Archive for April, 2010
public presentations by Hoa
Apr 24th
Upcoming public presentations by me:
Thursday 29 April at Monash Caulfield Building H Room 1.16 at the Vietnam Inheritance Symposium
I’m presenting a paper on Vietnamese-Australian diasporic writing- namely Nam Le, Dominic Huc Golding and myself. For more details view:
http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/psi/vietnam/
Saturday 29th May at the Emerging Writers Festival, Melbourne Town Hall, Yarra Room at 11am
I will be on a panel called “The gentle art of persuasion” and will be talking about how I constructed the play ‘Silence”from six interviews with Vietnamese-Australian women aged 23-65. For more information on the festival: www.emergingwritersfestival.org.au
Silence May 19-June 6 2010
Apr 12th
The next season of Silence for VCE students is at La Mama Courthouse from May 19-June 6. We are also doing a special perofrmance in Knox on June 10. Starring Gabrielle Chan, Ai Diem Le and Diana Nguyen it features bunraku puppetry by Penlope Bartlau and sound design by Simon Charles. 
Asian diasporic writing
Apr 10th
I’ve just given a seminar paper for my doctorate in creative writing. As well as reading out a sample from the novel I am working on “The Lady of the Realm” I also discussed Vietnamese diasporic writing and how it is a form of resistance against Western stereotypes about Vietnam. Vietnam and Vietnamese people are often portrayed as exotic beautiful and mysterious, passive or like the yellow peril- a form of orientalism – by Western authors. I’d like to think that Vietnamese-Australian (and Vietnamese-American, Vietnamese-French etc) writers write against these stereotypes and portray Vietnamese characters in more sophisticated way. For instance in Silence I wanted to portray the strength and the diversity of Vietnamese Australian women’s lives- I did not want to portray the stereotype of a Vietnamese outworker (Ma works in an office).
I met up with Michelle Cahill from Mascara magazine another asian-australian literary journal. We are hoping to do a joint event with Asialink and UWS. We talked about Asian diasporic writing and promoting that as a global world literature rather than just Asian-Australian writing. Knowing that you are part of a global movement helps transcend boundaries and genres not only in writers minds but readers minds as well.
The anthology “The Perfume River” will be released by UWA Press this month and contains writings on Vietnam by Vietnamese diasporic writers including Nam Le, Vincent Lam, Chi Vu and myself. I hope that it does well.
