Sweet and Sour: Issue One by Sweet and Sour

Issue One August 2020

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Ac kn owl e dg em e nt of C o un tr y In the spirit of reconciliation Sweet and Sour acknowledges the Ngunnawal people, Traditional Custodians of the land on which Sweet and Sour was conceived and produced. We pay respect to the Elders both past and present of the Ngunnawal Nation. We extend that to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples reading this Zine.

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In trod u ct io n Sweet and Sour was conceived with the notion of creating a space for individuals and communities with Asian heritage in Australia to share our thoughts, experiences and creativity. Every word and illustration within this book comes from an Asian creator, but is produced for everyone, no matter your race or culture.

Being Asian today in Australia is not easy. When more than one culture demands your allegiance, there is a bizarre sense of existing between multiple worlds, yet not fully belonging to either. We are international students, mixed-race individuals and second-generation immigrants; many of us belong to multiple cultural identities, and face issues relating to belonging, racism and identity. This year, as COVID-19 spread across the world, along with it came a rise in xenophobia catalysed by the pandemic. As our Black brothers and sisters fight against systemic racism, we stand with them, evoking difficult conversations with our own families to consider our place in the movement. The pieces collected in this zine explore a variety of issues associated with being Asian in Australia. Many of them are difficult to talk about and often hard to articulate. We see the subject of identity explored through our relationship with food, Aussie references, and WhatsApp screenshots, offering a wealth of insight into our intimate experiences. We hope the writers and artists found solace in putting their thoughts to paper, and we hope the readers may relate in the same way. It is a powerful feeling when we realize we are not alone and many of our experiences are shared with others. Our platform hopes to provide a supportive environment for us to talk about the specific issues we face, and come together as a community to explore and share our cultures, connect and heal.

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Con te t s n 8 In Commas and Vagueness Misbah Ansari

Out of Time Roydan Barboza

1 4 Lies We Tell Amy Lee

16 Things my mum has said to me over WhatsApp

Claudia Goh

1 7 beijing 13/12/19 Viv Wang

1 8 Tsitsirya Malcolm Fortaleza

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2 0 Call me by my name Jay Ooi 2 4 Under my veil Faiza Rezai

2 6 Interview with Ryan Fennis Jacquie Meng

3 0 Yeonjae Choi

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Photograph Above the Piano Cecilia Xu

3 6 Yvonne Yong

I am Not Vietnamese Queenie Ung-Lam

4 0 Jingfan Luo

4 3 On Taking a Break Zoe Rangathan

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I n C o m ma s a nd Vag u ene ss Misbah Ansari I hope the rains of this land meet you as you depart. This wish of a rainy rendezvous escaped from my mouth as a mumble when I read about Irrfan’s death. “Irrfan Khan: Slumdog Millionaire and Life of Pi actor dies,” buzzed my phone as I ran home to save myself from the sudden downpour that took over Sydney that day. Somehow when I read the BBC article about the sudden demise of an actor who I revered, my mind vaguely enlisted: Irrfan’s death, rains, other-landly rains. The stringing of random words by commas birthed a certain

feeling — familial, flying between two worlds, natural—just something less distant than calling Irrfan the “Slumdog Millionaire and Life of Pi” actor. I announced his death to my extended family in Australia, and they expressed some remorse, but not the kind that reflected mine. They made a faint pcchh sound, a magnetlike sound that I have usually observed Indians make when they wish to express utter sympathy or tiredness. They did not feel any commas or vagueness, just a courteous sorrow associated with being away from India for fifteen years. In that moment, I desperately called my father. I wish I could attach the voice clip of our call, but this Whatsapp chat partly demonstrates the theatrics of our conversation:

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Abba, as you can see, is an avid watcher of art movies and unconventional cinema. With him, I have watched the Hindi adaptation of Pride and Prejudice on Doordarshan channel (a government public service provider) and witnessed actors perform on stage at city theatres. Which is to say, my father’s mourning of celebrities, especially the Indian ones, hits different. When he talks about actors and their movies, he reminisces about attending film festivals and watching internationally acclaimed movies alone in the local theatres. We do not share any kinship with Irrfan, you see. We simply remember him differently. I have a mid-world, wispy relationship with Irrfan’s memory. When he died in The Namesake (a necessary spoiler, okay?), I reminisce crying in my flight just half an hour before my layover. I was in the air, in the middle of both my homes, winter in one place and summer in other. My father reminisces watching him as an extra in a low resolution, probably stooping every three minutes light. I am not claiming that we saw Irrfan Khan as a family because my father istoo practical a man to immerse himself in fandoms. But, I called my father

because we shared something personal in how we remembered Irrfan, he saw Irrfan in screens blurrier and more intimate than Netflix screens. Thinking of watching Irrfan the last time in a Hong Kong Airlines TV screen and my dad watching him on Doordarshan, my tears enlisted: Irrfan’s death, rains, other-landly rains, mid-home grieving. They say a lot gets lost in translation. A lot also gets lost when the news of demise from another continent reaches you. There is a particular third-party solemnity to learning about the death of Indian actors when you have lived in another country for so long. I do not know that yet, but my uncle and aunty say so. However, my aunty, amidst the discussion of Irrfan’s death talked about how Sydney receiving rains after so long is a blessing. How people forgot about the absence of rain amidst the COVID-19 clamour, and how easily people forgot the terror of the Australian bush fires. It was this exact moment when I felt an influx of pointy words and ideas hitting my gut, you know. Felt like broken embers of words and phenomenon are being pelted towards my stomach and they are stringing with commas like:

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Irrfan’s death, rains, other-landly rains, mid-home grieving, translations, fires, two-homed funeral. I think that day this vagueness joined by commas made me wonder: when you are juggling between two lands, do all the events somehow do tend to be related? Is Irrfan’s death saying something about the rains?

Is my identity a curious case of co mm as? Just how I cried about The Namesake among the cloud, how my dad watched Irrfan on hazy screens, will the mist that this rain creates touch Irrfan as

he departs? My aunt says you tend to forget the magnitude of a few things when something else arises. Just like we forgot about the rains, my Australian family forgot how to mourn Bollywood actors with the same fervour. They do make the idiosyncratic sound of remorse, but there is this distance of forgetting that they can’t cross I believe. Living in India and Australia, I always hope that good things that I am witnessing in either of the places meet my people on the other land I hope this sweet Alphonso mango nectar reaches you in Sydney, Aunt Gretta. I pray the purple Jacaranda bloom falls on your kurta, maa. I hope the rains of this land meet you as you depart, Irrfan.

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Roydan Barboza, ‘Out of Time’

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Lies we tell, secrets we keep. Things I tell myself to fall asleep. That I was the hot pink Miami Miss BMX bandit who proudly dinged my bell as I passed neighbours on Boxing Day, 1990. That I teased my fringe whilst doing the Loco Motion feeling so lucky. This was as Aussie as it gets. That my child labor consisted of free translation and writing my own sick notes.

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That I dreamt of going on Family Feud until I realised I didn’t have enough adult English-speaking family members on my team. That I hardly argued with my Tiger mother. But oh, when we did, I asked her if I was adopted. She responded she picked me up from the streets. That my mother loved me nevertheless because she spent hours making zhong-zi, bamboo wrapped dumplings for my lunch. That my Aussie friends were merely uncultured convict descendants whenever they asked me,‘what is that ugly looking leaf you’re eating?’ because their mothers shoved them leftovers scraps for lunch. That self-defensiveness became my coping mechanism. Helpful to my legal career for trial preparation pre-empting every rebuttal but toxic to my romantic relationships. That my self-hate would be resolved by an Eurasian Mr Darcy as he kissed my freckles to wake me up from this confusing ‘neither three nor four’ (不三不四) world. That I wasn’t so good at maths. This made me less Asian, right? That I never felt any different until Pauline told me so in the Year of the Rat. That I never felt helpless until little Johnny (and every useless guy after him) stood by and said nothing. That I never felt betrayed until a friend agreed with Pauline, citing more Asians meant she has to work harder. She didn’t make me feel better by saying, ‘I don’t mean you’. Was that, ‘I don’t meant you’ because I wasn’t smart enough? Or, ‘I don’t mean you’ because I wasn’t Asian enough? That I am not criminal for being yellow - it was your ancestors who were the convicts. That I’ve never eaten bats. Heck, I’ve never even been to China. I wasn’t even born there. I was born in Taiwan! That maybe, just one day, Michael Hing and Jason Yat Sen Lee will win their Senate seats.

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Tsitsirya Tsitsirya Tsitsirya Tsitsirya

Malcolm Fortaleza Malcolm Fortaleza

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Tsitsirya Tsitsirya Tsitsirya Tsitsirya

Malcolm Fortaleza Malcolm Fortaleza

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Things my mum has said to me over WhatsApp Claudia Goh

I’m Claudia Goh. I was born in Perth and have been living here my whole life. My parents are Malaysian Chinese - my dad’s from KL and my mum’s from Bentong.

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Beijing 13/12/19

Viv Wang the sunsets in beijing are blue yellow pink and purple in a way that you don’t see anywhere else the colours all settle on the horizon then blend into an expanse of foggy grey the winter air is crisp your own breath visible and lingering lungs heavy with smog heart heavy with the emotions that come from cultural disconnection when you huí guó, what exactly are you returning to? to huí guó implies that you’re returning to something that you’ve once known and while it is undeniable by the slant in your eyes and the pallor of your skin that this is the land of your ancestors the anxiety that underlies everything you do and the simplicity of your vocabulary suggests that it is a home you’ve never known

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Call me by my name

‘Jan’. This was what I was called a lot growing up in Australia. See, my parents gave me a beautiful Chinese name, ‘堅隆’ (pronounced more like ‘Chien Long’), but when it’s written and pronounced as ‘Jian Long’, it just never had the same ring and meaning. I never fully understood my own discomfort with my name until I did some digging last year. I realised this discomfort was one symptom of my conflicting cultural identity, of growing up in Australia to immigrant parents from Malaysia. But I also discovered a lot more about Chinese names that has brought me back to appreciating mine.

Chinese names have meaning

Yes, Chinese names are more than just sounds to identify you with – they tell a story. Each character has its own individual meaning, and when you join them together, they can mean something more. In my case, ‘堅’ (Jian) means strong and firm, and my mum chose it because it goes with my second name ‘隆’ (Long), which means prosperous, grand or to swell. Together, it means if I’m strong and firm, I will prosper.

So what happens when it’s Romanised? When ‘堅隆’ becomes ‘Jian Long’, it doesn’t mean anything anymore. And on top of that, because it’s not its own common Western name, there is no correct way to say ‘Jian Long’ for an Englishspeaking person. I never felt I had the power to correct people who pronounced it in whichever way they did – and I got so many ways: ‘Jee-anne’, ‘Jee-arn’, ‘Jee-ang’, ‘Juan’, and of course, ‘Jan’. They were all me, because there’s no right way to say ‘Jian’ in English. So it’s not that I dislike my Chinese name, it’s that ‘Jian Long’ doesn’t have the same pronunciation and meaning.

Chinese names are tied to family

The quickest example of this is the way we use surnames. In Australia, surnames are at the end of your name, but in Chinese, your surname comes first, which means your family comes first. It’s that age-old collective vs individual societies, and it’s even reflected in the different ways we write addresses on envelopes. In Australia, we start with the specific (your name) and get more general, but in China, it’s traditionally the reverse.

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But it’s more than just your surname that ties you to your family. Often, you share another name with your siblings and extended family (one of your given names). It becomes a social network that’s reflected in your name. In my case, I share the name ‘ 隆’ (Long) with my brother and the male cousins of my dad’s brothers. It’s a name given by my grandfather, and growing up, every time I wrote out my name, I had a sense that I was also connected with my brother, but it wasn’t until I started talking to people about this that it clicked in my head. My second name unifies me with my wider family, and it’s a part of my identity, because when I hear my name, I hear part of their name too.

Reconciling my name with my mum

I had always been afraid of changing my name. What would my parents say? It’s the name they gave me after all, who am I to say I don’t like it? But towards the end of high school, I just didn’t want to be called ‘Jian’ anymore, so I adopted the name ‘Jay’ - the first letter of my name. You see it, and you know how to say it. I finally sat down with my mum and talked through this change with her. I told her how I felt about

my name and why I adopted ‘Jay’. She says she chose it because she thought it would be easy to say in English, but my experience was the opposite.

I am sorry that you feel so bad about your name she replied.

Yeah, actually it is true, it’s hard to pronounce. I made a mistake But I had this sense that I was running away from my Chinese culture by not using ‘Jian’ anymore. As much as it’s practical, it also felt like a denial of this non-white part of me.

It’s okay

reassured my mum.

If you want to have an English name it’s okay. I’m perfectly okay. Honestly.

Issue 1 She tells me that it’s very common for Malaysian Chinese people to adopt a Western name anyway. She was the anomaly that didn’t.

My current name status

I honestly do like ‘Jay’ – it’s the person I’ve become, but even within that there’s a link back to my Chinese name. Despite this, ‘Jay’ doesn’t appear on any official documents, partly because ‘Jian Long’ was me for so many years, and it feels wrong to erase that. At the same time, it feels wrong to embrace the bastardised English pronunciation of my name again.

Yes, I am both culturally Australian and Malaysian Chinese, so I don’t want to pretend like my heritage doesn’t exist. but no, I don’t feel like trying to teach every person I meet how to properly say my name in Chinese - that just feels a little too entitled and impractical. So what should you call me? I think ‘Jay’ is sticking around, but my Chinese name isn’t going anywhere – you can also call me ‘堅隆’ if you like.

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Faiza Rezai, ‘Under my Veil’ (2017)

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Female mannequin, Abaya with Niqab, Photographic prints, foamcore boards, dowels and chipboards. Dimensions variable.

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Interview with Ry a n Fe nn is by Jacquie Meng Growing up in Canberra, Ryan Fennis is an electronic music artist with a half-filipino, half-Australian cultural background. Trying to pave a new sound for himself, his music feels like a sound collage: combining unconventional time signatures with distorted vocals. Feeding off his connections to people and places around Canberra, he discusses music, identity, and desserts. When did you start your music project and why? I was always doing music under Ryan Fennis, but I feel like I only started this music project when I released Detour — because that felt more defined, and ‘like’ me. However, I have been making music since I was in year 8, on GarageBand and stuff. I guess the only thing I wanted to do [back then] was to make beats and music. I feel like it was just for the fun of it. Who/what are you inspired by? Ryuchi Sakamoto, Pierre Bi’erre Bourne, and science fiction. Who are you listening to at the moment? Oli XL, Cassius Select, Daemon, Erika de Casier.

How would you describe your music in relation to your personal identity? The music I’m making now is kind of an answer to how I felt as a kid. When I was a kid making music, I didn’t know who to look up towards, so now I feel like the main person I’m talking to is myself. I’d say the music and videos I’m making is just like creating and paving an identity by myself, for myself. It is interesting that you don’t overtly label your music [lyrics, videos etc] with your Filipino culture. Why is that? I grew up in Canberra, I don’t fully understand the complexity of The Philippine’s history. And so, it’s weird for me to put that overtly into my music. I also haven’t seen many half-filo/half-Australian

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Photographer: Krei Manzo

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people that I aspire to- so there isn’t that influence. I think it’s such a complicated thing to summarise my bi-racial identity. A lot of biracial people may go through identity crises but everyone’s experience is different. There’s a lot of factors that come into play; how connected you are with your heritage, what you’re taught at school, your school environment, your home environment, how you see yourself, what you see in the media, what you consume, people you aspire to be like, the people around you, your interests, how people perceive your race/culture, how whitepassing you are, how dark/light you are, there are a whole lot of things that can vary each person’s experience.

to colonialism, having a preference for the lighter skin of the colonisers. Filipino celebrities are often of lighter complexion, and the skin whitening industry is one of the largest industries there. There’s also 180 or so different ethnic groups in the Philippines and it’s important to consider the relationships between them and the prejudice some may endure. What’s helped me is, you are who you are, educate yourself to get a better understanding of what your identity is, and to just fully embrace that.

It’s also important to look into the Filipino community itself and take into account how I benefit from being half white and having lighter skin. Colourism and internalised racism has been ingrained into the culture of The Philippines due

Biko is a filipino rice cake. It’s really simple as well - mum used to make a huge block of it - i think it’s just brown sugar, coconut, rice.. uh... You just cook it on a wok. Turon is a saba banana fried with sugar like a

What’s your favourite dessert? Biko and Turon. What are those?

Issue 1 spring roll… It’s the first thing that I thought of- so homey. What’s your latest EP and what is it about? Well I do have an EP coming out… It is kind of an extension of Detour, but a more refined continuation of it. Detour to me, means like taking a different route, just exploring something in a different way. For example, for the music, I tried to bend a few of the structures, trying to avoid writing things in 4/4 trying to create newer ways of playing the guitar… It’s experimental, but I also try to imagine it like: what would pop music sound like if it came from someone like me?*

Overload (2020)

You can stream Ryan Fennis on Spotify, Soundcloud, Apple Music, and BandCamp. * 4/4: a piece with a time signature of 4/4 has four quarter note beats; It means each measure has only four beats.

Detour (2019)

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Moon Jar Double (2017)

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Moon Jar Large (2017)

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Yeonjae Choi is a Korean ceramic artist who grew up in New Zealand then studied in Melbourne. Like many young immigrants, she struggled with the sense of not truly belonging. anywhere, confused about her identity, she turned to art to bridge the gap within herself; drawing from both of her cultures to inspire her art. From left: Moon Jar Large, Moon Jar Small, Moon Jar Double (2017)

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Pho tog ra ph above the p ia no Cecilia Xu In a photograph above the piano a grey-haired woman kisses a baby, two sets of brown eyes crinkled up like yesterdayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s news. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t remember being the baby and the woman no longer remembers me, but the picture remains in perfect focus.

Eight years ago, we flew home to see her. It was the year of the dragon. A kilo of prawns sat defrosting on the sill saved just for us, a tangible love. Her frayed edges had begun to show, her forehead crumpled in perpetual worry as she offered me the same carton of milk again and again and again. I often think of them sitting there in that cold narrow kitchen, the prawns we never ate.

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Now she sits by the apartment window gazing unseeingly into the crumbling courtyard. Her body is wrapped in a mended quilt; her mind is buried in an unreachable place. She falls through my fingers like hourglass sand and I fear I have learned to love her far too late.

The photographs of us remember what both our minds have now misplaced: my school bag on her shoulders, my small hand touching her face.

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Comic (2020) Yvonne Yong

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When you don’t look

Người V i e t n Việt’ amese Queenie Ung-Lam

“N o w , a r e y o u f r o m China or from Indonesia?” he asks me, those light blue eyes searching my face for clues. “A c t u a l l y , I ’ m Australian but my parents are Vietnamese,” I respond. I’m tetchy already. Did he have to go there? “Y o u d o n ’ t l o o k Vietnamese,” he states. And smiles. Wow. It’s another comment, from another White person and it all fuels that red, hot emotion. I feel my anger boiling, layers upon layers of it, and I imagine the scene playing out how I wish it

could. In my mind, I rise to stand over him, up up up, until I’m the one who looks down on him and I can ask him this: Is it my hair? Not black enough? Not long enough? My nose, not flat enough, too flat, too broad? My eyes, not brown enough? My round face, not round enough, too round? My tan skin, too dark or not pale enough? My eyebrows, too strong, too broad, not arched enough?

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I bet it doesn’t just stop there does it. Let me take it further, let me turn myself inside out, spew my organs out across the counter for you and your judgement. Bared to you down to my core, all is revealed. You will see how I am formed from voices across the sea, I am the child of boat people, the graves of my ancestors rest in villages no longer, my being is theirs and they are not from this soil. There, satisfy becaus all you it?

does that you? No, e t h a t ’s n o t wanted was

You are confused, I can tell, how I came to be here, selling you books in Canberra, speaking English as if it was my mother’s tongue, when I i tt How do I prove my heritage to you? Do you want a birth certificate, a passport, a DNA test? No, that is not enough for you, I know that now. You want me to reveal it all, to tell you yes my parents were refugees, yes I was born here but consider myself ethnically Vietnamese, yes I know the language but it wasn’t t t gi and French before I spoke Vietnamese, yes my skin is darker

and yes that makes me ethnically ambiguous, oh you think I’m Indonesian, I get that a lot, don’t worry, you know my identity and connection to my heritage better than I do, yes question me, question how I can speak English with the most Australian accent that you’ve ever heard t i t and brown eyes and tan skin, yes this all means I can’t possibly be Australian. Question where I come from, because surely, it cannot be here. But wait, now you tell me that I can’t be Vietnamese either? Look at my face a bit longer, tell i t t g am I too tan, are my eyes too wide, my eyebrows too arched, my face not enough. Please pause while I go grab my nail kit, hold on another second, I’m donning my white áo dài, oh wait and let me reenact Miss Saigon, running across the Western stage in the 70s, glossy black hair trailing behind her. Draw me a mold of a Vietnamese woman and I will endeavor to morph into her, I will satisfy you, you the white man who is the arbiter of who can look and be Vietnamese. Moldable, adaptable, changeable, those are the nature of my features, always ready to rearrange themselves to bow down to the interpreter’s eye.

Issue 1 Chinese, Indonesian, Malaysian, Filipina, Fijian, Nepalese, Thai, Laotian, I am all and none, the act of belonging only being born once you decide how I can belong and to whom. The trails of anger are erupting, uncontrollable, how do I respond to your ignorance, counteract your othering, assert my dominance and my right to claim my identity, all without becoming the uneducated, emotional and lying migrant, whose image faintly overlays your perception of me. I am tired. You are wrong, you guessed wrong, because you do not know this one thing, I’m fucking VIETNAMESE. Ethnically Vietnamese, of Vietnamese background, I have Vietnamese parents, Vi e t n a m e s e h e r i t a g e , Vi e t n a m e s e h i s t o r y. Vietnamese. Repeat. “I ’ m V i e t n a m e s e . ”

Now you know.

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Skin (2019) porcelain by Jingfan Luo

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Skin (2019) porcelain by Jingfan Luo

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Skin (2019) porcelain by Jingfan Luo

Special physical qualities of ceramics allow my works in the intersection between art and craft, engaged with mysterious and bizarre aspects to discover the mechanisms of clay. My works hope to further evoke the relationship between ‘naked’ and ‘private’, to explore the humanness in utensils.

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On Taking A Break

Zoe Ranganathan

The concept of taking a break, or taking time to work on your mental health is challenging to balance with the high standards that young PoC often place on themselves. We have so many tokenistic ‘wellbeing weeks’ and ‘puppy picnics’ thrown at us by our workplaces and universities - the same people that tell us that our self-worth is intrinsically linked to how high our GPA is and how much we earn. Learning how to tackle my mental illnesses at university has been a steep learning curve. The hardest part of it though, has been learning what my limits are and when I ‘deserve’ a break. I’m told daily by friends, “take a break” or “you should say no to doing more” - and my personal favourite - “make sure you take care of yourself”. I’ve never really known what exactly that means. For young women of colour, taking care of ourselves mentally is often seen as a negative, a synonym for laziness. We fear that if we slow down, we will fall behind not only our white competitors but the other people of colour who are working even

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harder to compensate for the discrimination that we all know we will encounter when applying for jobs and internships. But let’s say we do take a ig t t our phones for a weekend, indulge in UberEats, pop on a sheet mask that we know is overpriced and see how much Grey’s Anatomy we can cram into that precious 48 hours. We think this is what taking care of ourselves looks like. It is what our targeted YouTube ads, bus stop billboards and wellness conglomerates covertly drill into us day in and day out. We are left with the corporate vision for self-care engrained into us; surely our anxiety and stress will be vanquished by the lighting of a $60 lavender scented candle, right?! The “treat yourself” culture around self-care inadvertently places even more guilt onto the act. If taking care of one’s mental health is a ‘treat’, there is an implication that it is a luxury in

which we are able to overindulge. There is, consequently, inherent guilt in taking care of ourselves, where wellness and success are incongruous goals. We fear that if we take a break, it will be met with taunting remarks of “so and so’s daughter graduated early, with honours” or “so and so’s son is doing an MBA now” when we go home for Christmas. Neo-liberal feminism assumes that women of colour have successfully assimilated and are able to partake in self-care™ in the same way that white women are. This dangerous veer away from feminism as an intersectional movement allows high-ranking corporate women, like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, to provide the solution of ‘leaning in’ to male domination of the workplace, while remaining silent on the structural and economic reasons t i i t t The very notion of feminism in the 21st Century zeitgeist has been colonised. Neo-liberal feminism is a zero-sum game in which

Issue 1 the attention that women CEOs garner for being champions of feminism chastises not only women of colour but poor, disabled and trans women for not being able to do the same. The white woman’s self-care fantasy that is sold to us, is simply not accessible nor realistic for the majority of women. Not only does it assume that we have the time and the money to partake in luxurious acts, but it also fails to address the actual aggravating factors contributing to our very need to take a break. In some WoC communities, poor mental health is so commonplace that it has almost become a badge of honour, the yardstick against which we can tell if we are working hard enough. Nikki Gerrard’s ground-breaking 1991 paper ‘Racism and Sexism, Together, In Counselling’, was the t i i i racism and sexism intersect to tt t t of colour. The paper recounts troubling incidents of how women of colour are largely unable to t g t

mental health systems, as the racism and sexism that they experience is self-perpetuating when therapists and people who have the power to assist in the inculcation of myths and stereotypes by way of their power to enforce them. The common thread throughout the incidents states that even those who were trained in a professional capacity to assist with mental illness and trauma were dismissive of their experience, limited in the options they provided, and their body language and tone policing reinforced to the participants that they were not important in the therapist’s purview. Our mental health is placed at loggerheads between a culture that expects us to work harder than others, a self-care system predicated on consumerism and a mental health system that we cannot rely on. We have been subscribed to a pay-to-win version of self-care and good mental health that we never signed up for. It may only be through bringing the feminist movement back on track to advocate for all women that we may be able to be freed from the battle between our simultaneous pursuit of accomplishment and a well-deserved break.

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Cr edi t Sydney Farey Malcolm Fortaleza Su-En Hia Eleanor Hsu Chetan Kharbanda Joanne Leong Melodie Liu Jacquie Meng Emma Rani Hodges Viv Wang James Yang

s ine Ch

s se Va

y Farey dne y S

Cover by James Yang

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Issue One August 2020