Growing Up Asian in Australia
Asian-Australians have often been written about by outsiders, as outsiders. In this collection, compiled by award-winning author Alice Pung, they tell their own stories with verve, courage and a large dose of humour. These are not predictable tales of food, festivals and traditional dress. The food is here in all its steaming glory - but listen more closely to the dinner-table chatter and you might be surprised by what you hear.
Here are tales of leaving home, falling in love, coming out and finding one's feet. A young Cindy Pan vows to win every single category of Nobel Prize. Tony Ayres blows a kiss to a skinhead and lives to tell the tale. Benjamin Law has a close encounter with some angry Australian fauna, and Kylie Kwong makes a moving pilgrimage to her great-grandfather's Chinese village.
Here are well-known authors and exciting new voices, spanning several generations and drawn from all over Australia. In sharing their stories, they show us what it is really like to grow up Asian, and Australian.
Contributors include: Shaun Tan, Jason Yat-Sen Li, John So, Annette Shun Wah, Quan Yeomans, Jenny Kee, Anh Do, Khoa Do, Caroline Tran and many more.
Alice Pung is a Melbourne writer and lawyer. Her bestselling memoir Unpolished Gem received the Australian Book Industry's Newcomer of the Year Award and was short-listed for the Age Book of the Year, the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards and the Book sellers' Choice Awards. In 2008, Alice edited the collection Growing Up Asian in Australia.
Alice was born in Footscray, and grew up in Braybrook, attending local primary and secondary schools in the Western suburbs, including Tottenham North Primary School, Footscray Girls Secondary College, Christ the King College Braybrook, and Penleigh and Essendon Grammar School.
Alice's work has appeared in the Monthly, Good Weekend, the Australian, Age and Meanjin.
