘Take so much care.’ So we take time, and we take great care to create our work. Leah and Hasib spent much time and care curating this festival, and in return, it became a place where each participant—be they audience members or presenters—indeed did ‘take great care.’
As Elena Gomez writes, ‘community is a fluid thing; it's not static or fixed, and it requires attention in the way that a garden might. And enough to sustain and grow, but the needs can change at any given moment.’ Watching the festival online gave me a sense of how it must feel to live in a remote community away from the hubs of cities, and I knew that even if a writer or artist doesn’t have physical proximity, Liminal can be this. Liminal has gently shepherded a new kind of festival in our writing world, a place where there are no gatekeepers. The gates are now wide open.
Alice Pung is a writer from Naarm, whose books include Unpolished Gem, Her Father's Daughter, Growing Up Asian in Australia, Laurinda and One Hundred Days. She is also an Adjunct Professor at the School of Media and Communications RMIT.
The Liminal Festival took place 2–4 August 2024, in partnership with The Wheeler Centre. This collection of work is in concert with, and responds to, the panels, conversations and provocations put forth by some of the nation’s most talented writers, artists and thinkers. Find out more about the Liminal Festival here.